I am enjoying Elizabeth McKenna’s and Hahrie Han’s book Groundbreakers: How Obama’s 2.2 Million Volunteers Transformed Campaigning in America in preparation for this free open forum in Chicago on May 19. Register here.
The post Chicago OFA forum: how organizations develop activists appeared first on Peter Levine.
We were impressed by the very cool video that the Kettering Foundation – one of NCDD’s key organizational members – recently released. It can be an easy and fun tool for introducing deliberative politics to your audiences, so we encourage you to read more about it below or find KF’s original post about it here.
Those of you who have participated in Kettering’s annual summer Deliberative Democracy Exchange have probably heard Kettering Foundation president David Mathews tell a story about a small village that faces a recurring flood. It is a fable of sorts. In spite of the villagers’ many efforts to stop the flood, the waters return again and again.
So the people in the story had to make a decision: should they move across the river, where another band of people already live? Should they stay in their homeland? Or, should they move to higher ground? And in coming together and making a collective decision, the people create politics.
The story is designed to be universal – one that belongs to all times, all people, all cultures. People in communities everywhere face difficult problems and must weigh the costs and benefits of potential actions and then decide how to act together. The story counters the idea that public deliberation is some kind of new technique to be used on communities and encourages a notion of democracy that is citizen-centered.
A team at the Kettering Foundation collaborated with Momentum, Inc., artist and illustrator Danijel Zezelj, and MainSail Productions to produce a new animated video, The Creation of Politics, which brings to life this archetypal flood story that imagines how politics was first created – and why.
You can find the original version of this Kettering Foundation post at http://kettering.org/blogs/new-video-creation-politics
There’s this sort of conventional wisdom that Democrats “suck at soundbites,” in the words of DailyKos.
And perhaps what’s even more interesting than Democrats being terrible at expressing themselves succinctly is the commonly given reason for this shortcoming –
Liberals want you to understand an issue.
That is to say, liberals care too much about understanding an issue to condense it into a soundbite. They’re too precise, to concerned with the details. Conservatives, on the other hand, have a shaky relationship with the truth and therefore have no qualms with hawking their wares through misrepresentation or lies of omission.
Liberals appeal to reason, conservatives appeal to instinct.
Whoa. Now let’s back up a little bit.
I’ve no interest today in starting a fight about liberal and conservative campaign tactics.
But I am interested in this idea – whether it’s true or not – that Democrats are worse at soundbites because they care too much about understanding an issue.
The statement itself implies that Republican tactics – while perhaps more effective – are somehow less moral, less becoming of a free and democratic society.
And yet that’s the line I hear over and over again in postmortems on candidate or issue campaigns. Or at least one ones we lose.
Well of course we lost. We try to actually explain issues and that doesn’t translate well into a sound bite. There’s no chance for the average voter to understand what we’re trying to say.
Now, being wildly liberal myself, I’m in no position to objectively evaluate the truth in that statement, but what’s interesting is – in itself it is a sort of soundbite. A positioning that Democrats and liberals can rally around.
We’re the smart party. We’re the moral party. We’re the ones who are trying to build an informed society.
And almost by default – the other guys aren’t. They’re the used car salesmen willing to say anything to get you to buy a lemon.
It plays into Democrats’ whole mythos of who they are and what they stand for.
Perhaps this mythos isn’t effective beyond the base of the Democratic party, but it does show that Democrats are fully capable of articulating a single, simple idea that can catch on and become a common conventional wisdom.
…Now if only we could do this more.
We discuss in order to address public problems together. We also develop morally through discussion–which, by the way, I would define very broadly to encompass a conversation with your neighbor over the backyard fence, with Leopold Bloom in the pages of Ulysses, with Angela Merkel through the New York Times, with Jesus in prayer, or with your late parent through memories and imagination.
I posit that the quality of discussion is a function of the skills, attitudes, and beliefs of the participants; the nature of the question under consideration; and the format. An individual’s contribution to a good discussion must be understood in context, because a given discursive act (such as making a concession or repeating a claim) can either be helpful or harmful, depending on the situation.
The tool I would use to assess discussion is a network map, where the nodes are the assertions made by the participants, and the links are explicitly asserted connections, such as “P implies Q” or “P is an example of Q” or “P is just like Q.” The network grows as the conversation proceeds–except when people stop adding new ideas and links–and each contribution can be assessed in terms of how it changes the network. A person’s statement can (for example) make a network larger, richer, denser, or more coherent.
As an illustration, I’ve mapped a 2005 Pew Research Center debate on the right to die (prompted by the then-recent Terry Schiavo case) that involved Daniel W. Brock (a medical ethicist), R. Alta Charo (a law professor), Robert P. George (a political theoriss), and Carlos Gómez (a hospice physician). The transcript is here and my map can be explored here:
This topic (end-of-life decisions) has certain features: it raises fundamental metaphysical questions rather than empirical questions that could be settled with data. It poses absolute and irrevocable decisions, unlike questions about the distribution of scare resources, which can be negotiated. As for the format, it involved relatively long prepared statements by just four experts, in contrast to a free-for-all among a larger group, which would have a different structure. And the speakers, although diverse in perspectives, were all accustomed to a certain style of argument (relatively abstract and organized). It would be interesting to contrast this transcript to, for instance, a New England town meeting about a budget.
Dan Brock goes first and has a chance to lay out a position in favor of allowing a patient or her surrogate to end life support. His position is neatly organized, with the principle of autonomy at the center. He names that principle as the underlying rationale for a series of professional reports and court decisions that represent what he calls the current consensus. He connects autonomy to several related concepts: bodily integrity, privacy, self-determination, and choice. He draws the explicit implication that an autonomous patient must be able to choose or refuse any treatment. He adds the idea that when a person is incapable of exercising autonomy and has not made an advance directive, the best course is to empower a surrogate to choose. And he denies that the patient’s or surrogate’s choice should be constrained by supposed distinctions between starting versus stopping care, hydration/nutrition versus medical treatment, or a terminal versus a stable condition. Below is his position, isolated from the rest of the network.
Brock’s position is consistent (no nodes contradict each other), coherent (all nodes are connected), and centralized around the concept of autonomy. I would attribute those features of his position to: 1) the format (he gives prepared remarks that come first in a debate), 2) the professional style of the speaker (a professional philosopher), 3) the nature of the topic (bioethics), and 4) Brock’s position as a liberal who strongly favors autonomy. Indeed, Robert P George, the conservative theorist, says later in the debate: “liberals have to come up with a justification for placing autonomy in the central position in the first place, and that requires the defense of a moral proposition.” Note George’s use of a network metaphor to characterize Brock’s view.
Dr. Carlos Gomez speaks second. Unlike Dan Brock, he doesn’t produce a single, organized argument with explicit connections than link all of his ideas. I count nine different clusters of points in his remarks. Gomez’ points–isolated from the rest of the network–are shown below.
An important claim for Gomez only becomes evident to me (although this might be my own limitation as an interpreter) during the following exchange from the Q&A:
MODERATOR: Actually, before we go to the next question, when you said autonomy misses something essential in this sort of doctor-patient relationship, would you elaborate a little bit more on what that means in the real world?
MR. GOMEZ: Yeah, I’ve never had a patient knock on my office door, come in, sit down, and say, “I’m here to exercise my autonomy.” Now I may be a little too glib there, but what I’m suggesting is that one of the reasons that they are coming to me is precisely by nature of what I profess as a physician, by nature of what I know in terms of my skills, and also by nature – and on this I think Robby is dead on – by nature of the fact that there is a moral construct to what it means to be a physician or a nurse, or any other professionals that professes publicly what they’re going to do.
I think what Carlos Gomez has been implying all along is that nurses and doctors are required to show care for a patient, and an ethic of care is inconsistent with ending the patient’s life. Further, caregivers should have a strong voice in the debate about bioethics. Unlike Dan Brock, however, Gomez does not present that position as an organized argument but alludes to it with relatively scattered claims about how, for instance, there is actually no consensus about end-of-life treatment and the press is uninformed about hospice care. If I were to evaluate Gomez’ participation, I would say that he is less rhetorically effective than he might have been because he never states a claim that actually is central for him. The moderator assists not only Gomez but also the group by drawing out one central node that had not been clear before. On the other hand, Gomez clearly contributes ideas to the conversation and connects many of them to points already introduced by Dan Brock; so he broadens and enriches the discussion.
Alta Charo, a law professor, speaks third. She makes a cluster of points about how people mistake biological patterns for moral imperatives, and a related cluster of points about how sometimes the law appropriately creates “fictions” that are not based on biology, such as the idea of adoptive parenthood. She also makes at least nine other points that don’t explicitly connect to these two clusters. Her view is about as coherent as Carlos Gomez’. However, she is in a different position from him. She generally holds the same liberal position as Dan Brock, who has already spoken. It would not contribute to the conversation for her to repeat Brock’s argument for the centrality of autonomy, although she does state that choices about life must be personal and free. Instead, she builds ideas around the structure than Dan Brock has already laid out.
George follows Charo, and he lays out an alternative view to Brock’s, in which autonomy is explicitly not the central idea. Instead, “human life, even in developing or severely mentally disabled conditions, [is] inherently and unconditionally valuable.” His structure is about as consistent, coherent, and centralized as Brock’s, but it has a different center. Below is shown a network consisting only of the ideas proposed by Brock and George. “Human life is unconditionally valuable” is a central node in the top third of the picture; autonomy is a different center about two-thirds down.
The two networks touch at multiple points, either because George contradicts Brock (I show explicit disagreements with darker lines) or because he acknowledges specific areas of agreement.
Later, in the Q&A, George makes a discursive move that can sometimes be helpful to a group. He says, “As much as I love disagreement and dissent, I think that on one point on which Carlos and Dan thought they were arguing, there’s not actually a disagreement.” This is an example of tying together two points that have already been made in order to increase the coherence of the network. It is a helpful move–unless the two points are not actually alike.
By the time the session ends, the whole network is fairly connected. But certainly, no agreement has been reached, and two nodes remain central for different people but mutually inconsistent. That may be an inevitable feature of debates about the ends of life, or it may be a function of the way these speakers reason about such questions. Although they are speaking lightly at this juncture, Brock and Gomez imply a serious point about the impasse between them:
Dan Brock: Well Carlos and I first met on a PBS show about assisted suicide I guess 15 years ago, was it, Carlos? And we disagreed then roughly the way we do now, so –
MR. GOMEZ: I’m unteachable.
MR. BROCK: So am I.
I would hope that more mutual learning can occur when issues are either more empirical or more negotiable than this one is.
The post assessing a discussion appeared first on Peter Levine.
I’m not a libertarian, but some of my good friends are and I tend to think that there are lots of really promising areas of agreement with libertarians. The blog Bleeding Heart Libertarians was founded with just that goal in mind: to find the points of agreement between libertarian and progressive goals, and indeed (in my view) to argue for the superiority of libertarian perspectives for addressing some matters of mutual concern.
I often associate this libertarian caution at state over-reach to address the demands of social justice with F. A. Hayek but it’s a broad and puissant tradition in the literature. Basically, it’s entailed by the reality of unintended consequences and the perils of public choice: we don’t always fully know how our efforts will bear fruit and we do know that interested parties are often maneuvering to turn those efforts to their own advantage.
An example of a potentially promising direction for BHL is this recent Andrew Cohen post on abolishing state administration of schools. Though public schooling is a progressive shibboleth, I happen to think that that makes it a prime target for ideologically-blinkered reasoning by progressives: John Dewey’s vision of the public school is a far cry from what we’ve actually created (and indeed public schooling has long been a space of indoctrination and the active production of inequality) but through the miracle of equivocation we defend it all the same. Yet Cohen proceeds as if the case of public schooling is insufficiently strong according to his somewhat tendentious definition of the justifications for state action as a remedy for harms. But this seems to take up the weaker argument and ignore the stronger one!
Here’s the kind of argument I’d like to see from BHL:
Now, of course it may be that a well-informed libertarian (and progressives!) would have objections to some of these points. But it seems like the difference between “only remedy harms” and “first, do no harm” is one that should always favor the latter, and I can’t understand why a libertarian would choose the narrower path. I take it that we see this kind of approach in Radley Balko’s work and there’s been much more demand for it as Balko’s case comes to look a lot like those of Black activists and organizers: that’s precisely the kind of coalition I imagined BHL would champion. Of course, as an outsider to BHL it may be that I’m simply not understanding the internal motivations for this particular approach, which seems born of the kind of political philosophy that tries to exclude public choice considerations and empirical data and do its work through deliberately abstruse thought experiments. But I’d argue that both libertarians and progressives should move away from such arguments whenever other opportunities are present.
We are happy to share the announcement below from NCDD Supporting Member Amy Lenzo of weDialogue. Amy’s announcement came via our great Submit-to-Blog Form. Do you have news you want to share with the NCDD network? Just click here to submit your news post for the NCDD Blog!
I’m excited to be offering four online courses over the next three months – each a short series packed with learning and inspiration. Two are official “World Cafe Signature Learning Programs” co-hosted by Amy Lenzo and Samantha Tan, and two are original, long-requested offerings from Amy Lenzo, and co-host FireHawk Hulin:
MAY
1) Introduction to the World Cafe
LAST CHANCE TO REGISTER
May 13/14, 19/20, & 22/23
5:30 – 7:30pm Pacific Time / 8:30 – 10:30am Hong Kong Time
Details & Registration
2) Hosting in the Digital Realm
Wednesdays, May 27, June 3, 10, & 17th
Details & Registration
JULY
3) Introduction to the World Cafe
July 8, 15, & 22 9:00 – 11:00am Pacific Time
Details & Registration
4) Sacred Habits: Reconnecting to Wisdom in the Digital Realm
July 7, 14, 21, & 28
Details & Registration
Each “Introduction to the World Cafe” course includes a full World Cafe designed to be a great introduction to the World Cafe experience, and a first step in understanding how to host them most effectively. The first starts this week and is particularly timed to be convenient for people in Australia and Asia, and for people in the Americas who prefer night courses. The July series is timed for days in the Americas and evenings in Europe.
Each of the two original offerings by Amy and FireHawk are deeply engaging, participatory, informative, and inspiring. They are both visionary and practical; visionary in that they reveal a new way of being online, and practical in terms of providing clear techniques and practices for achieving your goals.
The “Hosting in the Digital Realm” course has proved to be phenomenally successful, and due to the demand from people who couldn’t make the first one we offered in March, we’re very excited to be offering it again so soon. In the follow-up survey, 9 out of 10 graduates surveyed said the course had enhanced their hosting practice, that they now feel more confident hosting in the digital realm and have a deeper understanding of what is possible. This course will build on what we learned the first time around and be even better! Hosting in the Digital Realm is for those who want to bring people together in an online environment to take advantage of the reach and scale that this cutting-edge medium offers. It includes a behind-the-scenes look at the technology of online hosting, and there is an additional “hands-on” optional session for those who are interested in “driving” the technologies we’ll be using or just want to understand the technology in more depth.
“Sacred Habits: Reconnecting to Wisdom in the Digital Realm” is designed to cultivate online habits that create space for a new experience online – in everything from our email correspondence to our participation in social media and webinars. It stands alone and is also a companion course that builds on and feeds into Hosting in the Digital Realm in a beautiful way, deepening and extending learning and awareness about working consciously within the digital realm.
I am deeply honored and delighted to see these courses make their way into the world, and hope you can join me for the journey by registering in one or both of them. If you have any questions, please contact me via email: amy[at]wedialogue[dot]com.
A couple weeks ago we had a visit from David Benatar, who kindly shared a chapter from the new book he was writing. The chapter he shared was on meaning in life, and it was–as much standard analytic philosophy is–pretty narrowly focused on making distinctions and arguing against various perspectives. In keeping with Benatar’s general mood (he famously thinks life is full of too much suffering, so it’s wrong to have children) he depicted meaning in life pretty pessimistically.
(Note: I won’t cite the paper here because it was a draft, but there are some general themes that run through this literature that I’ll discuss.)
Ironically, philosophy is mostly understood as the pursuit of meanings and values–or perhaps the meaning and value–for life and existence, yet few professional philosophers actually devote themselves to this question. Perhaps this is a problem for professionalism, but I suspect it is just that we hate faux-profundity and it’s hard not to sound faux-profound when you ask this question.
The major analytic theorists of meaning in life tend to describe it as the pursuit of an “impact” or “consequence”: they’re tied to a purpose with a goal. For Susan Wolf, for instance, meaning in life is achieved through active engagement in what she calls “projects” that have positive objective value. The major constraint on meaning in life is understood as a problem of the cosmic scale of time and space and our obviously small place in it. Without a God devoted to us each individually, it’s hard to understand how any goal-oriented conception of meaning in life could do much good. No matter how much we achieve, we will be specks in a large and uncaring universe: the death of the sun (or perhaps the heat death of the universe) will wipe away all mundane knowledge and wealth: even the greatest philosophers, scientists, saints, artists, and politicians will be forgotten.
If there is a God, then the only possible meanings are ones decided upon by Him (or Her or It) and they are largely alien to us. God may wish to assemble more souls in Heaven than zir adversary does in Hell; God may wish that each person find a unique and loving bond with zim; or God may wish simply to see how all this creation works out. These purposes are always already someone else’s, though: God’s. Even for the theist, it remains to be seen why God’s goals would or even could bind or guide us, why we wouldn’t feel a bit like Pinocchio once the strings are gone, but we have the additional problem that a creator’s purposes and meanings effectively eliminate the possibility of developing or discovering our own cosmic meanings.
So far, so existential: if you adopt a goal-oriented conception of meaning then life sucks (meaninglessly) and then you die. But it seems like the existentialists have already offered us an alternative. Not just Camus’s existentialism, which really does look like a kind of sour grapes, celebrating the pointlessness of Sisyphus’s punishment because we must, because there’s nothing better to be had. Unfortunately, here is where the Heideggerian tradition of existentialism–with its antihumanism–seems to offer a possibility that is too often ignored: that meanings in life only really make sense as process-oriented, bounded projects.
Let’s start with the “bounded-ness” of our meaningful projects: too often, we follow the Greek adage that one ought “call no man happy until he is dead.” This gives us both an objective and success criterion: one must successfully and actually achieve some set of goals to be happy, to have meaning, etc. But a bounded conception of meaning in life assumes that meanings happen in, well, life. It doesn’t try to transcend the lifespan from birth to death, nor does it accept this as a sour grapes alternative to immortality in an afterlife or the God’s-eye view that can incorporate future generations and the fate of the human race.
This is because projects that supply meaning in life are fundamentally process-oriented. That process sometimes has goal: writing produces a blog post, an academic paper, or a novel, but does that mean that parenting is over when it produces an adult human being? Just as we acknowledge that the lives of the idle rich might be full of ennui or meaninglessness because of their laziness, so too a meaning-granting project isn’t primarily satisfied by the end that it achieves. Indeed, we very often pursue projects that are doomed to failure or incompleteness in a knowing way: we eat carefully and exercise even when we know that these pursuits can only–at best–forestall our inevitable demise.
Benatar is convinced that meaning can only be found in transcendence: that which breaks through the bounds of our existence. That is, he thinks, what we’re reaching for when we ask for life to have a meaning, and it’s usually impossible or very difficult and thus most people fail. But if you reject transcendence, you can still have meaning: you can find it not in the pointing-beyond of transcendence, where one’s life is about something greater that itself, but in the coherence and tensions of one’s projects, which necessarily entails community and intersubjectivity. Calling it a circulating-within the span of birth and death, the way that one’s activities fit with the activities of one’s family and friends and neighbors and fellow citizens.
Put it this way: lots of projects have goals. But projects with goals can never satisfy the demands of “meaning in life” because we finish them but live on. It doesn’t help if you pursue a really big project, one that will continue after your death: at some point, the project will succeed or fail. If it fails, then your life had no meaning. But it if succeeds: your life still had no transcendent meaning, because the project is over and now bounded by the start and completion. So it’s a kind of category mistake to seek meaning in life in the achievement of such projects. This blog post won’t give me meaning in life, because it’ll be done and I’ll get back to other work. But writing: that can give my life meaning. Activities and practices give life meaning: fine, that’s an empirical claim. But what I want to say is that activities and practices give life meaning and they’re the only thing that can.
In this sense, meaning is inextricable from what Martin Heidegger called “world.” “World” is what Heidegger describes by the Greek temple’s capacity to “fit together and at the same time gather around itself the unity of those paths and relationships in which birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory and disgrace, endurance and decline acquire the shape of destiny for human being.” World isn’t just a place, it’s a phenomenological simple: it’s the structure of our spatial and temporal being. There’s lots to hate about Heidegger (seriously, fuck you Martin) but I think he gets this right: meaning in life is just the way that events of value and importance are unified by culture, architecture, language, and habits. Meanings don’t point beyond themselves, they organize and unify the circulation of characteristic events.
Heidegger liked to switch subjects and objects in sentences like this one: we don’t give meaning to things, rather things give us meaning. We don’t have a world or a language; language has us. (Literally: “Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells.”) Self and world are equiprimordial, which is just a fancy way of saying they arise together, make up a single transactional unit, etc. This is just irritating syntax and I’ll never believe the dumber Sapir-Whorf versions of Heidegger’s project. But: we can embrace the mundane and tarry with the ordinary. We can accept that our lives and projects will end rather than building worlds of meaning that would require us to be immortal.
Moreover, while it’s easy to adopt a transcendentalist position from which this all looks kind of unsatisfying, that transcendentalism is the problem. No doubt: if we want meaning in life to be achieved outside of life, we’ll be disappointed. If we want our human lives to take on a cosmic scale, then it is inevitable that we’ll succumb to the crushing ennui of our failure when we remember our finitude. There’s plenty of theology and metaphysics underpinning that fantasy: an eschatological project that radically alters or ends the cosmos, a desire for all the world to experience my end as the end. This is where maybe Heidegger had a point about the problems that technology and Christianity have created: bad metaphysics can make you suffer. The disappointment was always already unavoidable so long as we adopt the fantasies of mix bad metaphysics with the wrong frame for the question.
From Wendell Berry’s Manifesto:
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Berry’s mad farmer doesn’t actually think the sequoias are his crop: he doesn’t plant them hoping to have an effect a thousand years later. Berry’s farmer is trying to make sense of what it would mean to live a life bounded by the seasons, one that doesn’t reach beyond the circular temporality of sowing, reaping, and lying fallow but embraces such cycles and ecologies as the model for human lives.
When I was in elementary school someone gave me a big book of quotes on various subjects. One piece that stuck out were the simple lines:
Put up in a place
where it’s easy to see
the cryptic admonishment
T. T. T.
When you feel how depressingly
slowly you climb,
it’s well to remember that
Things Take Time!
That poem, or more properly, grook, was written by Danish scientist, poet and inventor Piet Hein.
If Hein already sounds like an interesting person, that’s because he was. Born in 1905, he was a creative and gifted thinker in a range of fields.
He began publishing his grooks – or gruks, for ‘GRin & sUK’ (“laugh & sigh”, in Danish) – in the daily newspaper Politiken in 1940. The works were printed under the headline “From day to day” and were taken as “poetic comments on small and great occurrences in everyday life.”
His first grook, for instance, read:
Losing one glove
is certainly painful,
but nothing
compared to the pain,
of losing one,
throwing away the other,
and finding
the first one again.
There’s something simple, playful, and relate-able in those simple lines about losing gloves.
But is that what the poem is really about?
The poem appeared shortly after the beginning of the Nazi occupation, and was interpreted by many – though not the censors – to have a more subversive meaning: When your freedoms is lost, don’t throw away your patriotism and become a collaborator.
Incidentally, Hein initially published under the pseudonym “Kumbel Kumbell,” kumbel being an Old Norse word for tombstone.
Perhaps one of his better known grooks is:
Taking fun
as simply fun
and earnestness
in earnest
shows how thoroughly
thou none
of the two
discernest.
A scientist by training – Hein worked with Niels Bohr for several years – he was also a dedicated artist, “Art,” he said, “is this: art is the solution of a problem which cannot be expressed explicitly until it is solved.”
In the end, Hein wrote more than 7000 grooks. He wrote in Dutch and English, but had his poems translated into many languages. As his estate puts it:
The small grooks belong to everybody, exactly as was Piet Hein’s original intention.
We come into the world with no moral ideas at all and must learn them from others. We learn not just from arguments and explicit principles, but also by observing practices and experiencing emotional reactions.1 We must make judgments about complex, evolved, historically contingent phenomena (such as, among many others, marriage, democracy, and art) that we cannot apprehend as wholes but must learn to assess from accumulated and vicarious human experience.2 In Habermas’ terms, we begin with a “Lifeworld” formed of our shared experiences and improve it through explicit deliberation with diverse people in civil society.3
Some people are much better at this process than others are, and we can explain why by understanding their moral worldviews as networks of ideas and connections and considering how their whole networks are organized. Consider these hypothetical discussion partners:
This list can be extended. The point is that the structure of a moral network is important. That follows from the premise that we each begin with whatever ideas and connections we happen to hold, and our responsibility is to refine the whole set in discussion and collaboration with others. In that case, we should be concerned not only about the various values that we endorse, but also with how they are configured. The best networks for discussion are likely rich, complex, connected, not overly centralized, and not necessarily fully consistent.
Notes
The post it’s not just what you think, but how your thoughts are organized appeared first on Peter Levine.
This four-page case study (2014) from The Intersector Project outlines how cross-sector collaboration was used to transform the East Lake Meadows community in Atlanta, Georgia.
From the Intersector Project
In 1995, in the East Lake Meadows public housing complex located four miles from downtown Atlanta, only four percent of residents earned incomes above the poverty line. The unemployment rate was 86.5 percent, and the neighborhood was home to a multi-million dollar drug trade with a crime rate 18 times higher than the national average. Less than 10 percent of children attending the neighborhood elementary school met basic proficiency standards in math by fifth grade. In 1993, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development awarded the Atlanta Housing Authority (AHA) a $35 million grant to renovate the crumbling housing stock of East Lake Meadows. Renee Glover, who had recently joined AHA as President, realized that merely renovating housing would not create a safer, more prosperous community. Concurrently, Tom Cousins, Founder of Cousins Properties, Inc., formed the East Lake Foundation to support and lead an integrated and holistic community approach which would provide mixed income housing, cradle-to-college education, and community wellness resources through public and private partnerships. Along with Carol Naughton, a real estate attorney for AHA, and Greg Giornelli, the Executive Director of the East Lake Foundation, and neighborhood residents, Tom and Renee catalyzed a collaborative effort to transform East Lake Meadows. This model and its success led to the development of Purpose Built Communities – a national network that redevelops distressed communities in cities throughout the United States.
“Cross-sector collaboration isn’t merely an option but a necessity to create neighborhoods where everyone can thrive. The necessary skill sets, funding streams, and leadership aren’t found only in one sector, but live in all sectors; collaborations allows for better coordination, more efficient use of resources, and greater impact. The revitalization of East Lake in Atlanta is a strong example of the power of cross-sector collaboration. Purpose Built Communities is helping leaders around the country use the model developed in East Lake to build healthy, sustainable neighborhoods with pathways to prosperity for the lowest income families.”— Carol Naughton, Senior Vice President, Purpose Built Communities
This case study, authored by The Intersector Project, tells the story of this initiative.
More about The Intersector Project
The Intersector Project is a New York-based 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that seeks to empower practitioners in the government, business, and non-profit sectors to collaborate to solve problems that cannot be solved by one sector alone. We provide free, publicly available resources for practitioners from every sector to implement collaborative solutions to complex problems. We take forward several years of research in collaborative governance done at the Center for Business and Government at Harvard’s Kennedy School and expand on that research to create practical, accessible resources for practitioners.
Follow on Twitter @theintersector.
Resource Link: http://intersector.com/case/eastlake_georgia/ (Download the case study PDF here.)
This resource was submitted by Neil Britto, the Executive Director at The Intersector Project via the Add-a-Resource form.