Reprinted from The Huffington Post (The Blog) - July 28, 2014

Are we becoming a more polarized people, as a new and important study from the Pew Research Center seems to demonstrate? In spite of the hype surrounding this new research, I argue that the public is not as polarized as a cursory reading of the Pew study would suggest.

Certainly, this research reflects an important problem, but that problem is less about the public and more about our political system.

The vast majority of participants in the research (about 8 in 10) do not actually fit Pew's definition of ideological polarization. Further, as Stanford political scientist Morris Fiorina explains in an excellent analysis of the research, the methodology used -- forcing respondents to choose between two dichotomies -- leads to a result that can exaggerate the ideological consistency of respondents.

Fiorina also examines the wider body of public opinion toward specific policy issues. He finds that most Americans are not either/or thinkers. Rather, they see merits in various points of view and are open to compromise.

In a related vein, a new public opinion analysis from the organization Voice of the People finds "remarkably little difference between the views of people who live in red (Republican) districts or states, and those who live in blue (Democratic) districts or states on questions about what policies the government should pursue."

Certainly, there is some evidence in the Pew research of a hardening of positions among the ideologically minded, and we don't deny that there are important disagreements among the American public. Still, this evidence does illustrate that common ground is not only attainable but, on many counts, already exists.

Even among those who take an ideological stance toward Beltway politics, many are much more pragmatic and open to compromise when it comes to local issues.

I say this with the confidence of 20 years facilitating conversations around the country with everyday Americans from across the political spectrum. During these discussions, there will often be a handful of participants who come off, at first, as rigidly partisan, voicing talk-radio-like rhetoric. But this rhetoric is almost always superficial and falls away quickly. When the conversation digs into concrete local issues such as improving schools or making streets safer, these participants become much more flexible and less dogmatic.

The Way Forward

There is indeed a serious problem of political polarization, but its source is not the American public. Rather, political parties have realigned and are much more consistently partisan than they've been in our lifetime. Activists on both ends of the ideological spectrum are much more influential via primaries and campaign donations than are average citizens. And media coverage generally reinforces what is most conflicted about our politics. All of this adds up to a highly polarized and dysfunctional national politics.

How then can we make progress?

Fortunately, there's a lot we can do at the local level - and we don't have to wait for national politics to get its act together to do so. Broad-based public engagement can support and even drive local progress on a host of issues that people care about and are willing to work together on. When it comes to education reform, jobs, climate change, public safety and a host of other concrete challenges, we can and should get on with it locally.

In fact, metropolitan regions are already getting it done, and have become the locus for progress on public policy issues.

On matters of national policy, however, we still have some work to do before we can make real progress on difficult challenges like immigration reform or climate change. First, we need to work through the tricky issues that are making effective problem solving practically impossible.

Unfortunately, we can't expect current office-holders on the national stage to fix things like money in politics or partisan and distorting gerrymandering; they've thrived in the current system and are therefore unlikely to champion needed reform. And in any event, they can't get anything done!

Instead, some form of people power will be necessary to drive reforms that enable us to collaborate and solve national problems rather than fragment, polarize and sink into stalemate.

Citizens must mobilize to demand practical, bipartisan progress on the issues that challenge our future as a nation. Those who fight for such progress must be rewarded at the ballot box and those who undermine it must be punished. Support must build for measures that protect our national politics from interest group and partisan manipulation.

Helping the public come to terms with these prerequisites for national progress is among the central political projects of our time. The Pew study does nothing to dissuade us from this fundamental point. Rather, now more than ever, we should get to work.

(Hartford, CT) Between the 320s and the 130s BCE, there were kingdoms in what is now Pakistan, India, Afghanistan, and Turkmenistan that had monarchs with Greek names who communicated in both Greek and Pali, who honored both Olympian gods and Buddha, and who had diplomatic relationships, marriages, and wars with both Mediterranean and South Asian neighbors. Here, for example, is a coin of king Strato I and his consort Agathokleia. They are named on one side in Greek. On the other side, in the Kharosthi script, it says, “King Strato, Savior and of the Dharma.” The figure is Athena, but other coins from the Greco-Bactrian kingdoms show the Buddhist wheel.

These kingdoms are fascinating because they may have influenced the ideas and art of Mahayana Buddhism, on one side, and Hellenistic philosophy and Judeo-Christian monasticism, on the other. Discussing them, however, can be politically sensitive. Ever since they were rediscovered, scholars–both Indian and European–have identified the Greek aspects of these communities with Europe, with colonialism, and with whiteness, and the Indian aspects of these communities with Asia, with independence, and with darker skin. Thus proponents of the British empire have accentuated the Greeks’ contribution to “Hellenistic India,” whereas anti-colonial scholars have either dismissed it or viewed it critically. This is a helpful overview of the historiography by Rachel Mairs.

I’m no expert, but I have a strong instinct that these categories are false and misleading. I happen to be white (of European extraction) and I studied some Greek. But the Greek cultural aspect of the Greco-Bactrian kingdoms is deeply alien to me. In their militarism, monarchism, paganism, misogyny, and peculiar metaphysics, the ancient Hellenes are far more remote than modern Indians are. If I had to choose between the ethics of a Greek circa 200 BC and a Buddhist of the same time, I would select the latter as both more persuasive and more familiar. The British imperialists who came to dominate South Asia in the late 1700s were not much more similar to ancient Greeks than I am, although they thought they belonged to the “classical tradition.”

The Greeks themselves distinguished between Europe and Asia and named “India” as that part of Asia that lay beyond the Indus River. But those are arbitrary distinctions, as my family and I recalled when we stood on either side of the Europe/Asia border in Turkey several times this summer. Ancient Indians tended to call the Greeks “Yona,” which refers to the Ionian Sea. It lies between Italy and Greece, but if Indians had called the Greeks “Aegeans” instead, that name would have encompassed both Asia and Europe (per the Greeks’ own distinction.)

Race is a hugely influential category today, but ancients did not divide people up that way. When the Greek emperor Seleukos and the Indian emperor Chandragupta sealed a peace treaty by arranging a marriage between their children, no one thought that a white person was marrying a person of color. Some Greeks may have thought that the marriage involved a barbarian, but that meant someone who couldn’t speak Greek. Barbarians were people who said “bar bar bar”: unintelligible foreign words. The important divisions involved language, not skin color.

If you can drop the association of Greeks with Europe and Mauryans with India, what really jumps out is the continuity of culture and history from North India to southern Italy in that era. The philosophical milieu of Siddhartha Gautama resembled that of Socrates. Both men lived in city-states that would be overrun in the late 4th century BCE by monarchical empires. In both cases, a polytheistic background culture allowed reflection on abstract fundamentals that yielded agnostic and atheist ideas. In both circumstances, the essential question was how to achieve equanimity despite the intrinsic cruelty of life. And both regions traded intensively with each other. Once we drop the division between East and West, we can learn to read Sextus Empiricus and Marcus Aurelius as guides to meditation and Nagarjuna as a systematic metaphysician much like Aristotle.

[See also when east and west were one; Jesus was a person of color, and strange lives (last paragraph)].

The post avoiding the labels of East and West appeared first on Peter Levine.

I’ll be offline the rest of the week for “circus vacation” – a week culminating in the season ending performances of the OPENAIR Circus. Now in it’s 29th year, this non-profit children’s circus annually engages 200 students from Somerville and surrounding communities in a variety of circus arts.

If you’re in the area, feel free to stop by and catch one of our shows! All performances are at Conway Park, with a suggested donation of $3. The theme this year is “haunted circus,” but in a totally child-friendly way, of course. Show times are:

Friday, August 1 @ 7pm
Saturday, August 2 @ 2pm & 7pm
Sunday, August 3 @ 2pm

And, if you were wondering, here’s what a car load of stilts looks like:

This is a sampling of comments from focus groups exploring American attitudes on foreign policy and on the crisis in Ukraine in particular, conducted this spring (before the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17) by the FDR Group and the Kettering Foundation. National polls over the last few years pick up responses similar to those captured above.

According to the Pew Research Center, for example, 8 in 10 say the U.S. should “concentrate more on our own national problems” and “not think so much in international terms.” More than half of Americans want the country to “mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own .”

So what does this mean for U.S. foreign policy? The crisis in Ukraine, heartbreaking violence in the Middle East, the unraveling “Arab spring,” disintegrating relations with Russia, gang violence and turmoil in Central America--these are just a few of the tough international challenges we face. Do people really want the U.S. to step back from the world stage? Has the country become more isolationist? What happens when people begin to weigh the implications of U.S. disengagement?

Understanding public thinking on foreign policy is a complex assignment, whether you rely on surveys, focus groups or on community discussions such as National Issues Forums. Events abroad are in constant flux, and there are few policy issues where the public learning curve is steeper.

Polls capture people’s reactions about foreign policy questions whether they understand the stakes involved or not. Even in focus groups, it takes prolonged discussion to help participants consider the costs of getting involved in an international crisis versus the costs of staying out. And focus groups contain an important warning for anyone looking at the polls. People routinely assume that “involvement” or “action” means military combat. Most are unfamiliar with other diplomatic and economic tools the country might employ.

Yet despite these caveats, a closer look at recent polls and focus groups reveals some important themes.

Isn’t it time to work on our own problems?

Both surveys and focus groups show an authentic conviction among Americans that the U.S. needs to reduce its footprint abroad and take better care of business at home.

In the FDR/Kettering research, participants repeatedly asked why we were investing money, time, and attention in so many foreign hotspots given our own problems. “We have people living on streets; kids that aren't eating,” a New Jersey woman said when she was asked about U.S. policy on Ukraine. “And we focus all this money and attention on something that is none of our business, none of our business.” A man made a similar point about Afghanistan: “All that money that was spent in Afghanistan. Some of it should have been spent on Sandy, Katrina, Irene and all these other issues.”

Why are we always out front?

According to surveys, only 12 percent of Americans want the U.S. to be the “single world leader” compared to 72 percent who want us to have a “shared leadership role.” More extended focus group discussions underscore this concern. Even when reminded that wars abroad can endanger us here at home, many participants still wanted to know why the U.S. so often seems so eager to step forward.

“Why does it have to be us right away?” was a typical comment. Commenting on the dispute with Russia over Ukraine, a woman said: “Why should we be the first one? Always getting ourselves involved . . . At this point, it's more of like an ego trip. Who's the stronger man? Who's got the better country . . .?”

Surveys suggest the public is considerably more open to foreign policy initiatives when the U.S. works in concert with other countries, an idea that also emerged in the focus groups.

There are also indications that some Americans do reconsider their initial rejection of U.S. engagement abroad when they begin to weigh the consequences of “not acting.”

The FDR Group’s Steve Farkas describes what happened in the focus groups he led as participants wrestled with how the U.S. should address the crisis in Ukraine:

“As the evening wore on, some of those who shrank back from U.S. leadership and activism on a crisis like Crimea-Ukraine-Russia started to worry about the consequences of letting Putin have his way. Others in the room talked about the possibility that not confronting a bully would encourage him to escalate, and you could feel that a few of the isolationists started, just started, having second thoughts. Others held fast, they had thought through their position, saying Putin would not respond to sanctions —‘he'll do what he wants to do.’”

Does U.S. involvement abroad really make us safer?

Current surveys show that three-quarters of Americans now say the war in Iraq was “not worth the cost.”

One key insight from the research is that many Americans see “costs” to military action on top of the heavy human and financial toll. Some worried that the U.S. is now seen as a bully or an aggressor, and that this in itself endangers us.

“Really,” one woman said, “we dictate to other countries what they can do, who can have nuclear weapons, who can't, you know. . . It's just honestly, we're hated for a reason because we think we know the best way and if they don't do what we think is the best, we get mad, we send troops, we spend money, we go on TV.” Another said: “You know, if we minded our own business, we'd take the target off our back.”

Experts sometimes assume that public hesitancy about U.S. involvement abroad stems from indifference or a sense that what happens outside our borders doesn’t matter. But a closer look from the FDR/Kettering research suggests that many Americans are in fact quite worried about what happens abroad. They’re just not sure that U.S. assertiveness makes us any safer.

Who can we trust? Can anything really make any difference?

Perhaps the most troubling observation from the focus groups is the profound sense of weariness, mistrust, and cynicism evidenced by so many Americans.

Participants repeatedly questioned whether leaders and the press are telling the truth and whether U. S. foreign policy could make any difference even in the best of circumstances. For many, deep disappointment with our own country seeped into their thinking about what we can or should do abroad. “I think that we should support democracy when we start to practice it [here]. . . and we don't.” Another participant asked: “We're not even friends in our own country. How are we going to be friends with people from another country?”

Attitudes like these strongly suggest that rebuilding public confidence in this country’s foreign policy will require much more than replacing one set of strategies with different ones.

And yet despite the pervasive discontent in the focus groups, there were also sparks of curiosity and interest beneath the surface. Most participants delved into discussions about Ukraine even though they didn’t think we should get involved. Many listened intently to other people’s views. As the conversations progressed, some acknowledged their own lack of certainty about what the country should do.

Given the supreme difficulty of America’s foreign policy challenges, an open mind, a little humility and a desire to hear what other people think isn’t the worst place to start. Perhaps some of the TV talking heads who so insistently push their own “just do it my way” policy options should take note.

I fear that the current state of our democracy is not robust enough to prevent the damage a biased-toward-the-rich form of capitalism is bound to wreak on our society.

We are doing reasonably well in observing the external trappings of democracy – voting, the rule of law, divided powers, etc. This is vitally important because it helps us to preserve our freedom and political stability.

Government by the people clearly implies that the people must have a say in the decisions that affect their lives.

But we are not doing as well on the substantive side of democracy – the side implicit in Lincoln’s definition of democracy as government of, by and for the people. Government by the people clearly implies that the people must have a say in the decisions that affect their lives.

Jefferson observed that a well-informed public is indispensable to democracy’s success. What he meant by “well informed”, however, included not only relevant factual information but also the hard work of deliberation needed to form thoughtful and considered public judgment.

The current state of our democracy fails on these counts. The public voice rarely plays any significant role in shaping policy. People are badly informed about the relevant facts. And most important of all, they lack both the incentive and the tools needed to reach considered public judgment on vital policy issues.

An astonishing example: the public voice had no role whatsoever in formulating the health care policies of either the Clinton or Obama administrations. Nor did the majority even understand either of these health care initiatives, let alone form thoughtful judgment about them. Remember that these were initiatives from Democratic Presidents who strongly believe in the importance of the public voice.

These acts reveal a vast disconnect between the rhetoric of our political leaders and the practice of a robust democracy.

Rebooting Democracy is a blog authored by Public Agenda co-founder Dan Yankelovich. While the views that Dan shares in his blog should not be interpreted as representing official Public Agenda positions, the purpose behind the blog and the spirit in which it is presented resonate powerfully with our values and the work that we do. To receive Rebooting Democracy in your inbox, subscribe here.

No one in society should be deprived of access to ideas.

Not long ago, I had the opportunity to learn about the JCI Scholars Program. Based at Jessup Correctional Institution, a maximum-security men’s prison in central Maryland, the program offers volunteer, non-credit, college-level courses in a range of subjects including advanced literature, criminal justice, games and game design, and history of economic thought.

Should you feel inspired to support this work – and I hope you do – you can do so at patreon.com/prisonscholarsprogram.

You can even skip the rest of this post and just head over there and donate now. I won’t be offended. Go ahead: patreon.com/prisonscholarsprogram.

This work strikes me as an important, intrinsic good – especially since prison-based education was decimated after President Clinton and a Democratic congress made inmates ineligible for Pell grants in 1994. It’s easy to confuse tough on crime with being tough on people who’ve committed crimes, I suppose.

But when I started thinking about this post I realized…I didn’t know why I find this work important. Or at least I couldn’t articulate it. Perhaps it was just the words of Oscar Wilde ringing through my head:

I know not whether Laws be right,
Or whether Laws be wrong;
All that we know who lie in gaol
Is that the wall is strong;
And that each day is like a year,
A year whose days are long.

…This too I know—and wise it were
If each could know the same—
That every prison that men build
Is built with bricks of shame,
And bound with bars lest Christ should see
How men their brothers maim.

Of course, Wilde wrote these words while imprisoned for his own “crime” of sodomy – a point which emphasizes that not all those imprisoned are imprisoned justly. There is, for example, healthy debate about the appropriateness of prison sentences for non-violent drug related crimes. Additionally, the Innocence Project estimates that between 2.3% and 5% of U.S. prisoners are innocent of the crime they’ve been imprisoned for.

Furthermore there is deep injustice and racism inherent in the system. Mandatory minimums have disproportionately increased black men’s admissions to prison. The school to prison pipeline systematically segregates and disenfranchises predominately poor, black men. The United States, with 5% of the world’s population, has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.

There is much work to be done. Much justice which needs to be achieved.

And, yet – that is not the point.

The bulk of the scholars who benefit from this program are violent offenders. Some are innocent perhaps, but others surely guilty. Yet the JCI Scholars Program boldly states, no one in society should be deprived of access to ideas.

No one.

Is that truly so bold?

I am close with people who have been the victims of violent crimes. Do I risk pulling a Michael Dukakis if I respond with something besides hate?

I am reminded of the words of the great Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

Would it truly be moral for me to hate, knowing that indeed, hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction. Shall I willingly continue the plunge into the dark abyss of annihilation?

No. I could not in good conscious go down that path.

And here we get to the heart of the matter – for as much as I may wish it, good conscious is not enough. It is not the only force which guides me.

That is to say – it is easy to take comfort in the language of personal responsibility, so often encountered when we talk about incarceration.

Whether you advocate for harsh punishments or thoughtful rehabilitation, whether you imagine criminal acts are caused by a failure of the individual or a systemic failure of society, it is comforting to imagine there is a defining line between us and them. 

And perhaps these men, incarcerated as they may be for violent, perhaps brutal crimes, perhaps they have crossed a line I have not crossed. Perhaps we as society should regulate such behavior. But we as individuals cannot neglect our humanity.

It would be foolish to think them so different from myself.

That darkness, that capacity for terrible acts, exists in all of us. And we have each touched that darkness more closely than we might like to admit. It may be comforting to claim superior self-control or personal virtue, but wishing does not make it so. We have each committed our own terrible acts. Broken no laws, perhaps, but not without sin.

Wilde writes, each man kills the thing he loves, yet each man does not die.

Betrayed by his lover, Wilde was sentenced to two years’ hard labor. His heart nor his health ever recovered. The conviction that each man kills the thing he loves was an acute truth for him. He was imprisoned, but his lover, free and unbesmirched, had conducted the more heinous act. The kindest use a knife, because the dead so soon grow cold.

We do need laws and regulations and a system of justice. And as a society, we should work to make that system as just and equitable as possible.

But as people, as individuals facing other individuals, we should know better than to sit in judgement. We are none of us Good.

I hope that the education provided by the JCI Scholars program helps empower incarcerated citizens to address some of our system’s terrible inequity. I am no expert on prisons, and while I seek justice, I couldn’t think to speak for them on this matter.

I hope that the education provided by the JCI Scholars program provides some measure of peace, some insight on the Good Life, for those confined and perhaps haunted by their past deeds.

But ultimately, these outcomes are not what matter. What matters is that no one in society should be deprived of access to ideas.

No one.

And that is a good in its own right.

Support this work here: patreon.com/prisonscholarsprogram.