Wilderness Politics: Meeting the Challenge of Climate Change
By Harry C. Boyte and Marie Strӧm
The recent announcement that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have passed the long-feared milestone of 400 parts per million creates a new sense of urgency about what is to be done.
In the face of the climate crisis, many express panic. "It feels like the inevitable march toward disaster," Columbia University scientist Maureen Raymo told the New York Times. The crisis threatens a barren wilderness.
We need a way of acting sufficient to the challenge. Here, the biblical story of the years in the Wilderness, in which the fractious and "stiff-necked" people of Israel agreed to a covenant with God and created a new way of life, offers resources. It is a story shared by Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
The usual response to the climate challenge is, instead, a polarizing politics which pits a victimized people against evil, oppressive power. Thus, Wendell Berry, environmental activist and farmer as well as prolific author of novels, stories, poems, essays and recipient of the National Humanities Medal, argued in his 2012 Jefferson Lecture at the National Endowment for the Humanities that "we Americans have been divided into two kinds: 'boomers' and 'stickers.'"
"Boomers," in his view, "motivated by greed, the desire for money, property, and power," are driving us toward ecological disaster. Under their rule, "our country has been pillaged for the enrichment of those who have claimed the right to own or exploit it without limit." In contrast, "stickers" are "those who settle and love the life they have made and the place they have made it in." They are the only hope for Berry.
Berry's Jefferson Lecture, as well as his other writings, hold insight. But its politics, dividing society into evil doers vs. innocents, leads to acrimony, not a way through the climate crisis.
It is crucial to develop a politics which can enlist the large majority in making change. Otherwise change on the scale required simply will not occur. Such politics has cultural roots.
Today's polarizing politics on the environment, like on many other issues, draws implicitly or explicitly on the Exodus narrative, the epic struggle of the Jews against their bondage in Egypt. In this story, "the Egyptians became ruthless in imposing tasks on the Israelites, and made their lives bitter" (Exodus 1:13-14). The Pharaoh embodies evil. Again and again his "heart is hardened."
The escalating plagues visited upon the Egyptians, from water turned into blood through death of their firstborn and their drowning in the Red Sea, are justifiable acts of a righteous God. "Terror and dread fell upon them," sings Moses and the Israelites. "By the might of your arm, they became still as a stone" (Exodus 15: 16). This story of deliverance from oppression has become a central model of freedom struggles over centuries.
But in the first five books of the Bible, what Christians call the Pentateuch and what Jews and Muslims call the Torah, the struggle against oppression is paired with the years in the Wilderness which prepare Israel for the promised land.
The Wilderness narrative recounts many other aspects of forming a people and creating a common life, beyond battles against oppression.
For instance, it includes the Golden Rule, "love your neighbor as yourself." It has stories of creating governance structures which decentralize power from Moses, whose commands, channeling God's, were once unquestioned. Decentralization begins with Jethro, Moses' father in law, not himself an Israelite, who advises Moses not to make all the decisions (Exodus 18: 13-26).
The Wilderness story includes Israel's agreement to a new covenant, based on observing the Ten Commandments and associated laws. These create foundations for "the way of the lord." It has vivid passages of energetic creation, such as building the Tabernacle. "So they came, both men and women ... the people of Israel whose heart moved them to bring anything for the work" (Exodus 36:22, 29).
The years included backsliding, rebellion and regret. "The people complained in the hearing of the Lord about their misfortunes ... 'O that we had meat to eat!'" (Numbers 11: 1, 4). Moses in turn complains to God: "Where am I to get meat to give to all this people ... the burden is too heavy" (Numbers 11:13-14).
An important generational shift occurs. The Moses Generation, shaped by Egypt, gives way to the "Joshua Generation," which grew up in the Wilderness. Only Caleb and Joshua of the Moses Generation make it to the Promised Land.
The narrative makes the point that the work of revitalizing the way of the Lord will never end. Jubilee, declared by God, is to occur every 50 years. It involves forgiveness of debts, liberty to captives, and lands returned to the common tribal pools. "The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine," declared the Lord (Leviticus 25:23).
On the threshold of the Promised Land, Moses calls for remembering, in ways relevant today.
"God is bringing you into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and springs ... a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees ... a land in which you will eat bread without scarcity, a land whose stones are iron and out of whose hills you can dig copper ... Take heed lest you forget ... the great and terrible wilderness" (Deuteronomy 8:7-9).
The current environmental crisis also demands that we remember. It grows from long-developing patterns of consumerism, energy production, decision-making structures and today's American Dream.
There is no way to avoid major disruptions in the face of climate changes, in a "good land" of material abundance and deeply entrenched consumer life styles.
But there are memories of more cooperative and egalitarian and less materialistic moments in history. And there are contemporary examples of the kind of politics we need to revitalize them.
For instance, Minnesota United for All Families organized advocates of gay marriage last year to defeat a constitutional amendment that would prohibit gay marriage, after 30 defeats in other states. The campaign used a relational citizen politics which refused to demonize opponents and involved more than a million conversations. "We learned that a politics of empowerment beats a politics of vilification," said Richard Carlbom, campaign director.
This politics also was championed by the great civil rights leader Thelma Craig. She insisted that radical culture change requires "80% of the people," not a mere majority.
A 21st century Wilderness Politics needs to remember, in the tradition of Moses. To address the challenge of climate change, we need to replace the current politics of polarization with a constructive politics that can galvanize energies across the political spectrum.
Harry C. Boyte Director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg College and a Senior Fellow at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs. Marie Strӧm is a graduate student in systematic theology at Luther Seminar, and a former democracy educator in Africa.
The recent announcement that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have passed the long-feared milestone of 400 parts per million creates a new sense of urgency about what is to be done.
In the face of the climate crisis, many express panic. "It feels like the inevitable march toward disaster," Columbia University scientist Maureen Raymo told the New York Times. The crisis threatens a barren wilderness.
We need a way of acting sufficient to the challenge. Here, the biblical story of the years in the Wilderness, in which the fractious and "stiff-necked" people of Israel agreed to a covenant with God and created a new way of life, offers resources. It is a story shared by Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
The usual response to the climate challenge is, instead, a polarizing politics which pits a victimized people against evil, oppressive power. Thus, Wendell Berry, environmental activist and farmer as well as prolific author of novels, stories, poems, essays and recipient of the National Humanities Medal, argued in his 2012 Jefferson Lecture at the National Endowment for the Humanities that "we Americans have been divided into two kinds: 'boomers' and 'stickers.'"
"Boomers," in his view, "motivated by greed, the desire for money, property, and power," are driving us toward ecological disaster. Under their rule, "our country has been pillaged for the enrichment of those who have claimed the right to own or exploit it without limit." In contrast, "stickers" are "those who settle and love the life they have made and the place they have made it in." They are the only hope for Berry.
Berry's Jefferson Lecture, as well as his other writings, hold insight. But its politics, dividing society into evil doers vs. innocents, leads to acrimony, not a way through the climate crisis.
It is crucial to develop a politics which can enlist the large majority in making change. Otherwise change on the scale required simply will not occur. Such politics has cultural roots.
Today's polarizing politics on the environment, like on many other issues, draws implicitly or explicitly on the Exodus narrative, the epic struggle of the Jews against their bondage in Egypt. In this story, "the Egyptians became ruthless in imposing tasks on the Israelites, and made their lives bitter" (Exodus 1:13-14). The Pharaoh embodies evil. Again and again his "heart is hardened."
The escalating plagues visited upon the Egyptians, from water turned into blood through death of their firstborn and their drowning in the Red Sea, are justifiable acts of a righteous God. "Terror and dread fell upon them," sings Moses and the Israelites. "By the might of your arm, they became still as a stone" (Exodus 15: 16). This story of deliverance from oppression has become a central model of freedom struggles over centuries.
But in the first five books of the Bible, what Christians call the Pentateuch and what Jews and Muslims call the Torah, the struggle against oppression is paired with the years in the Wilderness which prepare Israel for the promised land.
The Wilderness narrative recounts many other aspects of forming a people and creating a common life, beyond battles against oppression.
For instance, it includes the Golden Rule, "love your neighbor as yourself." It has stories of creating governance structures which decentralize power from Moses, whose commands, channeling God's, were once unquestioned. Decentralization begins with Jethro, Moses' father in law, not himself an Israelite, who advises Moses not to make all the decisions (Exodus 18: 13-26).
The Wilderness story includes Israel's agreement to a new covenant, based on observing the Ten Commandments and associated laws. These create foundations for "the way of the lord." It has vivid passages of energetic creation, such as building the Tabernacle. "So they came, both men and women ... the people of Israel whose heart moved them to bring anything for the work" (Exodus 36:22, 29).
The years included backsliding, rebellion and regret. "The people complained in the hearing of the Lord about their misfortunes ... 'O that we had meat to eat!'" (Numbers 11: 1, 4). Moses in turn complains to God: "Where am I to get meat to give to all this people ... the burden is too heavy" (Numbers 11:13-14).
An important generational shift occurs. The Moses Generation, shaped by Egypt, gives way to the "Joshua Generation," which grew up in the Wilderness. Only Caleb and Joshua of the Moses Generation make it to the Promised Land.
The narrative makes the point that the work of revitalizing the way of the Lord will never end. Jubilee, declared by God, is to occur every 50 years. It involves forgiveness of debts, liberty to captives, and lands returned to the common tribal pools. "The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine," declared the Lord (Leviticus 25:23).
On the threshold of the Promised Land, Moses calls for remembering, in ways relevant today.
"God is bringing you into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and springs ... a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees ... a land in which you will eat bread without scarcity, a land whose stones are iron and out of whose hills you can dig copper ... Take heed lest you forget ... the great and terrible wilderness" (Deuteronomy 8:7-9).
The current environmental crisis also demands that we remember. It grows from long-developing patterns of consumerism, energy production, decision-making structures and today's American Dream.
There is no way to avoid major disruptions in the face of climate changes, in a "good land" of material abundance and deeply entrenched consumer life styles.
But there are memories of more cooperative and egalitarian and less materialistic moments in history. And there are contemporary examples of the kind of politics we need to revitalize them.
For instance, Minnesota United for All Families organized advocates of gay marriage last year to defeat a constitutional amendment that would prohibit gay marriage, after 30 defeats in other states. The campaign used a relational citizen politics which refused to demonize opponents and involved more than a million conversations. "We learned that a politics of empowerment beats a politics of vilification," said Richard Carlbom, campaign director.
This politics also was championed by the great civil rights leader Thelma Craig. She insisted that radical culture change requires "80% of the people," not a mere majority.
A 21st century Wilderness Politics needs to remember, in the tradition of Moses. To address the challenge of climate change, we need to replace the current politics of polarization with a constructive politics that can galvanize energies across the political spectrum.
Harry C. Boyte Director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg College and a Senior Fellow at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs. Marie Strӧm is a graduate student in systematic theology at Luther Seminar, and a former democracy educator in Africa.
Wilderness Politics: Meeting The Challenge Of Climate Change
In the face of the climate crisis, many express panic. The biblical story of the years in the Wilderness, in which the fractious and "stiff-necked" people of Israel agreed to a covenant with God and created a new way of life, offers solutions to the challenge.
Wilderness Politics: Meeting The Challenge Of Climate Change
In the face of the climate crisis, many express panic. The biblical story of the years in the Wilderness, in which the fractious and "stiff-necked" people of Israel agreed to a covenant with God and created a new way of life, offers solutions to the challenge.
Wilderness Politics: Meeting The Challenge Of Climate Change
The Youth Build Movement – Service as Public Work
Today the language of "service" and "love" often cloaks other purposes. After 9/11 George Bush contrasted "a nation awakened to service and citizenship and compassion" with the axis of evil. "We value life," he declared. "The terrorists ruthlessly destroy it." He called on Americans to "become September 11th volunteers by making a commitment to service in our neighborhoods."
One wonders what assembled world leaders made of Pope Francis' pledge, at his installation on March 20, to "serve the poorest, the weakest, the least important" -- and his challenge to them to do likewise.
YouthBuild USA contrasts starkly with sentimental or cynical invocations of service. It uses unabashedly affective terms like "love" to describe its highly effective philosophy of working with low-income and minority young people for their educational and civic growth and development.
Key to YouthBuild's success is that it joins a philosophy of deep affection with equally deep belief in young people's potential for what we at the Center for Democracy and Citizenship call public work. It promotes "world-building," to use a related term of the late political theorist Hannah Arendt.
YouthBuild describes itself as a "movement to unleash the positive energy of low-income young people to rebuild their communities and their lives." It began in 1978 when Dorothy Stoneman asked East Harlem teenagers, "How would you improve your community if you had adult support?" "We'd rebuild the houses," they replied. "We'd take empty buildings back from the drug dealers and eliminate crime."
Together they and Stoneman created the first YouthBuild program -- still operating -- and renovated the first YouthBuild building. Stoneman and Leroy Looper founded YouthBuild USA in 1990 to scale up YouthBuild as a proven way to "break the cycle of poverty."
With a federal YouthBuild program which has bipartisan support, operated by the Department of Labor, YouthBuild has spread widely. There are now 273 YouthBuild programs in the nation. Since 1994, more than 100,000 YouthBuild participants have built more than 20,000 units of affordable, increasingly green housing.
In YouthBuild low-income young people work toward the GEDs or high school diplomas while learning job skills. They participate in leadership development, help govern local programs, and engage in service activities and political advocacy in support of YouthBuild. A recent innovation is the YouthBuild post-secondary initiative which helps YouthBuild members to make transitions to college.
Evaluations show YouthBuild has remarkable impact in education, workforce preparation, crime prevention, leadership development and poverty reduction. YouthBuild programs lower recidivism rates for court involved youth by 40 percent. More than half of the enrollees get on track for education and employment. A study by CIRCLE researchers, Pathways into Leadership: A Study of YouthBuild Graduates,, found that while young people generally enter YouthBuild for practical reasons -- the desire get a GED or job skills -- it can have huge civic benefits.
Graduates are "exemplary civic leaders," it reports. "A significant number hold public office or are church leaders such as pastors. More than one third are professional educators or youth workers. Almost all are leaders in their families, workplaces, and communities."
Individual stories in the Huffington Post illustrate such changes. "During the time I was not in school, I fell into the subculture of the streets. I felt alienated from, had no sense of responsibility for, and did not care about the deteriorating conditions of my community," writes Lashon Amado. "My initial goals for myself in the program were to gain my GED and then seek a trade." YouthBuild staff challenged his expectations. They saw "potential and intelligence in me that I had been ignoring for most of my life," Amado writes.
"I gained a discipline," he says, "how to wake up early in the morning... how to stay committed to a task. I also developed professional skills, learned about networking, attended workshops on public speaking and leadership development, and [had] my first exposure to the college experience."
Amado now coordinates a YouthBuild leadership effort, Student VOICES, while going to college at UMass Boston.
Patrick Breton, graduate of YoutBuild Brockton, describes the community's "highly motivational and supportive atmosphere. In addition to the caring and committed staff, I was with like-minded peers."
YouthBuild creates what it calls "positive mini-communities of adults and youth committed to each other's success." As Pathways to Leadership observes, these contrast with other experiences. "In general, major institutions, from schools to law enforcement agencies, treat them as threats to themselves and their communities." Such institutions "offer, if anything, a combination of surveillance, remediating, discipline and punishment to try to alter their destructive tendencies." YouthBuild "treats them as potential civic leaders and invests in their leadership skills."
YouthBuild's philosophy is based on what can be called public love, with both personal and public dimensions. Stoneman lists key personal elements including family-like support and appreciation; care for young people's development; and inspiring and caring role models. "When young people walk into YouthBuild, we need to immediately surprise them with the level of respect they receive and the level of caring that each staff person shows. Our job [is] to offer so much respect and love that it awakens our students' capacity to care."
YouthBuild also stresses public elements such as "power for them over their immediate environment"; "firm and loving challenge to stop self-destructive behavior and negative attitudes"; "high standards and expectations"; "understanding of the proud and unique history of their peoples"; and "heightened awareness of the present day world and their important place in it."
Throughout, meaningful work is emphasized. Scott Emerick, YouthBuild's Vice President, describes the importance of "building something real." Participants "expand their thinking and develop habits of mind that transfer to classrooms and to careers."
Dorothy Stoneman adds, "Young people love producing something of value to their neighbors. Just today on Capital Hill, one student said to a legislator, 'It made me feel so good to see the light in the eyes of the homeowner on the day of key presentation. I knew I had done something that made a difference.'"
Stoneman adds, "I have heard variations on the quote hundreds of times."
YouthBuild holds lessons for all of education. Public work, affection, and respect are important for young people of all backgrounds. Moreover, the movement itself has immense potential for growth -- more than 2,000 different organizations have applied to the federal government to bring YouthBuild to their communities. This spring the DOL has capacity to fund only 75.
For an administration interested in innovative, cross-partisan approaches to addressing the nation's problems, championing the expansion of YouthBuild could have large payoffs.
One wonders what assembled world leaders made of Pope Francis' pledge, at his installation on March 20, to "serve the poorest, the weakest, the least important" -- and his challenge to them to do likewise.
YouthBuild USA contrasts starkly with sentimental or cynical invocations of service. It uses unabashedly affective terms like "love" to describe its highly effective philosophy of working with low-income and minority young people for their educational and civic growth and development.
Key to YouthBuild's success is that it joins a philosophy of deep affection with equally deep belief in young people's potential for what we at the Center for Democracy and Citizenship call public work. It promotes "world-building," to use a related term of the late political theorist Hannah Arendt.
YouthBuild describes itself as a "movement to unleash the positive energy of low-income young people to rebuild their communities and their lives." It began in 1978 when Dorothy Stoneman asked East Harlem teenagers, "How would you improve your community if you had adult support?" "We'd rebuild the houses," they replied. "We'd take empty buildings back from the drug dealers and eliminate crime."
Together they and Stoneman created the first YouthBuild program -- still operating -- and renovated the first YouthBuild building. Stoneman and Leroy Looper founded YouthBuild USA in 1990 to scale up YouthBuild as a proven way to "break the cycle of poverty."
With a federal YouthBuild program which has bipartisan support, operated by the Department of Labor, YouthBuild has spread widely. There are now 273 YouthBuild programs in the nation. Since 1994, more than 100,000 YouthBuild participants have built more than 20,000 units of affordable, increasingly green housing.
In YouthBuild low-income young people work toward the GEDs or high school diplomas while learning job skills. They participate in leadership development, help govern local programs, and engage in service activities and political advocacy in support of YouthBuild. A recent innovation is the YouthBuild post-secondary initiative which helps YouthBuild members to make transitions to college.
Evaluations show YouthBuild has remarkable impact in education, workforce preparation, crime prevention, leadership development and poverty reduction. YouthBuild programs lower recidivism rates for court involved youth by 40 percent. More than half of the enrollees get on track for education and employment. A study by CIRCLE researchers, Pathways into Leadership: A Study of YouthBuild Graduates,, found that while young people generally enter YouthBuild for practical reasons -- the desire get a GED or job skills -- it can have huge civic benefits.
Graduates are "exemplary civic leaders," it reports. "A significant number hold public office or are church leaders such as pastors. More than one third are professional educators or youth workers. Almost all are leaders in their families, workplaces, and communities."
Individual stories in the Huffington Post illustrate such changes. "During the time I was not in school, I fell into the subculture of the streets. I felt alienated from, had no sense of responsibility for, and did not care about the deteriorating conditions of my community," writes Lashon Amado. "My initial goals for myself in the program were to gain my GED and then seek a trade." YouthBuild staff challenged his expectations. They saw "potential and intelligence in me that I had been ignoring for most of my life," Amado writes.
"I gained a discipline," he says, "how to wake up early in the morning... how to stay committed to a task. I also developed professional skills, learned about networking, attended workshops on public speaking and leadership development, and [had] my first exposure to the college experience."
Amado now coordinates a YouthBuild leadership effort, Student VOICES, while going to college at UMass Boston.
Patrick Breton, graduate of YoutBuild Brockton, describes the community's "highly motivational and supportive atmosphere. In addition to the caring and committed staff, I was with like-minded peers."
YouthBuild creates what it calls "positive mini-communities of adults and youth committed to each other's success." As Pathways to Leadership observes, these contrast with other experiences. "In general, major institutions, from schools to law enforcement agencies, treat them as threats to themselves and their communities." Such institutions "offer, if anything, a combination of surveillance, remediating, discipline and punishment to try to alter their destructive tendencies." YouthBuild "treats them as potential civic leaders and invests in their leadership skills."
YouthBuild's philosophy is based on what can be called public love, with both personal and public dimensions. Stoneman lists key personal elements including family-like support and appreciation; care for young people's development; and inspiring and caring role models. "When young people walk into YouthBuild, we need to immediately surprise them with the level of respect they receive and the level of caring that each staff person shows. Our job [is] to offer so much respect and love that it awakens our students' capacity to care."
YouthBuild also stresses public elements such as "power for them over their immediate environment"; "firm and loving challenge to stop self-destructive behavior and negative attitudes"; "high standards and expectations"; "understanding of the proud and unique history of their peoples"; and "heightened awareness of the present day world and their important place in it."
Throughout, meaningful work is emphasized. Scott Emerick, YouthBuild's Vice President, describes the importance of "building something real." Participants "expand their thinking and develop habits of mind that transfer to classrooms and to careers."
Dorothy Stoneman adds, "Young people love producing something of value to their neighbors. Just today on Capital Hill, one student said to a legislator, 'It made me feel so good to see the light in the eyes of the homeowner on the day of key presentation. I knew I had done something that made a difference.'"
Stoneman adds, "I have heard variations on the quote hundreds of times."
YouthBuild holds lessons for all of education. Public work, affection, and respect are important for young people of all backgrounds. Moreover, the movement itself has immense potential for growth -- more than 2,000 different organizations have applied to the federal government to bring YouthBuild to their communities. This spring the DOL has capacity to fund only 75.
For an administration interested in innovative, cross-partisan approaches to addressing the nation's problems, championing the expansion of YouthBuild could have large payoffs.
The Youth Build Movement – Service as Public Work
YouthBuild USA contrasts starkly with sentimental or cynical invocations of service. It uses unabashedly affective terms like "love" to describe its highly effective philosophy of working with low-income and minority young people for their educational and civic growth and development.
The Youth Build Movement – Service as Public Work
YouthBuild USA contrasts starkly with sentimental or cynical invocations of service. It uses unabashedly affective terms like "love" to describe its highly effective philosophy of working with low-income and minority young people for their educational and civic growth and development.
The Youth Build Movement – Service as Public Work
The Return of the Exiles
In the late 1950s, sociologist C. Wright Mills challenged the tendency of writers and other professionals to substitute whining and criticizing for action. He issued a call for what can be called "cultural organizing." "The writers among us bemoan the triviality of the mass media," wrote Mills. "But why do they allow themselves to be used in its silly routines by its silly managers? These media are part of our means of work, which have been expropriated from us... we ought to repossess our cultural apparatus and use it for our own purposes."
For all the differences between Barack Obama and Cornel West -- described in my recent column, "Higher Education and the Movement for a Citizen-Centered Democracy" -- both practice cultural organizing. They engage questions of American identity and the "next chapter of the American story."
Such cultural organizing takes seriously culture-shaping institutions like opinion journals, news and social media, motion pictures, entertainment industries and other sites of cultural production as settings for political struggle about the meaning of America, the identity of the American people, and the future of the society. Obama and West are unusual. The movement for a citizen-centered democracy needs to spread their examples.
In recent years, debates about the meaning and future of America have been dominated by a bellicose right wing, on the one hand, and a progressive intellectual and political establishment disengaged from -- even scornful of -- American identity on the other hand. Gary Gerstle has detailed progressives' secession from questions of American identity since the late sixties in American Crucible. His book is also a splendid account of battles in earlier years between exclusive racialized identities and civic democratic ideals about what America stands for.
Martha Nussbaum, an influential figure in liberal arts education, illustrates such secession in her 1994 essay in Boston Review, "Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism" and books such as Cultivating Humanity and Not For Profit. Nussbaum invokes the Greek tradition of the Stoics as the alternative to patriotism. Stoics held that "the accident of where one is born is just that, an accident; any human being might have been born in any nation." Nussbaum maintains that "emphasis on patriotic pride is both morally dangerous and, ultimately, subversive of some of the worthy goals patriotism sets out to serve [like] worthy moral ideals of justice and equality." She proposes that patriotism "erect[s] barriers between us and our fellow human beings." Her alternative, global citizenship, continues to hold sway in much of education and intellectual life.
I learned a different view in my college years, working in the Citizenship Education Program of the civil rights movement, directed by Dorothy Cotton. The Citizenship School Workbook, developed by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, affirmed that "we love our land -- America!"
The patriotism of the movement differed from bellicose nationalism and from global citizenship. Citizenship schools cultivated respect for other societies and their democratic struggles. As the Workbook put it, "in Africa and Asia new nations are being born as people of color everywhere are demanding the freedom to decide their destiny."
Citizenship schools practiced ground-level cultural organizing, which was in turn amplified in the larger public culture by leaders like Martin Luther King.
The movement's cultural organizing had roots in the populist movements of the 1930s. In The Big Tomorrow, Lary May describes how cultural workers in the film industry sought to change the values of "The American Dream," and had considerable success until the McCarthy repression of the 1950s. In Cultural Front, Michael Denning traces organizing among cultural workers of in the New Deal, including journalists, screenwriters and artists, scholars and educators.
Cultural organizers constituted what Denning calls an "historic bloc" addressing a myriad of issues but united by goals such as the struggle for racial and economic justice, the fight against fascism, and the effort not only to defend but also to deepen democracy. The populist concept of "the people" became central. "'The People' became the central trope of left culture, the imagined ground of political and cultural activity." This involved a contest over the meaning of "the American Dream" and "America" itself. "The figure of 'America' became a locus for battles over the trajectory of U.S. history, the meaning of race, ethnicity, and region in the United States, and the relation between ethnic nationalism, Americanism, and internationalism.... less a sign of 'harmony' than of the social conflicts of the depression."
The idea that professionals' work should aim at developing the civic capacities of people and communities and contribute to the enrichment of democratic culture was widespread. In the Harlem Renaissance, for instance, in the 1920s and 1930s, a range of professionals -- artists and poets, labor organizers, teachers, ministers and musicians, to list a few -- saw themselves as making visible the capacities of ordinary people.
James Weldon Johnson put it this way, "Harlem is more than a community; it is a large-scale laboratory experiment. Through his artistic efforts the Negro is smashing immemorial stereotypes." He saw blacks "impressing upon the national mind the conviction that he is an active and important force in American life; that he is a creator as well as a creature." The Harlem Renaissance meant that the black American was to be seen as "a contributor to the nation's common cultural store; in fine, he is helping to form American civilization."
Civic-minded professionals helped to sustain what Sara Evans and I call "free spaces," places rooted in the life of communities that have a public and democratic character, in which democratic cultural values and practices incubate. In Harlem, such spaces ranged from jazz spots like the Cotton Club to churches, labor study groups, locally owned businesses, union locals, the Harlem library, schools, and theater projects. These settings mingled with fluid boundaries to create a vital local public culture. People learned that what happened in Harlem mattered to "American civilization."
In the Great Depression, free spaces took root not only in Harlem but across the country, in towns as well as in cities, in cultural and educational practices of many different kinds. They amplified and communicated the populist movement.
In 1932, the writer Malcolm Cowley signaled such cultural organizing with his book Exiles' Return, calling for a repatriation of young American intellectuals and writers from Paris to join the emerging democratic movement.
We need a new Exiles' Return.
Harry C. Boyte is the Director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg College and a Senior Fellow at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs.
For all the differences between Barack Obama and Cornel West -- described in my recent column, "Higher Education and the Movement for a Citizen-Centered Democracy" -- both practice cultural organizing. They engage questions of American identity and the "next chapter of the American story."
Such cultural organizing takes seriously culture-shaping institutions like opinion journals, news and social media, motion pictures, entertainment industries and other sites of cultural production as settings for political struggle about the meaning of America, the identity of the American people, and the future of the society. Obama and West are unusual. The movement for a citizen-centered democracy needs to spread their examples.
In recent years, debates about the meaning and future of America have been dominated by a bellicose right wing, on the one hand, and a progressive intellectual and political establishment disengaged from -- even scornful of -- American identity on the other hand. Gary Gerstle has detailed progressives' secession from questions of American identity since the late sixties in American Crucible. His book is also a splendid account of battles in earlier years between exclusive racialized identities and civic democratic ideals about what America stands for.
Martha Nussbaum, an influential figure in liberal arts education, illustrates such secession in her 1994 essay in Boston Review, "Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism" and books such as Cultivating Humanity and Not For Profit. Nussbaum invokes the Greek tradition of the Stoics as the alternative to patriotism. Stoics held that "the accident of where one is born is just that, an accident; any human being might have been born in any nation." Nussbaum maintains that "emphasis on patriotic pride is both morally dangerous and, ultimately, subversive of some of the worthy goals patriotism sets out to serve [like] worthy moral ideals of justice and equality." She proposes that patriotism "erect[s] barriers between us and our fellow human beings." Her alternative, global citizenship, continues to hold sway in much of education and intellectual life.
I learned a different view in my college years, working in the Citizenship Education Program of the civil rights movement, directed by Dorothy Cotton. The Citizenship School Workbook, developed by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, affirmed that "we love our land -- America!"
The patriotism of the movement differed from bellicose nationalism and from global citizenship. Citizenship schools cultivated respect for other societies and their democratic struggles. As the Workbook put it, "in Africa and Asia new nations are being born as people of color everywhere are demanding the freedom to decide their destiny."
Citizenship schools practiced ground-level cultural organizing, which was in turn amplified in the larger public culture by leaders like Martin Luther King.
The movement's cultural organizing had roots in the populist movements of the 1930s. In The Big Tomorrow, Lary May describes how cultural workers in the film industry sought to change the values of "The American Dream," and had considerable success until the McCarthy repression of the 1950s. In Cultural Front, Michael Denning traces organizing among cultural workers of in the New Deal, including journalists, screenwriters and artists, scholars and educators.
Cultural organizers constituted what Denning calls an "historic bloc" addressing a myriad of issues but united by goals such as the struggle for racial and economic justice, the fight against fascism, and the effort not only to defend but also to deepen democracy. The populist concept of "the people" became central. "'The People' became the central trope of left culture, the imagined ground of political and cultural activity." This involved a contest over the meaning of "the American Dream" and "America" itself. "The figure of 'America' became a locus for battles over the trajectory of U.S. history, the meaning of race, ethnicity, and region in the United States, and the relation between ethnic nationalism, Americanism, and internationalism.... less a sign of 'harmony' than of the social conflicts of the depression."
The idea that professionals' work should aim at developing the civic capacities of people and communities and contribute to the enrichment of democratic culture was widespread. In the Harlem Renaissance, for instance, in the 1920s and 1930s, a range of professionals -- artists and poets, labor organizers, teachers, ministers and musicians, to list a few -- saw themselves as making visible the capacities of ordinary people.
James Weldon Johnson put it this way, "Harlem is more than a community; it is a large-scale laboratory experiment. Through his artistic efforts the Negro is smashing immemorial stereotypes." He saw blacks "impressing upon the national mind the conviction that he is an active and important force in American life; that he is a creator as well as a creature." The Harlem Renaissance meant that the black American was to be seen as "a contributor to the nation's common cultural store; in fine, he is helping to form American civilization."
Civic-minded professionals helped to sustain what Sara Evans and I call "free spaces," places rooted in the life of communities that have a public and democratic character, in which democratic cultural values and practices incubate. In Harlem, such spaces ranged from jazz spots like the Cotton Club to churches, labor study groups, locally owned businesses, union locals, the Harlem library, schools, and theater projects. These settings mingled with fluid boundaries to create a vital local public culture. People learned that what happened in Harlem mattered to "American civilization."
In the Great Depression, free spaces took root not only in Harlem but across the country, in towns as well as in cities, in cultural and educational practices of many different kinds. They amplified and communicated the populist movement.
In 1932, the writer Malcolm Cowley signaled such cultural organizing with his book Exiles' Return, calling for a repatriation of young American intellectuals and writers from Paris to join the emerging democratic movement.
We need a new Exiles' Return.
Harry C. Boyte is the Director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg College and a Senior Fellow at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs.