Land Grants, Extension and the Promise of Civic Science
As I described in my last column on public happiness, Nicholas Kristof's recent New York Times column on the detachment of academics from today's debates ("Professors, We Need You!" February 15, 2014) reflects growing sentiment that academics need to make their views "public." The public work tradition in land grant colleges and the extension service adds another element -- academics are citizens, with multiple contributions to make to public life.
Kristof is part of a trend. Thus, a January 2012 editorial in the leading science journal Nature calls for scientists to get into the fray. "Where political leadership on climate change is lacking scientists must be prepared to stick their heads above the parapet." The editorial observed that "climate change contrarians are multiplying in numbers." Their solution: "Climate scientists must be ever more energetic in taking their message to citizens."
The assumption reflected in the Nature editorial is that academics are different than citizens.
Who is a citizen?
Growing academic detachment over the past half century, detailed in studies such as Thomas Bender and Carl Schorske's collection, American Academic Cultures in Transformation, has played a powerful, if invisible, role in this distinction. Detachment has fueled what Bender describes as the shift from "civic professionalism" to "disciplinary professionalism." This shift operates everywhere, affecting common views of "citizenship" itself.
When the Center for Democracy and Citizenship partnered with Falcoln Heights, Minnesota, in a discussion of what roles citizens can play in quelling school violence after the Newtown tragedy, the audience of 25 or so in the citizen town hall included the mayor, the police chief, the city manager, teachers, a local principal, social agency workers, a university professor from the College of Architecture and Design, four students, IT business entrepreneurs -- and two elderly residents. The residents expressed regret that "there are so few citizens," implying that "citizens" are volunteers like themselves.
No one from any of the work sites in the community raised any questions about the definition. When town hall facilitators did raise questions, it prompted a lively conversation about how much power there might be in the community to address gun violence if people see their work in civic terms and work sites as civic sites.
We have become a nation of consumers of democracy, not producers of democracy. Today, as a result, Americans feel collective powerlessness to address mounting problems. And faculty members, role models for the legion of professionals who are shaped in college, have played an unwitting part in this process as they have come to see themselves, at most, as simply providing expert advice and as training other professional experts. Conventional views of citizenship now take public and civic meanings of work off the map. Citizen teachers, civic business owners, citizen clergy, citizen librarians, citizen nurses, even "civil" servants have disappeared.
In a time of enormous change, higher education has strong self-interest in understanding and claiming its invisible power to shape the civic identities and careers of its students. Colleges and universities need to become vital parts of the work of building a democratic society.
The land grant legacy as a resource:
Here, the democratic history of land grants and the extension system holds many lessons. The American Commonwealth Partnership coalition, which the White House invited me to organize to mark the 150th anniversary of the Morrill Act establishing land grant colleges in 2012, sought to make this history better known.
From the beginning, land grant colleges often sought to develop professionals with a strong sense of civic responsibilities and the civic skills to act effectively. Such emphasis deepened with the creation of extension in 1914. Thus, Liberty Hyde Bailey, a leading horticulturalist, chair of Theodore Roosevelt's Country Life Commission which developed the extension philosophy, stressed practical work with communities to solve public problems and to create civic capacity.
"Students in agriculture are...to take part in a great regeneration. The student in agriculture is fitting himself for a great work," said Bailey.
He challenged a narrow view of Extension work, where Extension agents and academics simply provide technical or scientific information. The expert role alone could create dangerous dependencies.
"The re-direction of any civilization must rest primarily on the people who comprise it, rather than be imposed from persons in other conditions of life," said Bailey.
College-based rural scientists needed to keep in mind the most important objective: helping communities develop their own capacity for self-action and rural democracy. The point was not merely solving the specific problem. Rather, it was the fact that the public work of problem-solving creates opportunities to deepen civic agency.
Civic science brings democracy and science together:
Though the term was not used, these practices can be called "civic science," a politics of knowledge in which scientists are citizens. This civic science came alive in soil conservation efforts during the Great Depression. Soil conservation scientists were constantly reminded that the community's knowledge was prior to their own. Gaining a deep understanding of the community, its history, culture, political life, conflicts, was essential for their efforts. The result is today's magnificent system of contour farming across the Midwest.
At the White House 2012 meeting, ACP launched Civic Science, an initiative which John Spencer and I described in an earlier blog to recall histories of democratic scientific practices and to flesh them out in an explicit conceptual framework.
Involving leading scientists, our civic science team re-conceptualizes scientists as citizens, learning the skills and practices of collaborative public work with other citizens on pressing public problems. Civic science stresses science as a resource for action in the world, not mainly an external description of the world. It highlights citizens as co-creators of democracy, and emphasizes civic empowerment.
The National Science Foundation, with a grant to our colleagues at the University of Iowa's Delta Center, is supporting a workshop this fall to further develop civic science. The workshop will create a set of "lessons from the field" based on powerful case studies of civic science in different areas. We will also begin to firm up a strategy for a network of civic science sites.
We believe that cooperative extension, celebrating its 100th anniversary this year, will provide an important venue for civic science, in a time of enormous challenges and opportunities.
Harry Boyte, director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg College and a Senior Fellow at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs, has collaborated with the Delta Center over the past decade in developing the framework of civic science. Boyte is Co-Principal Investigator on the National Science Foundation civic science grant. This post is adapted from "Extension Reconsidered and the Promise of Civic Science," in the Extension Reconsidered blog, discussing and debating the future of the Extension Service.
Kristof is part of a trend. Thus, a January 2012 editorial in the leading science journal Nature calls for scientists to get into the fray. "Where political leadership on climate change is lacking scientists must be prepared to stick their heads above the parapet." The editorial observed that "climate change contrarians are multiplying in numbers." Their solution: "Climate scientists must be ever more energetic in taking their message to citizens."
The assumption reflected in the Nature editorial is that academics are different than citizens.
Who is a citizen?
Growing academic detachment over the past half century, detailed in studies such as Thomas Bender and Carl Schorske's collection, American Academic Cultures in Transformation, has played a powerful, if invisible, role in this distinction. Detachment has fueled what Bender describes as the shift from "civic professionalism" to "disciplinary professionalism." This shift operates everywhere, affecting common views of "citizenship" itself.
When the Center for Democracy and Citizenship partnered with Falcoln Heights, Minnesota, in a discussion of what roles citizens can play in quelling school violence after the Newtown tragedy, the audience of 25 or so in the citizen town hall included the mayor, the police chief, the city manager, teachers, a local principal, social agency workers, a university professor from the College of Architecture and Design, four students, IT business entrepreneurs -- and two elderly residents. The residents expressed regret that "there are so few citizens," implying that "citizens" are volunteers like themselves.
No one from any of the work sites in the community raised any questions about the definition. When town hall facilitators did raise questions, it prompted a lively conversation about how much power there might be in the community to address gun violence if people see their work in civic terms and work sites as civic sites.
We have become a nation of consumers of democracy, not producers of democracy. Today, as a result, Americans feel collective powerlessness to address mounting problems. And faculty members, role models for the legion of professionals who are shaped in college, have played an unwitting part in this process as they have come to see themselves, at most, as simply providing expert advice and as training other professional experts. Conventional views of citizenship now take public and civic meanings of work off the map. Citizen teachers, civic business owners, citizen clergy, citizen librarians, citizen nurses, even "civil" servants have disappeared.
In a time of enormous change, higher education has strong self-interest in understanding and claiming its invisible power to shape the civic identities and careers of its students. Colleges and universities need to become vital parts of the work of building a democratic society.
The land grant legacy as a resource:
Here, the democratic history of land grants and the extension system holds many lessons. The American Commonwealth Partnership coalition, which the White House invited me to organize to mark the 150th anniversary of the Morrill Act establishing land grant colleges in 2012, sought to make this history better known.
From the beginning, land grant colleges often sought to develop professionals with a strong sense of civic responsibilities and the civic skills to act effectively. Such emphasis deepened with the creation of extension in 1914. Thus, Liberty Hyde Bailey, a leading horticulturalist, chair of Theodore Roosevelt's Country Life Commission which developed the extension philosophy, stressed practical work with communities to solve public problems and to create civic capacity.
"Students in agriculture are...to take part in a great regeneration. The student in agriculture is fitting himself for a great work," said Bailey.
He challenged a narrow view of Extension work, where Extension agents and academics simply provide technical or scientific information. The expert role alone could create dangerous dependencies.
"The re-direction of any civilization must rest primarily on the people who comprise it, rather than be imposed from persons in other conditions of life," said Bailey.
College-based rural scientists needed to keep in mind the most important objective: helping communities develop their own capacity for self-action and rural democracy. The point was not merely solving the specific problem. Rather, it was the fact that the public work of problem-solving creates opportunities to deepen civic agency.
Civic science brings democracy and science together:
Though the term was not used, these practices can be called "civic science," a politics of knowledge in which scientists are citizens. This civic science came alive in soil conservation efforts during the Great Depression. Soil conservation scientists were constantly reminded that the community's knowledge was prior to their own. Gaining a deep understanding of the community, its history, culture, political life, conflicts, was essential for their efforts. The result is today's magnificent system of contour farming across the Midwest.
At the White House 2012 meeting, ACP launched Civic Science, an initiative which John Spencer and I described in an earlier blog to recall histories of democratic scientific practices and to flesh them out in an explicit conceptual framework.
Involving leading scientists, our civic science team re-conceptualizes scientists as citizens, learning the skills and practices of collaborative public work with other citizens on pressing public problems. Civic science stresses science as a resource for action in the world, not mainly an external description of the world. It highlights citizens as co-creators of democracy, and emphasizes civic empowerment.
The National Science Foundation, with a grant to our colleagues at the University of Iowa's Delta Center, is supporting a workshop this fall to further develop civic science. The workshop will create a set of "lessons from the field" based on powerful case studies of civic science in different areas. We will also begin to firm up a strategy for a network of civic science sites.
We believe that cooperative extension, celebrating its 100th anniversary this year, will provide an important venue for civic science, in a time of enormous challenges and opportunities.
Harry Boyte, director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg College and a Senior Fellow at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs, has collaborated with the Delta Center over the past decade in developing the framework of civic science. Boyte is Co-Principal Investigator on the National Science Foundation civic science grant. This post is adapted from "Extension Reconsidered and the Promise of Civic Science," in the Extension Reconsidered blog, discussing and debating the future of the Extension Service.
Land Grants, Extension and the Promise of Civic Science
We have become a nation of consumers of democracy, not producers of democracy. Today, as a result, Americans feel collective powerlessness to address mounting problems.
Land Grants, Extension and the Promise of Civic Science
We have become a nation of consumers of democracy, not producers of democracy. Today, as a result, Americans feel collective powerlessness to address mounting problems.
Land Grants, Extension and the Promise of Civic Science
Public Happiness
Education, understood in this way, is constitutive of a flourishing democratic society. The understanding has never been more needed.
Public Happiness
Education, understood in this way, is constitutive of a flourishing democratic society. The understanding has never been more needed.
Public Happiness
Public Happiness
At first appearance, the recent call by Nicholas Kristof for the nation's "smartest thinkers," now hidden away in the arcane world of academia, to join the "great debates" about the nation's problems ("Professors, We Need You," New York Times , February 15, 2014), would seem to have little in common with Patrick Creadon's latest documentary, If You Build It.
Kristof's call out to academics is addressed to the high end of American meritocracy -- the "best and the brightest," in the old phrase.
The documentary, by way of contrast, tells a real life story of two young self-described design activists, Emily Pilloton and Matthew Miller, who worked with 10 scruffy high school juniors whom many would see as on the losing end of the meritocracy. The teens take time off from shoveling cow dung to participate in a shop class with large ambitions, Studio H. Their final project, creating a local farmers market, aims at revitalizing a destitute rural community.
Their work closes on a note of measured optimism, but it has its ups and downs. The shop class is viewed skeptically by the local school board, which refuses to pay the teachers' salaries. The group also succeeds in building the farmers' market, in the process planting what Pilloton calls "small seeds in our students."
From another angle of vision, both Kristof's call and If You Build It represent a broader ferment. After all, the process of involving leading scholars in public life was well underway before Kristof's column, organized by the Scholars Strategy Network, a creation of Harvard social scientist Theda Skocpol in 2009. SSN now involves 370 academics, based on the premise that "scholars need to be more fully involved in today's great debates."
Meanwhile, signs of a movement to reconnect education with real-world public work are multiplying, as I have described before in stories about highly successful educational initiatives for low income kids. These include Youth Build and the Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences.
I believe that the impulse toward what our nation's founders understood as public happiness is gaining strength against the grain of today's privatized, consumer versions of "happiness."
John Adams, the nation's second president, leading advocate of independence, chief author of the Massachusetts Constitution of 1779, was an eloquent philosopher of such public happiness. In Section Two of Chapter Six, Adams testified to the virtues of education, which he held essential to "the happiness of a people and the good order and preservation of civil government." The Constitution continues:
Put differently, both the Scholars Strategy Network and Studio H are seedbeds for a renewed understanding that education is a great civic vocation. The goal is not simply private success, but public contribution.
Education, understood in this way, is constitutive of a flourishing democratic society. The understanding has never been more needed.
--
Harry Boyte is Director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg College and a Senior Fellow at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey School of Public Affairs.
Kristof's call out to academics is addressed to the high end of American meritocracy -- the "best and the brightest," in the old phrase.
The documentary, by way of contrast, tells a real life story of two young self-described design activists, Emily Pilloton and Matthew Miller, who worked with 10 scruffy high school juniors whom many would see as on the losing end of the meritocracy. The teens take time off from shoveling cow dung to participate in a shop class with large ambitions, Studio H. Their final project, creating a local farmers market, aims at revitalizing a destitute rural community.
Their work closes on a note of measured optimism, but it has its ups and downs. The shop class is viewed skeptically by the local school board, which refuses to pay the teachers' salaries. The group also succeeds in building the farmers' market, in the process planting what Pilloton calls "small seeds in our students."
From another angle of vision, both Kristof's call and If You Build It represent a broader ferment. After all, the process of involving leading scholars in public life was well underway before Kristof's column, organized by the Scholars Strategy Network, a creation of Harvard social scientist Theda Skocpol in 2009. SSN now involves 370 academics, based on the premise that "scholars need to be more fully involved in today's great debates."
Meanwhile, signs of a movement to reconnect education with real-world public work are multiplying, as I have described before in stories about highly successful educational initiatives for low income kids. These include Youth Build and the Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences.
I believe that the impulse toward what our nation's founders understood as public happiness is gaining strength against the grain of today's privatized, consumer versions of "happiness."
John Adams, the nation's second president, leading advocate of independence, chief author of the Massachusetts Constitution of 1779, was an eloquent philosopher of such public happiness. In Section Two of Chapter Six, Adams testified to the virtues of education, which he held essential to "the happiness of a people and the good order and preservation of civil government." The Constitution continues:
Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people, being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties; and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in the various parts of the country, and among the different orders of the people, it shall be the duty of legislatures and magistrates, in all future periods of this commonwealth, to cherish the interests of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them... public schools, and grammar-schools in the towns; to encourage private societies and public institutions, rewards and immunities, for the promotion of agriculture, arts, sciences, commerce, trades, manufactures, and a natural history of the country; to countenance and inculcate the principles of humanity and general benevolence, public and private charity, industry and frugality, honesty and punctuality in their dealings; sincerity, and good humor, and all social affections and generous sentiments, among the people.
Put differently, both the Scholars Strategy Network and Studio H are seedbeds for a renewed understanding that education is a great civic vocation. The goal is not simply private success, but public contribution.
Education, understood in this way, is constitutive of a flourishing democratic society. The understanding has never been more needed.
--
Harry Boyte is Director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg College and a Senior Fellow at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey School of Public Affairs.
Beyond Mandela — South Africa’s Lesson for the World
I saw the movie Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom in East London over the holidays with my daughter Jae. We were vacationing nearby with my South African in-laws, in the Eastern Cape village of Kei Mouth. A few weeks before, dignitaries from around the world - Joyce Banda, president of Malawi, Prince Charles of Great Britain, Alain Juppė, former Prime Minister of France and many others -- had come into the Eastern Cape for Nelson Mandela's funeral in the village of Qunu.
Seeing the movie was another occasion, beyond the funeral, to reflect on what South African experiences have to teach the world. The lesson involves much more than the example of an iconic leader "for the ages," or the message of "forgiveness" embodied in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The real lesson is that it takes a great array of talents and capacities, not a superhero or a saint, to make large scale democratic change.
The movie powerfully conveyed the message of forgiveness. The treatment of Mandela himself, moreover, was much better than I had feared. It didn't remove Mandela from politics or the culture of his origins, nor turn him into a saint, in the fashion of many of the commemorations.
It shows that Mandela's capacities for forgiveness and generosity were rooted in his remarkable political savvy and long range political vision. In contrast, both Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and the young militants Mandela encountered on Robbin Island substituted moral outrage for sober, disciplined politics.
Mandela, the movie, includes Mandela's televised speech to the nation in 1992, during a period of growing violence. He seeks to educate the people about constructive politics. For instance, he tells black South Africans that anger, legitimate as it is, cannot turn to violence if the nation is have a viable future. They need to win through ballots, not bullets (especially since the government has the military power).
But what is lost in the movie is the basic truth that the transition in South Africa was the work of millions of people, not a single man. When one man is at the center, others have no ownership in change.
In Mandela, aside from a few who take part in the anti-apartheid protests, whites are portrayed simply as oppressors driven by fear to acts of brutal suppression. Missing entirely are the discussions, debates, cultural transformations and constructive public work in a myriad of families, religious institutions, businesses, professions, media outlets, schools and universities and government itself, as millions of whites came to the understanding that apartheid was untenable and unjust.
These are embodied in the large scale work of the Institute for a Democratic Alternative in South Africa which I described in my recent Huffington Post blog on "The people's politics of Nelson Mandela." Idasa alone involved tens of thousands of whites in a "politics of engagement" that educated them about the reality of black people's lives and built bridges across the widening racial chasm. The arduous political work of "going home" to make change in communities full of racial (or other kinds of) bigotry is a lesson needed everywhere.
An even larger omission may be the vast process of civic learning which took place among South African blacks as they developed new capacities for collective problem-solving and a new pride in black culture. Aside from Mandela and a few of his comrades in the ANC, blacks appear in Mandela only as victims or as defiant protestors.
Here, it is useful to recall a distinction from the American civil rights movement used by leaders like Bob Moses, Ella Baker, and Thelma Craig between "organizing" and "mobilizing".
Mobilizing, which uses a prophetic good versus evil language, is best known. It involves protests, civil disobedience, defiance campaigns and the like. These play a role in any successful struggle against injustice. But organizing -- the patient, community-level, molecular work of developing new skills, resiliency, pride, and confidence -- creates the foundations for lasting change.
Xolela Mangcu, the Black Consciousness public intellectual at the University of Cape Town, describes the scale and significance of organizing in the Black Consciousness Movement in "African Modernity and the Struggle for People's Power," a recent article in the journal The Good Society. Biko and other BCM leaders built on a rich, if largely invisible tradition of "radical modernizers" such as W.B. Rubusana, Sol Plaatje, SEK Mqhayi and others, who affirmed African traditions and culture.
Biko differed from racialistic appeals about "driving whites to the sea." "He drew Africans, Coloureds and Indians together in a collective movement for liberation," describes Mangcu. "[But] he always made the point that the struggle was for a non-racial democracy based on what he called the 'joint culture' of black and white people, constructed out of the hybridity of their respective cultures."
In the BCM perspective, blacks also must assume the leadership of their own liberation struggle. To this end, BCM linked community organizing about people's practical issues -- health, working conditions, housing, schools, home industries and others -- with a philosophy that "infused the black community with a new-found pride in themselves, their efforts, their value systems, their culture, their religion, their outlook to life." The BCM philosophy educated a generation of leaders in what were called "formation schools," as well as through publications like Creativity and Development, Essays on Black Theology, Black Viewpoint, and Black Perspectives.
These included community leaders and also national leaders in the United Democratic Front of the 1980s, the primary force in bringing an end to apartheid. Today, this legacy can constitute a philosophical challenge of relevance in our time, showing the insufficiency of a triumphalist view of science and technology descending from the European Enlightenment.
Scientific triumphalism, a major rationale for colonialism, now fuels what Mangcu calls "technocratic creep," the refashioning of social and economic life by rational, abstract modes of thought, by growing patterns of bureaucracy, and by instrumental rationality holding ends as a given, focusing on efficiency of means. Increasingly today, we have lost the "Why?" and "What's the point?" questions in policy and politics.
South African need to find ways to inform the world about the BCM and other African intellectual traditions and approaches, which provide resources for overcoming technocratic creep. In a time of bitter divides and deepening polarizations, people everywhere also need to know the elemental fact about the peaceful transition from apartheid to democracy in South Africa: it takes a society to make change on this scale.
Boyte, director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg College and senior fellow at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey School of Public Affairs, lives several months a year in South Africa, where he is also a visiting professor at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University.
Seeing the movie was another occasion, beyond the funeral, to reflect on what South African experiences have to teach the world. The lesson involves much more than the example of an iconic leader "for the ages," or the message of "forgiveness" embodied in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The real lesson is that it takes a great array of talents and capacities, not a superhero or a saint, to make large scale democratic change.
The movie powerfully conveyed the message of forgiveness. The treatment of Mandela himself, moreover, was much better than I had feared. It didn't remove Mandela from politics or the culture of his origins, nor turn him into a saint, in the fashion of many of the commemorations.
It shows that Mandela's capacities for forgiveness and generosity were rooted in his remarkable political savvy and long range political vision. In contrast, both Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and the young militants Mandela encountered on Robbin Island substituted moral outrage for sober, disciplined politics.
Mandela, the movie, includes Mandela's televised speech to the nation in 1992, during a period of growing violence. He seeks to educate the people about constructive politics. For instance, he tells black South Africans that anger, legitimate as it is, cannot turn to violence if the nation is have a viable future. They need to win through ballots, not bullets (especially since the government has the military power).
But what is lost in the movie is the basic truth that the transition in South Africa was the work of millions of people, not a single man. When one man is at the center, others have no ownership in change.
In Mandela, aside from a few who take part in the anti-apartheid protests, whites are portrayed simply as oppressors driven by fear to acts of brutal suppression. Missing entirely are the discussions, debates, cultural transformations and constructive public work in a myriad of families, religious institutions, businesses, professions, media outlets, schools and universities and government itself, as millions of whites came to the understanding that apartheid was untenable and unjust.
These are embodied in the large scale work of the Institute for a Democratic Alternative in South Africa which I described in my recent Huffington Post blog on "The people's politics of Nelson Mandela." Idasa alone involved tens of thousands of whites in a "politics of engagement" that educated them about the reality of black people's lives and built bridges across the widening racial chasm. The arduous political work of "going home" to make change in communities full of racial (or other kinds of) bigotry is a lesson needed everywhere.
An even larger omission may be the vast process of civic learning which took place among South African blacks as they developed new capacities for collective problem-solving and a new pride in black culture. Aside from Mandela and a few of his comrades in the ANC, blacks appear in Mandela only as victims or as defiant protestors.
Here, it is useful to recall a distinction from the American civil rights movement used by leaders like Bob Moses, Ella Baker, and Thelma Craig between "organizing" and "mobilizing".
Mobilizing, which uses a prophetic good versus evil language, is best known. It involves protests, civil disobedience, defiance campaigns and the like. These play a role in any successful struggle against injustice. But organizing -- the patient, community-level, molecular work of developing new skills, resiliency, pride, and confidence -- creates the foundations for lasting change.
Xolela Mangcu, the Black Consciousness public intellectual at the University of Cape Town, describes the scale and significance of organizing in the Black Consciousness Movement in "African Modernity and the Struggle for People's Power," a recent article in the journal The Good Society. Biko and other BCM leaders built on a rich, if largely invisible tradition of "radical modernizers" such as W.B. Rubusana, Sol Plaatje, SEK Mqhayi and others, who affirmed African traditions and culture.
Biko differed from racialistic appeals about "driving whites to the sea." "He drew Africans, Coloureds and Indians together in a collective movement for liberation," describes Mangcu. "[But] he always made the point that the struggle was for a non-racial democracy based on what he called the 'joint culture' of black and white people, constructed out of the hybridity of their respective cultures."
In the BCM perspective, blacks also must assume the leadership of their own liberation struggle. To this end, BCM linked community organizing about people's practical issues -- health, working conditions, housing, schools, home industries and others -- with a philosophy that "infused the black community with a new-found pride in themselves, their efforts, their value systems, their culture, their religion, their outlook to life." The BCM philosophy educated a generation of leaders in what were called "formation schools," as well as through publications like Creativity and Development, Essays on Black Theology, Black Viewpoint, and Black Perspectives.
These included community leaders and also national leaders in the United Democratic Front of the 1980s, the primary force in bringing an end to apartheid. Today, this legacy can constitute a philosophical challenge of relevance in our time, showing the insufficiency of a triumphalist view of science and technology descending from the European Enlightenment.
Scientific triumphalism, a major rationale for colonialism, now fuels what Mangcu calls "technocratic creep," the refashioning of social and economic life by rational, abstract modes of thought, by growing patterns of bureaucracy, and by instrumental rationality holding ends as a given, focusing on efficiency of means. Increasingly today, we have lost the "Why?" and "What's the point?" questions in policy and politics.
South African need to find ways to inform the world about the BCM and other African intellectual traditions and approaches, which provide resources for overcoming technocratic creep. In a time of bitter divides and deepening polarizations, people everywhere also need to know the elemental fact about the peaceful transition from apartheid to democracy in South Africa: it takes a society to make change on this scale.
Boyte, director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg College and senior fellow at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey School of Public Affairs, lives several months a year in South Africa, where he is also a visiting professor at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University.