Reasoning and Absurdity

In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates describes the human soul as consisting of three parts, which he describes through allegory: “two horses and a charioteer.” Furthermore, “one of the horses was good and the other bad.”

More precisely, one horse “is a lover of honour and modesty and temperance, and the follower of true glory,” while the other, a “crooked lumbering animal,” is “the mate of insolence and pride, shag-eared and deaf, hardly yielding to whip and spur.”

This tripartite image captures an understanding the soul which has continued to permeate Western thought. The good horse is man’s noble spirit (thymos), the other his wild appetites (epithymia). The charioteer, tasked with the difficult task balancing the instincts of these two beasts, has the most crucial role: this is man’s reason (logos) itself.

In this struggle, “if the better elements of the mind which lead to order and philosophy prevail, then they pass their life here in happiness and harmony – masters of themselves and orderly.”

Aristotle seems to invoke a similar argument when he comments in Nicomachean Ethics, “as sight is in the body, so is reason in the soul.”

Reason, it seems, is fundamental to who we are as human people – and, perhaps more importantly, is essential to what it means to be a good person.

As with many things, though, this Greek ideal is complicated by the realities of modernity.

This classical Greek understanding goes beyond finding the act of reasoning to be good. Reason is not merely a process through which unique people may come to unique conclusions, rather it is the tool through which we may ultimately uncover Truth. Singular, universal, Truth.

This is problematic in a pluralistic world.

While there may be some moral stances on which all reasonable people could agree, asserting the existence of Truth – whether or not you claim to have discovered that Truth – amounts to the harsh assertion that some people are right and some people are wrong; that some religions are right and some religions are wrong; that some cultures are right and some cultures are wrong.

Such a position is untenable.

Thus, perhaps, we are plunged into despair. Holding diversity of thought and belief in high esteem means abandoning any pursuit of Truth and relinquishing the reins of reason. There is not one Truth that can be discovered through the scholarly art of reason; rather reason is little more than a mantle to drape around whichever views fit our fancy.

This is the challenge that Nietzsche refers to in On the Genealogy of Morals when he quotes the secret motto of the Order of Assassins: Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.

The destruction of Truth, the dispersion of reason – while so very valuable in our pluralist, modern times – muddies the question of what is right and what is wrong. Where do cultural differences end and moral imperatives begin? How do you balance one person’s religious freedom with another’s personal freedom?

Nietzsche sees this an inescapable cycle, arguing that “all great things bring about their own demise through an act of self-sublimation.”

Thus reason must ultimately destroy itself – as reason will reveal that there is no Truth.

“What meaning does our being have, if it were not that that will to truth has become conscious of itself as a problem in us?” Nietzsche writes. “Without a doubt, from now on, morality will be destroyed by the will to truth’s becoming-conscious-of-itself: that great drama in a hundred acts reserved for Europe in the next two centuries, the most terrible, most questionable drama but perhaps also the one most rich in hope…”

“Rich in hope” is not the expression most people would use for this terrible drama. If nothing is true, everything is permitted. Only anarchy and nihilism can follow.

I myself am more drawn to Camus’ take on things. With his dry, French wit he sees the conflict but dismisses it as conflict. Yes, the world is absurd, he reasons. That’s not license to do as you will.

You are free, perhaps, to be a terrible person, but that doesn’t mean you ought to let yourself follow that path. You still need to steer your horses.

This is the message I get from much of Camus’ work: the world is absurd, life is meaningless, and with that freedom some will permit themselves to fulfill the worst of human nature. But we also have a choice to be good. And without any reasoning, without any truth to justify it, that’s the choice we ought to make.

In The Stranger, Meursault is rightfully punished while others’ every-day callousness goes shamefully unchecked. In The Plague, our heroes – faced with the absurd, seemingly certain result of death, continually choose to fight for life. In The Fall, our unnamed, damned narrator wistfully declares, “But let’s not worry! It’s too late now. It will always be too late. Fortunately!

The absurd is no reason to stop fighting for what’s right.

And yet, in much of his writing Camus is indirect with his moral claims; perhaps he finds little ground to judge the morality of others.

So I was struck this morning by the unwavering moral claims Camus’ makes in his 1946 speech “The Human Crisis:”

Yes, there is a human crisis because in today’s world, we can contemplate the death or the torture of a human being with a feeling of indifference, friendly concern, scientific interest, or simple passivity. Yes, there is a human crisis, since putting a person to death can be regarded with something other the horror and scandal it ought to provoke. Since human suffering is accepted as a somewhat boring obligation, on a par with getting supplies or having to stand in line for an ounce of butter.

There is a human crisis, because in a world where nothing is true, we foolishly assume that everything is permitted. We reason away our responsibilities, occasionally decrying perpetrators only to accept bystanders neutral. It’s not our responsibility, it is not our concern.

But Nietzsche is wrong; there is no death of morality and there is no death of truth. We may not always know what’s best, but Camus’ feels it in his bones: we still have an imperative to do what is right.

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podcast on civic education and engagement in Catholic communities

Here, starting at minute 39, is my recent conversation with Msgr. Kevin Sullivan, Executive Director of Catholic Charities, New York, on his SiriusXM Radio Show, “Just Love.” We talked about why Millennials volunteer so much (I named a combination of idealism and structured opportunities and expectations), why civic education seems to work well in Catholic schools, why the media is biased against Millennials, why Obama ’08 and Sanders ’12 drew youth support, the difference between service and social change, and the argument for expanding service opportunities.

Forgiveness and Revenge Seminar Retrospective

Whenever I teach an advanced class of thoughtful students, I like to offer a short retrospective at the end of the semester. I sit down without my notes or texts and try to makes sense of what we have done.

Below, you’ll find the retrospective I shared on our last day. (As background, we read five main texts with supporting articles: William Ian Miller’s Eye for an Eye, Susan Brison’s AftermathAntjie Krog’s Country of My SkullJoshua Dubler’s Down in the Chapeland Sara Ruddick’s Maternal ThinkingOther major figures: Ta-Nehisi Coates, Desmond Tutu, Maria Chenowith and Erica Stephan, David Kennedy, Susan Griffin, and Hannah Arendt. (Yes, this is too much! Yet the students were game and actually kept up with the reading, which was pretty satisfying.)

[Content Warning: Sexual Assault, Torture, Violence]

We began the class with William Ian Miller’s book Eye for an Eye on talionic cultures. For Miller (no relation, sadly), the cultures of honor that celebrate revenge and reprisal have a few distinctive features: they recognize the legitimacy of resentments and retributive desires and they try to channel those desires through procedures that limit their harmfulness. Thus they respond to the threat of revenge by quantifying harms and restricting reprisal. These cultures are sometimes thought of as primitive, but in vengeance they show remarkable insight and ingenuity. Miller makes much of the fact that revenge involves parties at odds who are trying to get even, and at times these metaphors suggest a seemingly inexorable calculation in justice, one which legitimates payback and every other possible settling-of-accounts.

One of the most interesting parts of Miller’s book is his account of how Christian theories of forgiveness seem to echo and rhyme with the original accounting that the scales of justice entail. St. Paul seemed to suggest that we forgive because vengeance is for the Lord, and so by repaying harms with kindness, we heap coals upon our perpetrator’s head. It almost looks as if the deprivation of punishment in life is a designed to lengthen the sentence or intensify the damnation to be carried out after death. For Miller, the best account of the quality of revenge comes in our discussion of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, because there we see the demand for forgiveness made by a superior foe, because Shylock seeks revenge as proof of his own humanity, and is denied it as proof of the inferiority of his Jewishness.

The echoes with Coates’ work on reparations struck a chord with the entire class. Ultimately Coates suggests that payback is required for spiritual renewal, that Blacks and whites cannot know forgiveness until we settle accounts. So long as Black children must deal with the legacy of slavery, white supremacy, and the continual plunder of Black wealth by whites, calls for racial justice will be cheap talk. Coates certainly set the bar high, and I don’t know that we have yet found an argument to gainsay him, except that the racial accounting he demands is too difficult for us to bear. But Coates can easily see that we are unwilling to pay what we owe; the question is what hope there can be for equality so long as this debt remains unpaid.

Here, the South African experience ought to be instructive. When philosophers write books on forgiveness, we can never seem to do anything better than refer to Desmond Tutu, whose warm celebration of the strength and power of forgiveness strike us all as somehow worthy of emulation. And it’s in Tutu that we start to see the opposite side of Coates’ argument. Coates sets the stakes very high; for Tutu they were even higher, because his book and his constant refrain was that there can be no future without forgiveness. This is an interesting formulation: it does not promise South Africa an easy path, but rather makes a simple logical point: forgiveness is necessary. It may not be easy, it may not be fair, and it may not even be sufficient. But without it, the country is stuck.

Reading Antjie Krog’s book, Country of My Skull, helped us to see that a process can be inadequate and still work, a little. It can be a part of a reconciliatory project that none of the participants will live to see the end of. Sometimes it seems that even the #rhodesmustfall critique is able to point to colonial harms associated with Cecil Rhodes because the later harms of apartheid have been largely exposed and… not resolved, but rendered less pressing. The problem is that the past contains so many horrors, and even when resentments over recent atrocities like necklacing have been quelled, there is a whole previous century of atrocities to explore.

Forgiveness was nonetheless necessary for Tutu and for Krog, even while for Coates, forgiveness is nigh impossible. Necessary but impossible; impossible, but necessary. Something like that is at the heart of the problem of violence and trauma in Susan Brison’s work. How can a woman survive the aftermath of the crime that almost kills her? What Brison argued was that almost nothing about the experience of seeking justice through the police and courts can be said to serve her interests. Her hope and her healing were so very slow, and partial, and frail that I almost hesitate to mention them here: I worry that I shouldn’t “put them to work” as “conceptual resources” in the same way as many of the other texts we’ve read. Yet Brison offers them to us as evidence of considerable philosophical rigor, and I think the right move is to engage with her.

There was and will be no question of forgiveness for Brison; she showed us how irrelevant her attacker even was to these questions of survival and flourishing after violence. But revenge, too, seemed inadequate to her. What she needed was safety and respect, what she needed was to be restored to power and security. As a result, she focuses on a curious paradox: victims who blame their attacker feel much less safe than those who blame themselves. Even though the self-blame is in some sense obviously fictional and inaccurate, it is therapeutic and the source of the strength to grow and change beyond the trauma.

And in her dual conclusions, Brison seems to set up a very different and non-relational account of the aftermath of violence: that the goal of the survivor was to bend and not break, to cultivate in herself and in her child the openness to novelty and sociality that trauma and violence take from us. When I set up the syllabus I hoped this moment in Brison would set up a useful echo for the work of Sara Ruddick in Maternal Thinking with which we ended the class, because that’s where I put my sometimes dwindling hope: not in the promise of forgiveness from victims, but in the sense that revenge may be just as irrelevant to survival, no matter how powerful the impulse sometimes feels.

We began to learn just how irrelevant paybacks have become in our society when we read about the prisoners at Graterford in Pennsylvania. Much of what matters in Dubler’s discussion of faith in American prisons is in the background assumptions of the way his book is written, not often clearly stated or remarked upon: that the prisoners there are intelligent, good, and even wise; that they are not being punished, but merely waiting, living under conditions of arbitrary interference and capricious abuse. What Dubler found in Graterford’s chapel were men who are struggling to figure out how their own past acts have come to define them, and how to survive the evil that they have done and that is done to them. This suggests that one of the worst elements of revenge is the way we see perpetrators as irredeemable, the way we reduce those who harm us to those harms. Graterford makes me wonder what it could mean to love the sinner and hate the sin when we never stop thinking of them as sinners, and never let them forget that they have sinned.

Perhaps this “waste management” of criminals would be more acceptable if there weren’t so many of them. And indeed, I think Dubler’s book on Graterford starts to show us the problem with a world where we simultaneously treat some members of our society as if they are unworthy of our attention or support throughout their lives, subject to constant violence and depredation, until they lash out or misbehave–at which point we become desperately retributive. The men and women in prison are disproportionately poor and poorly educated, and yet the only injustices we’re willing to punish are the ones they commit. This asymmetry of responsibility is a kind of massive structural violence that undermines the entire project of criminal justice, and hampers the reprobative role of punishment in our society.

This is usually the place in the course where one would turn to restorative justice approaches. Instead, we turned to the literature on violence prevention, a transition that requires explanation. The criminologist John Braithwaite often tells the story of two US servicemen in Japan who raped a young Japanese woman. The rapists were called to a private reconciliatory meeting, where the woman read a letter indicating that she was willing to forgive them and ask that they not be punished. The servicemen did not understand, and when it was their turn to speak they told the judge, “We are not guilty, your honor.” This shocked everyone involved; had they been–or pretended to be–repentant, they would have been freed. As a result, they were sentenced to the legal maximum period of incarceration rather than freed as had been planned.

Now, Braithwaite tells the story as an example of a failure of reconciliatory norms in the US: confessions and repentance have been trained out of Westerners by the the procedural safeguards we have created to prevent coerced confessions. But I see the story differently: a young woman was raped by two foreign men, and the male authority figures in her society demanded that she absolve them of the crime for diplomatic purposes. They were only stymied by the rapists’ failure to make the proper ritualized speech acts in a crucial moment of the ceremonial subordination of the victim’s needs and interests.

This is not a story of frustrated reconciliation or failed forgiveness, but frustrated impunity. It’s not an indictment of the refusal of repentance rituals, but of the demand for them. I find myself sympathetic to the Black South African mothers Krog reports on, who argued that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was a fancy way for powerful men to smooth over their own transgressions, leaving the mothers no less bereft of their sons and daughters than before.

But this too, is too simple, which is why we ended with Sara Ruddick. Ruddick is my kind of care ethicist: she resists gender essentialism while defending care ethics, and roots the phenomenology and ethics of care in practices of caretaking and peacemaking and the skills and competencies required to succeed in those matters. What’s more, Ruddick acknowledges the tension between the different modes of care, of holding safe, welcoming change, and attentively loving our children and vulnerable dependents, and shows that mothers (who can be men but have tended to be women) develop their skills and competencies in the difficult thinking through of those tensions in contexts and situations. It’s a powerful book of philosophy, and I’ll be teaching it again at JCI this summer.

On my view, Ruddick helps to spell out both the background attitudes required for forgiveness but that we can also only start to think of the role of forgiveness in a society and in a relationship when we foreground the purposes it serves. Women and men who mother understand that transgressions and injuries will occur, and they train their children to forgive them. They do this because resentments are unhealthy; they do this because revenge is unsustainable. But mostly they do this because maternal thinking is a kind of disciplined, cognitively-loaded thinking-through-emotions.

Anger is one of the most pernicious emotions a child must confront, and so mothers prepare themselves and their children for that confrontation. Mothers know that anger always presents itself as immediate, urgent, and correct, but that a child can only survive, thrive, and succeed when she can resist its pull. Mothers teach their children to master their anger; they train them to restrain it and to let it go. And they do the same for themselves: they learn that their anger and sorrow at the loss of one child must be subordinated to the safety of their other children, and other mothers’ children. And so they act out of anger but with reason, they force themselves to put their anger and revenge to use. Sometimes they harness their grief for peacemaking.

A mother’s anger can become violent, of course. But if it remains maternal in the way Ruddick describes, it will preserve the goals of preservation and cultivation, of survival and growth. Ruddick and Brison thus end on the same note: that the meaning of a trauma is ultimately the way it shapes us as mothers. The measure of our revenge or forgiveness is not whether it slakes our revenge but whether it makes the world a safer space for our children. Talionic cultures know this; they limit payback just because they want to settle accounts for the next generation. Reconciliation and forgiveness, too, work only to the extent that they settle old scores, that they bury the implements of violence in places where new generations will not dig them up.

I ended the semester significantly less hopeful about forgiveness than I began. Individual acts of forgiveness have a power to transform people and relationships in a way that still seems sublime, in the technical sense of “sublime:” a phenomenon that challenges our faculty of understanding. And precisely because it has this status, I worry deeply about the demands that we craft policies in such a way as to require that forgiveness become mundane, a quotidian part of the working of a system. Because in those cases it always seems to be the powerless who must forgive, and the powerful who use the rhetoric of forgiveness to demand that their victims ignore oppression and systematic violence.

This is not the hopeful ending I planned. And indeed, it’s not an ending at all; Martha Nussbaum’s new book Anger and Forgiveness came out too late to include in the syllabus, but it’s been helpful to my own thinking, and I shared a few useful passages with the students. Like Brison, Nussbaum treats our relationship to anger, resentment, and revenge as one that we must manage, one that we must prevent from gaining too much control over us. She treats anger and resentment as imprecise heuristics for pointing out injustice, but argues that both justice and individual happiness require the subordination of those passions to capability-expanding outcomes. She brings the literature on survivors together with the philosophical and theological scholarship on forgiveness, and uses that to frame the problems of mass incarceration and transitional justice. So there’s a lot in this book to be excited about, even as I worry that she’s put too much of her emphasis on South Africa’s “success.”

In particular Nussbaum worries about the status-degrading and payback moments in revenge, like when Paul uses forgiveness to get payback. What’s particularly good about the book is that Nussbaum is bringing together so many disparate strands of this problem, so that, for instance, she can show that these hyperbolic payback and status-lowering elements of our retributive impulses have contributed to the American problem with mass incarceration. It’s a big, sophisticated, and difficult text, and while I’ve read most of it, I don’t think I’ve fully digested it yet. So the semester is over, but the true retrospective is always forthcoming.

The Goa Iron Ore Permanent Fund in India: A Bold Precedent

The Alaska Permanent Fund has been an inspiration to many of us because it provides a mechanism, the “stakeholder trust,” to ensure that everyone benefits from common assets, especially natural resources such as water, minerals, forests and the atmosphere. 

In Alaska the Fund, operating as an independent, state-chartered trust, holds an equity stake in oil on state lands and therefore reaps a royalty on a portion of the oil extracted.  This is deposited in a massive trust fund, worth more than $52 billion, which kicks off revenues in the form of “dividends” for every resident of the state, including children.  The sums usually amount to $1,000 to $2,000 per year.   

Peter Barnes in his 2006 book Capitalism 3.0 suggested a number of ways in which the permanent fund idea could be applied to other common assets that are now plundered for private gain, such as forests, the atmosphere, the copyright and patent systems, and the financial regulatory apparatus.  The State of Vermont has entertained the idea of establishing permanent funds for some of its common assets, but the idea has not moved there. (See the 2008 report, "Valuing Common Assets for Public Finance in Vermont.”)

I was therefore thrilled to learn recently about a fascinating version of the permanent fund that the Supreme Court of India has mandated for the state of Goa.  In the course of public-interest litigation, it was discovered that, over the course of an eight-year period, the Goan government had allowed private mining companies to cart away 95% of the value of minerals on public lands, or about US$8.5 billion. This sum is twice the total state revenues for those eight years, or about$5,800 (Rs.3.7 lakhs) for each man, woman and child in Goa. In addition, private mining companies had caused all sorts of environmental destruction.

Rahul Basu, an Indian activist who brought the Goa Iron Ore Permanent Fund to my attention, noted that “since minerals are a part of the commons, i.e., owned by all of us, this loss is effectivelya per-head tax. Everyone loses equally, and a few get richer.  This is not trickle-down, it is gush-up. This is a highly regressive redistribution of wealth.”  Basu also noted that government privatization of common assets violates principles of equality, and thus runs contrary to Article 17 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  “We have found similar issues in iron ore, coal, oil & natural gas elsewhere in India,” writes Basu.  “As royalty rates are usually set by trying to attract investment into the sector, countries race to the bottom.”

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NCDD Discount on Engagement Strategy Workshop, 6/23

Our colleagues at Public Agenda, an NCDD member organization, are hosting a great workshop on engagement strategy this June 23 in Boston, just before the Frontiers of Democracy conference, and they are offering a $25 discount for NCDD members! That means the workshop is only $250 when you register before for the May 15 early bird deadline. It will be a chance to hone your skills and learn new methods and tools!  You can learn more and find the discount code in the announcement from Public Agenda below, or find the original version here.


Workshop: Public Engagement Strategy Lab

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Looking for assistance with organizing and sustaining productive public engagement? Struggling to decide how to combine online and face-to-face engagement? Frustrated with the standard “2 minutes at the microphone” public meeting? Want to know about the latest tools and techniques? Need expert advice on bringing together a diverse critical mass of people?

Join the Public Engagement Strategy Lab!

Who:
Leaders looking to revamp or strengthen their engagement strategies, structures, and tools

Date:
Thursday, June 23, 2016

Time:
9:30am – 4:30pm

Location:
Tufts University Medical School
145 Harrison Avenue
Boston, Massachusetts 02111

Cost:
Early Bird $275 (by May 15, 2016) or Regular $350 (after May 15, 2016)
Use the promo code NCDDMEMBER to get $25 off!

Registration Deadline:
Required by June 16, 2016, pending availability

Contact:
PE[at]publicagenda[dot]org or call Mattie at 212-686-6610 ext.137

Space is limited. Register today!

During the workshop, Public Agenda trainers Matt Leighninger and Nicole Hewitt will:

  • Provide an overview of the strengths and limitations of public engagement today
  • Help you assess the strengths and weaknesses of public engagement in your community
  • Explore potential benefits of more sustained forms of participation
  • Develop practical skills for planning for stronger engagement infrastructure, and
  • Demonstrate a mix of small group and large group discussions, interactive exercises, case studies, and practical exercises

This Strategy Lab is hosted by Tisch College, Tufts University as a preconference session for Frontiers of Democracy 2016. Participants in the Public Engagement Strategy Lab have the option of staying for the Frontiers of Democracy Conference. To register for the conference, click here.

The Public Engagement Strategy Lab will provide you with the tools and resources you need to authentically engage stakeholders in thoughtful, democratic processes. No more public forums and community meetings that lack impact. Move your public engagement planning forward with approaches based on the ideas and examples found in Public Participation for 21st Century Democracy (Wiley-Blackwell, 2015).

To register, follow this link. We hope to see you there!

You can find the original version of this Public Agenda announcement at www.publicagenda.org/pages/workshop-public-engagement-strategy-lab#sthash.wCLJLYPK.dpuf.

Activist Roots of Mother’s Day

In 1925, Anna Jarvis was arrested for disturbing the peace at a Philadelphia confectioners convention.

The candy makers, she thought, had done poorly to profit though the commercialization of motherly affection.

I imagine the scene – dignified confectioners discussing various ganaches and pastries, Jarvis crashing in like Carrie Nation, perhaps similarly wielding a hatchet for good measure. Eventually getting carted off while still yelling at the profit mongers for twisting her invention.

No doubt it was significantly less dramatic, but that’s how I picture it.

In 1948, Jarvis died in Philadelphia’s Marshall Square Sanitarium, having spent her fortune fighting to stave off the commercialization of mother’s day.

She was unsuccessful.

Jarvis was, in fact, the founder of mother’s day. She had started the celebration in 1908 – three years after her own mother’s death – and worked to see it become a national holiday in 1914.

For much of her life, Jarvis’ mother, Anne Reeves Jarvis, organized Mothers’ Day Work Clubs which worked to address tragically high infant mortality rates and tended wounded soldiers from both sides of the U.S. Civil War.

The group’s motto was “Mothers Work — for Better Mothers, Better Homes, Better Children, Better Men and Women.” In the midst of war, its members fought hard for peace. Amongst so much injustice, the women fought for justice.

In 1870, abolitionist and member Julia Ward Howe articulated the vision of the work clubs with her Mother’s Day proclamation:

Arise, all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or of tears! Say firmly: “We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies, our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause.

Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We women of one country will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”

From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says, “Disarm, disarm! The sword is not the balance of justice.” Blood does not wipe out dishonor nor violence indicate possession.

It goes on to call for a general congress of women “without limit of nationality.” After all, “as men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war,” women must now “leave all that may be left of home” in order to discover the means of peace.

So, this was what was in the mind of the young Anna Jarvis, three years after she buried her mother – founder of the radical Mothers’ Day Work Clubs – when, on May 10, 1908, she gathered 400 people at Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church in Grafton, West Virginia, to commemorate her mother and celebrate the first Mother’s Day.

Jarvis asked that people wear carnations to remember all mothers.

And then she worked for the day to become a national holiday. A day for peace, for equity, for lifting the voices of women among the shouts of men and, yes, a day for sending a handwritten note to your own mother and thanking her for giving you so much.

So, perhaps, you can appreciate the devastation which motivated Jarvis’ rebellion as she saw this vision go awry. As she saw mother’s day devolve into little more than a day to buy flowers and chocolates, and, perhaps, to get you off the hook from calling your mother for another year.

While I can identify with Jarvis’ distaste for commercialization, in honesty, though, I’m not entirely enamored with Jarvis’ ideal mother’s day either.

She intentionally tried to frame the day as a holy day – organizing it on Sundays and celebrating in a church. And she intentionally called the day ‘mother’s day’ as opposed to ‘mothers’ day.’ It was a day to celebrate your own mother, she insisted, not a day to celebrate all mothers.

As one article puts it, “Jarvis retreated from her mother’s socially conscious vision for Mother’s Day in favor of one that idolized the mother’s individual role.”

This, I believe, was a mistake. Her visions of celebrating individual mothers for their sacred domestic role plays into all the tired tropes of separate spheres. We can do better than that.

And I’d give her a pass, say that Jarvis’ vision was simply a product of her time, but I can’t help but think that her mother would have envisioned something more radical – and, of course, her mother knew best.

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“Explainer” on civic education

Over at The Conversation, I have a new article that’s meant to be a short overview of civic education today. It begins:

Any election demands knowledge, attention and wisdom from the whole electorate. When a campaign season does not seem to be going well, there’s often angst about whether the public has been sufficiently educated.

Anxious eyes turn to our public schools.

For instance, writing in The Atlantic recently, Jonathan Zimmerman, professor of education and history at New York University, decried the incivility of the 2016 campaign and named “a flaw with civic education.” He wrote: “Put simply, schools in the United States don’t teach the country’s future citizens how to engage respectfully across their political differences.”

I have studied and advocated civic education for almost two decades. I believe civic education must be improved in the United States. First, though, it’s important to understand the condition of America’s civic education.

Classroom Debate Can Boost Youth Democratic Capacity

The team at the Jefferson Center, an NCDD member organizations, recently began a series of guest blog posts on political engagement and democracy, and we were impressed by the series’ piece below from MN high schooler Bruce Acosta. In it, Bruce reflects about how increasing civic education, debate, and deliberation about social issues in schools can fight young people’s disengagement from political involvement and boost their democratic capacity – a trend our field can both support and benefit from. We encourage you to read his piece below or find the original version here.


Better Engaging Young People in Politics

The problem of political participation and awareness among young Americans manifests itself both in and outside schools. Combined with low current involvement in linkage institutions, standardized testing has shown that students and younger voters are missing critical knowledge about our government and their duty in maintaining it.

This is not to say that they do not care about their nation. On the contrary, studies suggest that this new generation of Americans is simply seeking out other, less institutionalized ways to enact change, including volunteering, activism, and organized protest. However, it is important to note that this is largely because of negative media portrayal of politics and narrowly-targeted campaigns that alienate these budding citizens. Thus, in order to effectively combat civic disengagement from traditional politics and promote political awareness, we must find how to utilize this desire to impact one’s community in addition to making voting intent and efficacy integral values in school curricula.

Among successful programs and reforms currently adopted by schools across the country are the open classroom climate and service learning. As a proven method in engaging students in politics, the open classroom climate is the teaching of civics with a strong focus on debate and discussion of social issues. Regarding the lack of appeal of traditional, or “big P” political activity shared by many young people that was mentioned earlier, a series of surveys in California and Chicago high schools and other research has highlighted the impressive results of this strategy in improving student interest in voting, as well as civic knowledge and general confidence in one’s democratic capacity.

On the other hand, service learning, the use of community involvement activities to enforce and supplement course concepts, provides students with a deeper connection to one’s ability to actualize their own goals through volunteering and activism, or “little P” politics. Overall, a study that compared the effects of these two pedagogical strategies affirmed that students exposed to service learning became significantly more involved in these unconventional actions, while open classroom students tended to lean towards participation through voting and joining a political party or interest group.

Despite the success of these schools in employing effective measures against political disengagement, it is also important that we continue to improve the current state of civics courses. While many ideas exist about the direction education should head, two particularly promising solutions stand out. Firstly, history classes, which are heavily favored by state curricula over government classes, could be taught with additional political context. By introducing more civics standards into history courses, schools that would otherwise be unable to provide their students with a background in politics would be able to teach them crucial skills and values to promote future activity.

Secondly, civics classrooms should adopt an increased use of the internet in teaching and student application of course content. For example, online discussion forums serve as potential avenues for children to debate and research issues that are relevant to them, helping to promote efficacy. Evidently, the classroom holds an infinite number of possibilities in expanding the political minds of young Americans.

You can find the original version of this guest blog post from the Jefferson Center at www.jefferson-center.org/engaging-young-people.