Last week, one session of the Summer Institute of Civic Studies was devoted to friendship, and the assignments were:
When people treat one another as friends, interactions have a special quality. This is not a naive point, for people want to have friendships and will sometimes put the development and maintenance of their friendships above other goals. Aristotle observed as much.*
One might suspect that only some cultures cultivate friendships that are strong enough to make people check their conflicting self-interests. We might find people acting as friends among the ruling classes of classical city-states, but surely not in atomized and materialistic America.
Based in part on the great book by Mansbridge assigned for this session, I would propose instead that whether people act as friends depends on the immediate situation. When interactions are sustained and face-to-face (or possibly online, given sufficient bandwidth); when interests are not too starkly opposed or the stakes are reasonably low; and when groups are tolerably small, modern Americans will put friendship ahead of narrow interests and will work hard and skillfully to preserve friendship.
For instance, I hypothesize that a group like the Summer Institute itself (22 activists and scholars from six countries, gathered for 63 hours of seminar time), if asked to plan a recreational activity for themselves, would be primarily concerned with preserving their friendship. They would, for instance, be reluctant to put options for activities to a vote. If time pressures forced them to vote, they would be highly uncomfortable to see a minority disappointed and would–at a minimum–seek to acknowledge and regret their sacrifice. (Allen’s book is focused on sacrifice and how to repair it). If even one person said that he could not participate in a given activity (for instance, he couldn’t go on boat ride because of sea-sickness), that idea would instantly be retracted. On the other hand, if an individual simply didn’t like a given activity, he would be unlikely to say so because expressions of self-interest would make him look like a bad friend.
We didn’t actually assign the exercise of choosing a recreational activity, because it seems better for members of the Institute to make individual choices about how to spend their weekends. But we talked about how such a conversation would likely go, and the predictions seemed insightful to me.
Two big questions are:
Background on the two assigned books
Mansbridge emerged from the New Left of the 1960s and 70s, where she observed small groups , “appear[ing] everywhere like fragile bubbles” that had certain features in common. Decisions were made in face-to-face meetings, after much discussion, when someone expressed the consensus of the group. There were no formal distinctions among participants or offices. And there was a strong norm against making self-interested statements.
These forms seemed naïve from the perspective of what Mansbridge calls “adversary democracy,” which presumes that interests conflict and there must be winners and losers in decisions. Yet they seemed to work somewhat well and to have certain advantages.
She studied two examples. Helpline is a commune of the New Left: urban, somewhat racially diverse, aimed at social change. The other case is a Vermont Town Meeting in a rural, socially conservative white community. They differ, too, in that Helpline codifies the principles of “unitary democracy,” whereas Selby has official votes and office-holders and exercises powers granted by the state. And yet Mansbridge finds many similar practices.
This leads her to generalizations about where and when “unitary democracy” can work. She also finds convergence between the two examples.
Allen begins with the observation that democracy requires sacrifice. Some lose when others gain, and the losses are not fairly distributed. Her question is how you can build some kind of “friendship” when some must sacrifice?
Her friendly critique of Habermas: He explains why people will speak with reciprocity if they are in a setting where they are aiming for consensus, but not why they would enter such a space in the first place. She writes,“Friendship is not an emotion, but a practice, a set of hard-won, complicated habits that are used to bridge trouble, difficulty, and differences of personality, experience, and aspiration. Friendship is not easy, nor is democracy. Friendship begins in the recognition that friends have a shared life—not a ‘common’ nor an identical life—only one with common events, climates, built-environments, fixations of the imagination, and social structures. Each friend will view all these phenomena differently, but they are not the less shared for that” (pp. xxi-xxii).
*Our next business after this will be to discuss Friendship. For friendship is a virtue, or involves virtue; and also it is one of the most indispensable requirements of life. For no one would choose to live without friends, but possessing all other good things. … Moreover, … friendship appears to be the bond of the state; and lawgivers seem to set more store by it than they do by justice, for to promote concord, which seems akin to friendship, is their chief aim, while faction, which is enmity, is what they are most anxious to banish. And if men are friends, there is no need of justice between them; whereas merely to be just is not enough—a feeling of friendship also is necessary. Indeed the highest form of justice seems to have an element of friendly feeling in it. And friendship is not only indispensable as a means, it is also noble in itself. We praise those who love their friends, and it is counted a noble thing to have many friends; and some people think that a true friend must be a good man (Aristot. Nic. Eth. 1155a3, 20)
The post friendship and politics appeared first on Peter Levine.
Our colleague Peggy Renihan summarizes it best.
It is with great pleasure that I share with you that the Florida Legislature restored our funding!
From all of us at LFI and FJCC, THANK YOU!!!
We appreciate all that you did to make this possible”
I’ve been thinking a lot about actionable steps, recently. Amid the murders in Charleston. Following the deaths of Walter Scott, Kalief Browder, Michael Brown, and far, far too many others.
I’ve read articles on how to be an ally, read commentary and analysis on the perpetual racism pervading our society. I’ve added my voice to those calling for change. I’ve joined mailing lists calling for action, attended protests and demonstrations. I’ve given financially where I can.
And none of it feels like enough. Nothing feels like it’s changing.
I woke this morning with the words of Oscar Wilde ringing in my head:
We did not dare to breathe a prayer,
Or give our anguish scope:
Something was dead in each of us,
And what was dead was Hope.
I rather wanted to spend the day hiding in my closet sobbing silently at all the ills in the world, but that didn’t seem like it would do anybody much of any good.
Besides, who am I to take the bench when people of color are dying? Not everyone has the privileged to just look away.
As I am wont to do at such times of despair, I re-read Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus.
They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.
I generally suspect that I’m the only one who finds the words of Camus a comfort. Who, after all, likes to imagine that “the workman of today works everyday in his life at the same tasks, and his fate is no less absurd” than the fate of Sisyphus. The man who defied the gods and was pushed to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain.
Sisyphus, “powerless and rebellious.” (impuissant et révolté)
What an interesting juxtaposition of words!
Sisyphus knew he was powerless and yet he rebelled. The Gods couldn’t punish him, for still, he rebelled.
In Power and Powerlessness, John Gaventa examined the role of social power in maintaining the oppression of the poor in the Appalachian Valley.
Gaventa identified what he calls the three dimensions of power.
In the first dimension, A has power over B insofar as A is has more resources or can use more force to coerce B. The first dimension is a fair fight, where one side is stronger than the other.
In the second dimension, A constructs barriers to diminish B’s participation. Voter ID laws, monolingual meetings. In the second dimension, A rigs the game.
The third dimension is the most insidious. Not only does A control and shape the agenda, but A’s power is so absolute that A influences the way B sees the conflict. In the third dimension, B is not even sure she’s oppressed. It’s a woman who just naturally does all the house work.
I sometimes think that the pervasiveness of racism in America stems from Whites’ inability to reach this total level of dominance.
We brought people over as chattel and expected them to obey. We beat them and tortured them and did unspeakable things to break them, but they continued to resist.
We fancied ourselves as gods, and yet among those who were most powerless we found ourselves impotent. Unable to exert total power. Still they rebelled.
There is no fate that can not be surmounted by scorn.
Sisyphus is stronger than his rock.
But I imagine that it’s of little comfort to one who looks back on generations of oppression, who looks around to see their brothers and sisters dying. It’s of little comfort that some dead, French philosopher thinks you’ve won.
Yet there is something in this, I think –
For the battle goes on.
The battle goes on, and slowly bending the arc of the moral universe can feel very much like futile labor, it can feel like an effort in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing.
But still the work goes on.
For we know that all is not, has not been, exhausted, and we know that fate is a human matter, which must be settled among men.
And there is so much work for us to do.
In the Summer Institute of Civic Studies yesterday, we briefly listened to Saul Alinsky talking to Studs Terkel in 1971. The tape is both an evocative glimpse of Alinsky as a person (you should picture a chain-smoking older man in a suit and small round glasses, talking like James Cagney) and an example of how he envisioned one of the basic tools of community organizing, the one-on-one interview. Near the end, he says:
I run into you. You’re on welfare, you know, standing on the corner. So we get into kind of a session. So I say, ah, where do you live?
–Over there. Well, where do you expect me to live? I’m on relief. Where do you want me to live–in a 14-carat palace?
–You pay anything to live there?
–Ah, come on, you trying to be funny?
–Well no, I don’t want to be funny. Jeez, ah, the place looks like it’s loaded with rats, roaches, everything.
–You damn well know it is.
–Hmm, what would happen if you didn’t pay your rent?
–What would happen? They’d throw me out, my kids, everybody else. What do you mean?
–Yeah. [Pause.] What would happen if nobody paid their rent over there?
–Why they’d …! Well, truthfully, they’d have a little trouble throwing us all out, wouldn’t they?
The tape ends there, but the next move would be for Alinsky to say, “Hey, mac, we’re having a meeting tomorrow night down at Our Lady of Sorrows. Interested in stopping by for a while to talk with some other tenants on relief?”
The post Alinsky does a one-on-one appeared first on Peter Levine.
The case study, Understanding Participant Representativeness in Deliberative Events: A Case Study Comparing Probability and Non-Probability Recruitment Strategies, by Jamie Griffin, Tarik Abdel-Monem, Alan Tomkins, Amanda Richardson, and Stacia Jorgensen, was published in the Journal of Public Deliberation: Vol. 11: Iss. 1. This case study examines participant representativeness within deliberative events and then reviews two public participation processes in Lincoln, Nebraska.
From the Abstract
Deliberative event participants often differ in meaningful ways from the population they are intended to represent; however, less is known about whether various recruitment methods influence participant representativeness. Furthermore, a better understanding of where in the recruitment process lack of representation occurs is needed. We present a framework for understanding why event attendees might not represent the target population and then compare two different recruitment strategies using this framework. Specifically, we consider a Deliberative Poll that used a random-digit-dial telephone recruitment survey and a deliberative event that used a convenience sample web recruitment survey. For two stages in the recruitment process, we calculate nonresponse errors for statistics assessing demographic characteristics and confidence in local government. Notably, both recruitment methods resulted in event attendees that were older and better educated than the population they were intended to represent providing evidence that probability recruitment methods do not necessarily outperform nonprobability methods. Additionally, we demonstrate that aspects of the recruitment process other than the recruitment survey sampling method used can influence participant representativeneess. We conclude by discussing adjustments to the recruitment process that might improve the representativeness of event attendees.
Download the case study from the Journal of Public Deliberation here.
About the Journal of Public Deliberation
Spearheaded by the Deliberative Democracy Consortium in collaboration with the International Association of Public Participation, the principal objective of Journal of Public Deliberation (JPD) is to synthesize the research, opinion, projects, experiments and experiences of academics and practitioners in the emerging multi-disciplinary field and political movement called by some “deliberative democracy.” By doing this, we hope to help improve future research endeavors in this field and aid in the transformation of modern representative democracy into a more citizen friendly form.
Follow the Deliberative Democracy Consortium on Twitter: @delibdem
Follow the International Association of Public Participation [US] on Twitter: @IAP2USA
Resource Link: www.publicdeliberation.net/jpd/vol11/iss1/
I often wonder what moments will be remembered in history. Which moments, in retrospect, will seem to mark a turning point, a watershed change.
Will history remember a church founded by Reverend Morris Brown? A church burnt to the ground in 1822 for its involvement with a planned slave revolt. A church rebuilt, only to be forced underground for 30 years after Charleston outlawed all black churches in 1834.
Will history remember the day in 2015 when nine black men and women were murdered at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church?
To be surprised is to be naive.
All this has happened before, and we’ve done far too little to keep it from happening again.
“I have to do it,” the gunman was quoted as saying. “You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.”
Then he murdered people at church.
It may be the act of one deranged man, but its the rhetoric of too much of our nation. For too long we have allowed such hateful speech to flourish, giving a pass to hateful ideas – too afraid or unsure of how to intervene.
Where did the gunman learn to hate like that?
He learned it from us. From white America. From people who nurtured his hate or who simply left it there, unconfronted.
They say the gunman sat with parishioners for an hour before opening fire. He sat with them as they discussed biblical verse and prayed.
But in that garden of Gethsemane, it was Rev. Clementa Pinckney’s and Cynthia Hurd’s cup that would not pass. It was Myra Thompson, Sharonda Singleton and Tywanza Sanders who had to die to remind us that there is still hate and evil in this world.
That there is still hate and evil in our communities.
You wouldn’t think we’d need reminding, but clearly we do – since black churches are burned and black bodies are scattered in our streets. And yet we, white America, continue to sit by and sigh.
And nothing changes.
I want to make sense of this senseless horror. I want an action I can check to solve this problem once and for all.
But there are no easy answers, and it will take hard, long work for solutions.
All I know is that we can do better, and amidst this heartache, this pain, and sorrow we must do better.
How many more have to die?
I recently spoke at a conference, “Property and Inequality in the 21st Century,” hosted by The Common Core of European Private Law, an annual gathering of legal scholars, mostly from Europe. They had asked me how the commons might be a force for reducing inequality. Below are my remarks, “The Commons as a Tool for Sharing the Wealth.” The conference was held at the University of Göteborg, Sweden, on June 12-13, 2015.
Thank you for inviting me to speak today about the relationship between property law and inequality – a topic that receives far too little attention. This should not be surprising. Now that free-market ideology has become the default worldview and political consensus around the world, private property is seen as synonymous with freedom, economic growth and human progress.
Oh yes, there is this nasty side issue known as inequality. Malcontents like the Occupy movement and renegade economists like Thomas Pikketty have brought this problem to the fore after years of neglect. Their success has been quite an achievement because for years the very existence of inequality has been portrayed as an accident, an aberration, a mysterious and shadowy guest at the grand banquet of human progress.
I wish to argue that hunger, poverty, inadequate education and medical care, and assaults on human dignity and human rights, are not bugs in the system. They are features. Indeed, market ideologues often argue that such deprivations are a necessary incentive to human enterprise and economic growth; poverty is supposedly needed to spur people to escape through the work ethic and entrepreneurialism.
Property rights lie at the heart of this dynamic because they are a vital tool for defining and patrolling the boundaries of private wealth, and for justifying the inevitably unequal outcomes. So it’s important that we focus on the role of property rights in producing social inequality – without ignoring the many other forces, including social practice, culture and politics, that also play important roles.
I’d like to focus on the obsession in modern industrial societies to propertize everything, including life itself, and to use law as a tool to impose a social order of markets and private property as expansively as possible. This cultural reflex is known as the enclosure of the commons. The term describes how property owners assert sweeping rights – often with the active complicity of governments – as a way to appropriate collectively owned resources for private gain.
We can see this dynamic in the international land grab now underway, the incessant attempts to privatize groundwater and municipal water systems, the grotesque expansion of copyright and patent law to privatize scientific knowledge and cultural works, and the use of the Earth’s atmosphere as a free waste dump by polluters. The mania for privatizing the world has reached such an extreme stage that even intangible wealth as public spaces, microorganisms, genetically created mammals, artificially created nanomatter and human consciousness itself are claimed as objects of private property rights.