In case you missed it, last month was a busy one for the Reviving Civility initiative from the National Institute for Civil Discourse – one of our NCDD organizations – and we wanted to share their update. NICD has been elevating the conversation about civility in politics to new levels and even awarded several elected officials for their work to revive civility this summer. We encourage you to read their August update below or learn more about the initiative here.
This week, we were Reviving Civility at the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) 2016 Annual Legislative Summit in Chicago August 8-11th. On Tuesday, August 9th, NICD’s Ted Celeste hosted “Building Trust with Citizens: Text, Talk, Revive Civility, A National Conversation About Civility” with more than 100 participants.
This very diverse, highly engaged crowd worked in small groups of 4-8 people to discuss and brainstorm ideas about reviving civility in our nation while utilizing our innovative text-messaging platform. Many state legislators made commitments to take Text, Talk, Revive Civility back to their states.
NICD awarded Representative Stephanie Howse (D-OH), Representative Matt Pouliot (R-ME), and State Treasurer Terry Hayes (I-ME) with the NICD Award for Civility in State Governance at a reception on Tuesday, August 9th.
NICD also presented its inaugural Award for the State Most Committed to Civil Governance to the state of Maine this year. Representative Pouliot and State Treasurer Hayes, along with Maine State Representative Andrew McLean and Maine State Senators Andre Cushing, Rebecca Millette, and Roger Katz accepted the award on behalf of their state legislature.
The NICD’s National Network of State Legislators Committed to Civil Governance held it’s annual meeting on Tuesday, August 9th.
You can join in the conversation too. By texting CIVILITY to 89800 you can participate in Text, Talk, Revive Civility as well!
While the schedule may still be a bit flexible, we are excited to announce the current line up for the pre-conference events at the Florida Council for the Social Studies Annual Conference in October.
You can register for the conference here. And don’t forget about our awesome keynote speaker, Dr. Murali Balaji!
The philosophical field known as phenomenology, initiated by Edmund Husserl in the early 20th century, can perhaps most simplistically be described as the charge to describe phenomena; to describe, as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains, the “experience of or about some object.”
A core principle of practicing phenomenology is what Husserl called phenomenological reduction or epoché, a term borrowed from the Skeptics. In order to properly describe a phenomena, he argued, we must first bracket out certain biasing factors.
As Sarah Bakewell describes in At the Existentialist Café, phenomenology frees us “from ideologies, political and otherwise…forcing us to be loyal to experience.”
In other words, ” the Husserlian ‘bracketing out’ or epoché allows the phenomenologist to temporarily ignore the question, ‘But is it real?’, in order to ask how a person experiences his or her world. Phenomenology gives a formal mode of access to human experience.”
Phenomenology is a rigorous philosophical exploration, but on its surface it seems far removed from the basic tenants of physics. Phenomenology seeks to describe the world as it’s experienced, physics attempts to describe the world as it is.
So I was struck yesterday, when a professor described the process of developing a physics model in somewhat phenomenological terms; to model a complex system, we must strip away all the noise, focusing on those elements which really matter.
Interestingly, while similar in practice, the approaches are very different in interpretation. In phenomenology, this reduction is something of a purification process. Focusing on the core elements of an object, freed of ideologies and constructs, allows a phenomenologist to more truly describe a phenomenon.
The hard sciences have a different understanding: all models are wrong, but some are useful. The reduction process of modeling is logistically and computationally necessary, but it removes an element of truth from your understanding. The goal is to always come up with more and more complex models; methodically adding more elements to the model in order to better describe complex, real-world systems.
In some ways, phenomenology is an important topic of debate in physics. Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment where a cat is both alive and dead until observed was intended to illustrate the limits of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. That model indicates that wave forms collapse when an observation takes place; that the cat is both alive and dead until observed.
This strikes me as a phenomenologically valid reality; no phenomena really exists outside the experience of that phenomena. But this seems scientifically unlikely; a cat cannot be both alive and dead.
The fields of phenomenology and physics have some stark differences, but it seems they may have more in common than one might initially think. And it raises interesting questions for the social sciences – which continually tries to be more and more like it’s hard science peers. But in stripping away the noise and complexity, in reducing too far to a mathematical model, we strip the phenomenological aspects of reality; we think we’ve modeled the world as it exists but neglected the world as its experienced.
Walter Benjamin was a radical social theorist in the high Continental tradition. John Dewey was an American pragmatist and a democrat. T.S. Eliot was a political reactionary. Despite their differences, they lived around the same time and sometimes made a very similar point: information is replacing wisdom or meaning.
I quote some passages to that effect below. I won’t supply a lot of commentary–let alone any solutions–but I do want to underline the urgency of their point. It’s estimated that people now produce and exchange 2.5 billion exabytes of data every day. All the words that people have spoken since the origins of the species amount to roughly 4 billion exabytes. That means that between now and Friday afternoon, we will create and share about as much new data as we have had time to speak since the early Paleolithic. I’m not assuming that speech is better than text or images, but this comparison underlines the astounding growth in volume. Meanwhile, wisdom seems more or less flat. We hope that increasingly powerful analytical tools can make sense of all the new data, but perhaps they just add another level of transient information.
1. In “The Storyteller” (1936), Walter Benjamin argues that traditional storytelling took two forms: reports from far away and versions of local tradition. Both forms were oral and social, the storyteller interacting with a live audience. Both were intended to be useful, conveying a moral message or practical guidance and building a community.
The novel, Benjamin argues, undermined storytelling. It existed for many centuries but only grew into an important institution with the rise of the bourgeoisie, for whom information is a commodity with economic value. The novel’s rise was simultaneous with the development of the news media as purveyors of information, epitomized by the French center-right daily newspaper Le Figaro:
From our perspective, the nineteenth-century novel might seem a repository of profound meaning. For Benjamin, it was already a way-station on the route from meaningful stories (which were concise, ethically demanding, and social) to information as a commodity.
2. T.S. Eliot, “The Rock” (1934):
The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness …
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
3. John Dewey, from The Public and its Problems (1927):
The physical agencies of publicity [of communicating with the public] which exist in large abundance are utilized in ways which constitute a large part of the present meaning of publicity: advertising, propaganda, invasion of private life, the ‘featuring’ of private incidents in a way which violates all the moving logic of continuity, and which leaves us with those isolated intrusions and shocks which are the essence of ‘sensations’ [pp. 168-9] …
‘News’ signifies something which has just happened, and which is new just because it deviates from the old and regular. But its meaning depends on relation to what it imports, to what its social consequences are. This import cannot be determined unless the new is placed in relation to the old, to what has happened and been integrated into the course of events. Without coordination and consecutiveness, events are not events but mere occurrences, intrusions; an event implies that out of which a happening proceeds. … The catastrophic, namely, crime, accident, family rows, personal clashes and conflicts, are the most obvious forms of breaches of continuity; they supply the element of shock which is the strictest meaning of sensation; they are the new par excellence, even though only the date of the newspaper could inform us whether they happened last year or this, so completely are they isolated from their connections [179-80].
Tufts’ University’s Tisch College of Civic Life and the journal The Good Society seek proposals for papers to be presented at a conference at Tufts on May 18, 2017 and then published in The Good Society as part of a special issue edited by Tisch Associate Dean Peter Levine. Tisch College can offer travel and lodging for presenters at the conference.
Framing:
Current global crises of democracy raise fundamental questions about how citizens can be responsible and effective actors, whether they are combating racism in the United States, protecting human rights in the Middle East, or addressing climate change. If “citizens” are people who strive to leave their communities greater and more beautiful (as in the Athenian citizen’s oath), then their thinking must combine facts, values, and strategies, because all three influence any wise decision. Mainstream scholarship distinguishes facts, values, and strategies, assigning them to different branches of the academy. Many critics have noted the philosophical shortcomings of the fact/value distinction, but citizens need accounts of how facts, values, and strategies can be recombined, both in theory and in practice. John Dewey, Hannah Arendt, Mahatma Gandhi, Jürgen Habermas, Amartya Sen—and many other theorists of citizenship—have offered such accounts.
Actual civic movements also combine facts, values, and strategies in distinctive ways. For instance, the American Civil Rights Movement used the language of prophesy, and Second Wave Feminism strategically advocated new ways of knowing. This special issue invites theoretical, methodological, historical, empirical, and case-study articles related to the question: how should citizens put facts, values, and strategies together?
Paper proposals of up to 300 words should be sent to Peter Levine at peter.levine@tufts.edu and to Good Society editor Trygve Throntveit at tthrontv@umn.edu by November 1, 2016. Prospective authors must be willing to present drafts by May 1 2017, attend a one-day conference at Tufts on May 18, and revise for final publication by September 2017.
I’ve been thinking a lot about safe spaces.
Perhaps it’s because the school year is starting that the debate over safe space and intellectual rigor has become top of mind. But this issue is core to civil society in general: we’re seeing the debate play out on college campuses, but it gets deeply to questions of who gets to participate – and how – in civil society and what that participation (or absence) means for social outcomes.
And as a side note, let’s not forget that half of all young people in this nation do not receive any of the benefits of a college education or experience.
The debate over safe space strikes me as being about far more than safe spaces. No one who advocates for safe spaces wants students to be coddled, and no one who advocates against safe spaces wants students to be tormented. So in some ways, the debate – or talking past each other, if you will – seems misaligned to the actual issues at play.
A few years ago my former colleagues at Tisch College’s Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement released a study on how American teens use their out-of-school time.
One of the top level findings of this report was a striking difference in how teens of different social classes used their time:
Research so far suggests a wide variation of after-school time use based on social disparities: three out of ten children in low-income households do not participate in any organized activities, while just one out of ten middle-class or wealthy children do not. Not surprisingly, affordability of extracurricular involvement varies greatly by income level. Furthermore, parents of different socioeconomic backgrounds may view priories in time use differently.
The study reinforced the 2003 work of sociologist Annette Lareau: there are not only financial reasons for different people’s experience, but cultural class reasons as well.
In general, wealthier kids benefit from organized out-of-school activities: they develop leadership skills, self-confidence, and college application material through formal athletic, artistic, and academic opportunities.
Children of lower socio-economic status benefit from unstructured, unsupervised time. They learn self-sufficiency, resilience, and independence by taking care of themselves and siblings after school.
The normative values of lower socio-economic families may prove problematic to social mobility – those kids may not have as much flare on their college applications – but the reality is that there is value in both approaches, and negatives in taking one approach too far.
This may seem tangential to the topic of safe spaces, but I actually think it’s related. I don’t know that the divergence of views breaks down along social classes, but there do seem to be normative differences in what people expect out of a civil society – at large or in a campus microcosm.
Some opponents of safe spaces revel in pushing their view to the extreme. It’s a sort of tough love approach: say the most offensive things possible in order to make kids develop a thick skin. My sense is that some of these folks aren’t simply trying to express their own view, but they’re actively trying to antagonize people in the hopes of helping people grow more accustomed to such things. (And/or to draw attention to themselves?)
Surely, they have a right to do so – but it also kind of makes them a….well, you can choose your own descriptor here.
On the other side, there’s no shortage of horror anecdotes about students claiming safe space protection for something absurd. Like the guy who sued for coffee being hot – there’s always some one out there making the system look bad.
I don’t think the majority of people are in either of these extremes, though people tend to lean towards one view or another.
Some people have experienced positive growth by being strongly challenged – and it has helped them go strong in return. Others have been silenced by society and are looking for supportive spaces through which they can regain their voice.
Depending on your own experience, you might have a different view on which of these norms is more important and which you’d rather see fostered in civil society. But as with out-of-school activities: there is value in both approaches.
The problem that I see is that there is systemic inconsistency in terms of who falls into each group. If half the population was randomly assigned to feel one way and the other half was randomly assigned to feel the opposite…that would be a very interesting study. But when race, class, gender, sexual identity, or other demographic factors line up so closely with how people feel about this issue – that’s something we need to pay attention to.
