Does reflective patriotism depend on a positive assessment of one’s country’s history?

Posted on August 21, 2026 by Peter

The Educating for American Democracy roadmap asks all educators (and policymakers–and perhaps students) to address this challenge:

“How can we offer an account of U.S. constitutional democracy that is simultaneously honest about the wrongs of the past without falling into cynicism, and appreciative of the founding of the United States without tipping into adulation?”

I suppose my personal assessment of America’s record would lean toward the critical side, emphasizing the centrality of conquest and slavery in the American story and the oscillation of liberation and subjugation in our history. For example, I would want students seriously to consider “the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil.”

That does not mean that my view is entirely negative. I once tried to capture my conflicted take in a palindrome:

America, you Jerusalem reborn!
No profligate, old-world, ruined people, you.
Behold: peace. You’re principle without pain and dishonor.
Dishonor and pain without principle: your peace.
Behold, you people: ruined world!
Old, profligate. No reborn Jerusalem you, America.

How to assess America is an appropriate topic for disagreement and debate. Educating for American Democracy invites students to debates of this kind. The Tocquevillan concept of “reflective patriotism” is broad enough to encompass various responses to America’s overall record.

But my question expands to three related ones.

First, the value-judgment itself: How should we reason about America’s record? How should we think about progress and failure, sin and redemption, promissory notes and accumulated balances? Is it helpful to evaluate the US in comparison to other countries, including the one from which we won independence or the former British colony just to our north? Should we still tremble for our country when we reflect that God is just?

Second, a normative/conceptual issue: Should patriotism depend on a positive assessment of a country’s history? I believe that I am a patriot, and I view my work on topics like civics as an everyday example of patriotism. I’ve described my motivations for visiting Kyiv and Nablus in 2025–in opposition to my government’s policies–as patriotic. But I do not base my commitment to my national community on a positive view its past. That seems too contingent to me, like loving one’s children because they’re so well behaved.

Besides, I would advocate constitutional patriotism as a virtue for people whose national histories are clearly problematic, such as citizens of the Federal Republic of Germany. Like other forms of love, love of country is about concern and sacrifice, not about giving the object a high rating.

Finally, an empirical question: Would teaching students to hold a more favorable view of America cause them to act more patriotically?

As with most empirical questions, the answer is probably: It depends. One set of variables involves the inputs: requirements, assignments, pedagogical methods, and teachers who are prepared for the subject in various ways. Another set of variables involves the students, who vary in age, background assumptions, and experiences with our polity. (For instance, it is likely that America should be presented differently to kindergarteners and teenagers.) And a third set of variables measures the outcomes, which may include beliefs, habits, and dispositions.

I have not found compelling empirical research on this topic. One body of evidence that is gaining attention involves measuring two different psychological constructs. One construct is identifying with one’s country, measured with items like “Being an American is an important part of my self-image” and “In general I’m glad to be an American.” The other construct is national narcissism, an internationally replicated scale that captures a feeling that one’s country has superior qualities that are being disparaged, particularly by foreigners (Cichocka & Cislak 2020). While national identification correlates with support for constitutional democracy, national narcissism predicts authoritarian populist views (Marchlewska et al 2022).

This cross-sectional evidence does not tell us whether schools can promote national identification, nor whether they can do so without enhancing national narcissism. I would favor patriotism without narcissism if schools can accomplish that. But I think that one of the most serious threats to our republic is national narcissism, and I would guard vigilantly against it.

The palindrome is distantly inspired by Yehuda Alharizi’s “Palindrome for a Patron” [12th or 13th century] as translated by Peter Cole and cited by Harold Bloom in “The Lost Jewish Culture,” The New York Review of Books, June 28, 2007. Other sources: Aleksandra Cichocka, & Aleksandra Cislak. “Nationalism as collective narcissism.” Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 34 (2020): 69-74; Marchlewska, Marta, Aleksandra Cichocka, Aleksandra Furman, and Aleksandra Cislak. “Who respects the will of the people? Support for democracy is linked to high secure national identity but low national narcissism.” British Journal of Social Psychology 61, no. 2 (2022): 599-621. See also: American exceptionalism, revisited; anxieties about American exceptionalism; Teaching Civics in Kyiv; more on teaching patriotism (2006); a pluralistic 250th and a palindrome (2007).

on translation as spiritual practice

Posted on August 17, 2026 by Peter

“The feeling that the world is a bounded whole–that is the mystical.” — Wittgenstein

The Spanish word quedar can be translated as to remain, to stay, to meet, to fit, to suit (as in Ese color te queda bien), to be located, to end up, to agree, or to be left with (as in Me quedan 20 euros).

One of those meanings is “to agree.” That English verb can be translated back into Spanish as estar de acuerdo, acordar, convenir, coincidir, aceptar, or, again, quedar.

One of those meanings is acordar. Rendered back in English, that verb can mean to agree, decide, or make an arrangement, or–if it’s in a reflexive form–to remember. In turn, “to decide” could be conveyed in Spanish by decidir (or decidirse), resolver, acordar or determinar.

I chose quedar because it has a famously wide range of meanings, a bit like rendre or tenir in French. But notice that each of the words that I’ve mentioned connects to a unique list of words in the other language. This is typical. Putting two languages together creates a pattern of intertwined connections, like an arabesque design.

When you study a language, you memorize foreign words as sets of distinct words in your home language. In a given context, quedar means one thing, such as “to stay” or else “to agree.” A translator should know–or look up–the full list of meanings for each word and must pick the best one for each sentence. Sometimes there is no single best choice.

But once you know the language reasonably well, a word no longer decomposes into several words in a different language. Now it covers its own space. Presumably (I don’t have good enough Spanish to know) each use of quedar carries an implicit trace of its whole range of meanings.

Todo pasa y todo queda, 
pero lo nuestro es pasar, 
pasar haciendo caminos, 
caminos sobre el mar. 

Everything passes and everything stays,
But ours is to cease to be. 
As we go, we make a highway,
A highway on the sea. 

Antonio Machado, Proverbios y Cantares (1912): XLIV

Here I’ve rendered the first line with the verbs “to pass” and “to stay,” but I had other choices. Pasar could mean to go through, to happen (¿que pasa?), to spend time, etc. And we have already seen the range of meanings for quedar. Its other senses are missing in the English word “stay,” but that verb has its own range of meanings, including to visit and to prevent something from happening. Those are absent in Machado’s original.

I chose “to pass” for several reasons, including the sonic resemblance to pasar as well as some vague sense of English allusions, such as “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh” (Ecclesiastes). I chose “to stay” as a single syllable that was a near-rhyme for “ways.” Translation is not only about matching words but also about syntax, rhythm, and sound.

Artificial Intelligence is good at translating prose. It generally chooses an appropriate equivalent for each word. Thanks to AI tools, I have been able to read articles in languages, such as Japanese, of which I know nothing. I have also developed a careful practice of asking Claude to list all the dictionary definitions of words in languages, such as Sanskrit and Pali, that interest me. I hope that viewing these lists gives me some sense of how the words work in their original languages, although I must look through that glass darkly.

What AI cannot do is give a person the experience of parsing the whole world a bit differently by beginning to think in a different language. In turn, that experience teaches us that anyone’s model of the world is limited and contingent, and much always remains beyond anyone’s grasp.

A language is a whole system of meanings. It allows us to work with the world, yet it coexists with other systems that present the world differently. Those other systems include not only human languages (which are, after all, rather similar and interconnected), but also other consciousnesses. To glimpse this plurality is to see our own world as if from beyond it.

In the detail from a 13th-century Persian mihrab that accompanies this post, each arabesque field could stand for a pair of intertwined human languages, but there are also fields across the boundaries formed by the Quranic calligraphy. And the whole mihrab is a threshold to the beyond.

Wittgenstein writes, “Das Gefühl der Welt als begrenztes Ganzes ist das mystische” (Tractatus 6:45). Acknowledging that this sentence could be translated in many ways, I will render it: “The feeling that the world is a bounded whole–that is the mystical.”

It’s another way of saying that we make our highways on the sea.

See also: Machado’s Glory is Never What I’ve Sought and Highways on the Sea; paradigms of attention; why the humanities could never be automated; and thinking both sides of the limits of human cognition. Photo credit: detail of a mihrab from Kashan (1226) in the Pergamon Museum, Berlin, via Wikimedia Commons.

Universities Must Start Graduating More Good Citizens, by Anna Saavedra and Peter Levine

Posted on August 13, 2026 by Peter

This post is by Anna Saavedra, Director of the Center for Civic Society at the USC Schaeffer Institute for Public Policy and Government Service, and me. I am currently a Nonresident Senior Scholar at the Schaeffer Institute as well as the Lincoln Filene Professor of Citizenship & Public Affairs at Tufts University’s Jonathan Tisch College of Civic Life.

Seven in 10 adults feel the U.S. higher education system is going in the wrong direction, and half say American democracy is functioning poorly, or very poorly. One proposed solution could tackle both problems simultaneously: American colleges and universities could require civics curricula for all freshmen.

Students often arrive on campus without the insights, skills, and dispositions that are essential to the kind of civic behavior that sustains a democratic republic. Universities have a clear role to play in helping them become engaged, knowledgeable citizens, and to do so with academic rigor.

Most recently, a faculty panel at Yale urged the creation of a civic education initiative that would reach every freshman. Institutions considering such a step will face challenges, including how to staff a university-wide mandated curriculum. Presuming that practical problems could be overcome, any university would still have to address another hard question: What should a civics curriculum teach?

A lot will depend on how a university and its faculty views the major weaknesses and threats to the republic. For example, a course focused on America’s 250-year history might improve knowledge and appreciation of the Constitution and political traditions. One that encourages dialogues and discussions involving diverse perspectives could be a counterweight to polarization and social media trolling. Global challenges, such as climate change and disruptive technologies, could be the topic of a class that encourages students to develop solutions, perhaps with a large dose of scientific literacy.

The drive to improve civic education will not yield a single national template, nor should it. A civics course built around the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence looks different from one anchored in diverse political and economic theories, or from a program centered on community-based service, or from a practicum in public policy.

Each approach develops different competencies, and there is no reason to expect—or demand—convergence. Diversity of curricula is inevitable and desirable. Institutions need to articulate the skills, knowledge, and values they believe citizenship requires, and design programs deliberately aimed at those goals.

Skeptics worry that such a curriculum risks becoming either superficial or politicized. A course that reduces citizenship to a fact checklist will fail to inspire; one that substitutes advocacy for analysis will also fall short. Avoiding these pitfalls requires intellectual humility, institutional discipline, and a genuine commitment to pluralism—to engaging students across lines of disagreement rather than confirming the views they already hold.

Fortunately, universities need not start from scratch. Existing efforts offer resources, frameworks, and communities of practice. The states of Florida and Arizona already require a civics course for all public university students, and some private institutions have adopted requirements of various types. Tulane University, for example, requires all undergraduates to spend two semesters in courses that involve service in their community.

The greatest risk is inaction. For too long, many universities have assumed students arrive with, or will passively acquire, the aptitude and knowledge necessary for democratic life. Civic ignorance is widespread, confidence is uneven, and engagement is often shallow or polarized. Higher education cannot solve these problems alone, but it can no longer disclaim responsibility.

The Yale committee is right to insist universities take the goal of citizenship development seriously. Doing so will require resources, creativity, and, above all, a willingness to engage difficult questions about what it means to be a U.S. citizen in the 21st century. Today’s undergraduates are tomorrow’s voters, jurors, public servants, and community leaders. The quality of their civic education will shape their own lives and the health of the republic itself.

See also: “a civic common reading program“

a civic common reading program

Posted on August 10, 2026 by Peter

In the Alliance for Civics in the Academy, we say:

Civic education should be a shared intellectual activity, grounded in texts, aimed at building a practical capacity for listening to and acting together with others, including those of differing beliefs.

I believe that citizenship or civic engagement is about more than texts and spoken words. It is also about work–and sometimes, sacrifice. We can learn to be effective citizens by serving or fighting or working instead of talking. Acts of citizenship can literally be silent.

Still, authentic words are scarce today. Despite the torrent of gigabytes of characters and sounds that human beings–and now also machines–circulate every second, we are at risk of losing considered words, the words of embodied human beings who have memories and hopes and the capacity to suffer and who speak or write to engage other people. Hence I believe that today’s civic education should emphasize slow, attentive reading and the creation of new words.

In Our Declaration, Danielle Allen recalls teaching working-class students in night school in Chicago. She writes,

To my embarrassment, however, I never read the Declaration slowly, the way I had been taught to read, until I did so with my night students. It’s a cliché to say that we fell in love, but we did. Its words became necessary for us; they became our Declaration. Through reading them slowly, we came into our inheritance: an understanding of freedom and equality, and of the value of finding the right words.

Here is a proposal for a program that could be adopted across a college or university as part of its civic mission. It builds on existing “common read” or “common book” programs, but it is a bit different. Those programs tend to encourage every student–or every incoming student–to read a recent book. Often, the author visits, and the book is incorporated in various courses and special events.

There is suggestive evidence that these programs bring academic and psychological benefits (Soria 2015). But they would not necessarily enhance civic learning. And I am skeptical that most students will actually read and discuss an assigned book, especially post-COVID and in the era of AI.

I would propose the following tweaks:

The chosen text should be concise yet very rich, so that it is possible to read it (possibly aloud) before discussing it and producing a response–all in real time.

It should address the core civic question, the question of collective agency. In other words, the text should be about groups discussing “What should we do?” and acting accordingly.

The text should generally be old enough that it has generated criticism and creative responses or echoes from various perspectives. These responses can be recommended along with the main assigned text.

Students would produce their own responses to the text in the form of words (written or spoken), images, music, or performances, either as individuals or in teams. With exceptions, such as the use of recording devices, they would make these products without the assistance of machines.

This program would include all students, from incoming undergraduates to residents in a medical school. Whether to require or merely encourage participation would depend on the institution’s rules and culture, and might vary within an institution.

The institution would produce a discussion guide and offer professional development opportunities for teachers, but instructors and facilitators could approach the text in their own ways, grounded in their own disciplines, professions, methods, and interests.

Since a new text would be chosen each year, a student in a multi-year academic program would experience a diversity of texts. Here are some illustrative examples:

Addams, Jane, “The Subjective Necessity of Social Settlements”
Arendt, Hannah, “Prologue” to The Human Condition
Auden, W.H, “September 1, 1939”
Brecht, Bertolt, “To Future Generations”
Brooks, Gwendolyn, “The Lovers of the Poor”
Dewey, John, The Public and its Problems, chapter 5 (selection)
Douglass, Frederick, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”
Du Bois, W.E.B., “The General Strike,” chapter 4 of Black Reconstruction in America (selection)
Hall, Prince, “A Charge, delivered to the African Lodge”
Heaney, Seamus, “From the Republic of Conscience”
King, Martin Luther, Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail”
King, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop”
Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence (2026)
Lincoln, Abraham, The Second Inaugural
Lord, Audre, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”
Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, The Book of Nehemiah
Reagan, Ronald, Speech at Pointe du Hoc, France (June 6, 1984)
Thucydides, The Melian Dialogue, from The Peloponnesian War (5.84-116)
Tocqueville, Alexis de, “Of the Use Which the Americans Make of Public Associations In Civil Life”
The Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy’s Great Binding Law
The Declaration of Independence
The United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Civic Studies in the Rust Belt: on the tempos of change

Posted on August 5, 2026 by Peter

I’m heading home from Dayton, OH. Tomorrow, we’ll go to my hometown, Syracuse, NY for a visit. Each city has lost about half of its peak population of about a quarter of a million people since the later 1900s. The main cause in both cases has been deindustrialization; hardly any factory jobs remain in either city. In both cases, Interstate highways were deliberately built on top of a thriving Black business district (although Syracuse is now finally working on replacing its elevated stretch of I-81). These cities once offered large department stores, opera theaters, and crowded downtown streets. Today, both communities, with their many resilient and creative people, show some green shoots of civic revival.

I was in Dayton for a Summer Institute of Civic Studies that was graciously hosted by the Kettering Foundation; I played a supporting role. This was the 17th Civic Studies institute that I have led or co-led or supported since 2009, They have taken place in many locations, from Ukraine to Mexico. My most recent one was in Kyiv last May. (Among these 17 institutes, I am not counting a one-day class that I offered in Nablus, the West Bank, last November, nor many semesters of teaching similar material to undergraduates ay Tufts.)

The Dayton Summer Institute was one of my favorites, in part because of the location and the fact that our cohort combined several activists from Dayton’s civil society with visitors from far away. Thanks to our Kettering Foundation hosts, we mixed seminar-style discussions of demanding texts with a city tour, a meal in a host family’s home, and other local experiences. And we held relatively sustained conversations about examples of civic action from Dayton, including a food coop and political reforms.

These rich conversations made me think about the many tempos of social and political change.

There is the slow drip of de-industrialization, which removed about 2,500 people from Dayton each year for decades. Many changes happen that way–gradually and then suddenly, as Hemingway said of bankruptcy.

There is an oscillation of progress and regression. Consider Dayton’s history in the Underground Railroad, the Great Migration, the segregation of many of its institutions, the 1966 riot/uprising, the election of a first Black mayor in 1970, the disappearance of investment and jobs, and even the Trump Administration’s attacks on Haitians in nearby Springfield.

There is the tempo of national and global politics. It is a cliché that change happens rapidly in modern times. Actually, I would describe the political and social order of the USA from 1970-2016 as quite stable, more so than in previous eras. But the last few years have seen dizzying changes, from Obama to Trump to Biden to Trump; from Tea Party to MAGA to Black Lives Matter to MAGA to the resistance in Minnesota; and in and out of a global pandemic–with Artificial Intelligence now threatening to change everything again.

There are the life trajectories of human beings, some of whom grow into leaders and elders over many decades.

And the trajectories of organizations. We were honored to visit Dayton’s former 5th Street YMCA. Black men with limited means founded this organization in 1928, at a time when Dayton’s downtown Y allowed only limited and segregated access to Blacks. (They could only swim on Thursday evenings, for example). These men raised the money to construct a fine building that is now on the National Register of Historic Places, with a facade that bears the names of the Daytonian poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and William A. Hunton, a Black man who worked in the national YMCA at the time and helped to authorize this branch.

In those days, Fifth Street was a busy urban corridor of Black business, including two movie theaters and many professional offices. Now it is bisected by an Interstate and largely depopulated, with quite a lot of grass on plots from which the buildings have been removed. But the well-restored former YMCA building belongs to a significant nonprofit organization, Miami Valley Housing Opportunities.

Somehow, we must reserve some of our energy and attention for long, slow processes–helping young people grow into leaders, building organizations, restoring landmarks from previous struggles, and making our communities more inviting–even as we react effectively to the rhythm of daily crises.

the Gulf equilibrium

Posted on August 3, 2026 by Peter

At this hour, the headlines say that Donald Trump has called off strikes on Iran because negotiations are almost concluded, while Iran denies that there are any talks. Maybe an agreement will soon be signed, but I think not.

Financial Times commentator Chris Giles argues that the US-Iran war is in a “bounded equilibrium.” Whenever the combatants exchange attacks or ramp up their rhetoric, crude oil prices rise. As the price of a barrel approaches $100, Donald Trump worries about becoming the new Herbert Hoover and restrains US attacks, claiming that an amazing deal is on the table. However, as tankers begin to traverse the Strait of Hormuz, the price of a barrel sinks toward $70 and the Iranian regime attacks ships or land targets in the region to reassert control.

As a result, the world is stuck in a range that can be measured in terms of oil prices ($70-100), the number of ships moving through the Strait (zero-80/day) and fatalities from airstrikes and drones (zero-540/day). The first trend moves inversely to the other two.

The Institute for the Study of War tends to interpret daily changes in Iran’s posture as the result of competition among factions in the regime, some more bellicose than others. (See yesterday’s report, for example.) But that form of explanation is compatible with Giles’ equilibrium theory. Perhaps aggressive factions tend to gain influence whenever oil prices slide.

For the Iranian regime, the status quo is tolerable, but they risk losing leverage when shipping goes back to normal. On the other hand, they do incur costs when the US strikes Iranian targets. These twin pressures keep their behavior within a range.

This current equilibrium is not truly stable. Although I wouldn’t be surprised if the status quo lasts for months or even a couple of years, the underlying situation is subject to breakdown in various ways.

The US economy may take a major hit once global oil reserves run out, or simply as a result of sustained energy shortages plus other vulnerabilities, such as an overpriced stock market. If a serious US recession follows the attacks on Iran, that may deter future US aggression and make Iran less interested in developing other deterrents, such as nuclear weapons. In a recession, Trump might be motivated to entice the Iranian government to reopen the Strait by offering security guarantees, sanctions relief, or pressure on Israel.

On the other hand, the Iranian economy could collapse, or the Iranian regime could face other pressures that persuade its leaders to reopen the strait without tolls. I find this outcome harder to envision, but it is possible.

In the meantime, I would tune out daily news about negotiations. I would not use the oil futures market to predict the future, although the current price does indicate the situation of the day.

The current situation may continue long enough that Democratic candidates in the 2028 presidential race will start having to offer solutions.

where is the attention?

Posted on July 29, 2026 by Peter

Sometimes, my dog wonders something about me. Perhaps: Will I will play with him?

He stares at my face, which means he must look quite far above his own head. His nostrils may twitch, and I guess that he is gathering as much data as he can with his nose. His head is cocked, which signals to me that he has a question. His ears (being floppy) are harder to interpret, but usually you can tell that they are tensed forward to listen.

Where is he when he attends this way? One valid answer: between his nose and his tail. Or: in the space contained by his fur.

But it would be a normal use of the English language to say that his eyes–or his mind–are on me. Presumably, he is not thinking about his tail, whereas he is intentionally focused on my face. His eyesight is directed, so that he is not looking anywhere other than my face. Even the space between us and behind me is presumably blurred for him. I am the “figure,” and the rest is the “ground.”

The senses of smell and sound are less directed. Information can reach a nose and ears from any direction. But Luca is probably trying to screen out other olfactory and auditory data and lean into information about me that may be carried by smells and sounds.

He cannot feel me from a distance, and he is probably inattentive to the things that he can feel, such as the ground below him–unless it moves. He is not focused on touch because it will not tell him whether I am going to play with him.

Thus, if you ask where is he when he wonders about me, a plausible answer would be: In a zone centered on my face. But my face is merely a source of information, so another answer could be: He is in relation to me. Or: We are together. After all, the purpose of the cocked head is to tell me that he is attending to me so that I will be more likely to answer his question.

This act of attention has duration. Luca sustains his gaze, which is why I infer that he is attentive. Besides, he is interested in whether I will play with him in the future because I have played with him in the past. I don’t know whether a dog thinks about memories or plans, but humans certainly do. And neither memories nor plans are in the present.

If Luca already knew what he wanted to know, he would no longer pay attention. Nor would he attend if there were nothing present that might answer his question. Maurice Merleau-Ponty says that attention arises “in the process of learning” (1945, p. 34). He defines the “attention itself” as “circumscribed ignorance, an intention that is still ’empty’ but already determined” by what is really there.

Let’s say that any sentient being is its attention, or at least that its attention is a very significant aspect of the being. I have explored that thesis a bit here.

Our attention has a location that is related to the location of our body, but the two are not coterminous. In fact, we are rarely aware of most of our body, and we cannot become aware of some parts or aspects of it, such as the blood in our veins. Although Luca’s sensory capacity is concentrated inside his skull, he is not attentive to his skull and can never even see the back of it.

Still, the body has an important relationship to attention. If something happens to the body, we may immediately notice it and may be compelled to attend. I pulled a muscle in my back on Monday, and that certainly got my attention. If the body dies, the attention ends.

Our attention has a location in time that is related to the present hour and minute, but the two are not identical. We can be deeply engaged with a memory or a fear or hope for the future. And an instant of attention may make sense only as one part of an extended act. I may attend to one word while writing this whole post, but no word means much alone.

Two or more attentions can be connected, with each serving as the object of the other. Then it may be more meaningful to ask where we are than where I am.

Where? and When? seem to be questions about limitations. We are finite, limited creatures who cannot be everywhere or last forever. However, we are not limited in quite the way we may assume when we identify with our body at the moment that is shown on a clock. Our place and time are different from that.

Source: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Gallimard, 1945). (“La conscience en train d’apprendre” is “cette ignorance circonscrite, de cette intention <<vide>> encore, mais déjà déterminée“). The metaphor of figure and ground also comes from this text.

preparing for a threat to the fall election

Posted on July 27, 2026 by Peter

Under the headline “This Is What’s Keeping Me Up at Night,” New York Times columnist (and Charles F. Kettering Foundation Senior Fellow) David French sketches a disturbing scenario.

The Democrats may win a majority of House seats this fall. Donald Trump and many allies would decry the election as rigged and corrupt. When the House convenes in January, several defeated Republicans would file challenges, which the Committee on House Administration would consider. Controlled, as now, by Republicans, this committee would refer the final decision to the full House, also with its current composition. The Constitution says that “Each house shall be the judge of the elections, returns and qualifications of its own members,” and the Supreme Court has clarified that there is no appeal to the courts. The House majority could vote to seat several incumbents who actually lost their elections, thus retaining Republican control.

[July 31: I have received well-informed feedback that the newly elected House would consider any challenges. I think that is different from what David French suggests, and I hope it is true!]

To accomplish this outcome, the House Republican majority of 218 would have to hold together. A disproportionate number of the defeated Republican incumbents would come from the party’s more centrist and institutionalist wing. Although they would have an incentive to award their seats to themselves, that would be crossing a Rubicon. If several defeated candidates were seated, then arguably the current Republic would have ended just after its 250th anniversary. That fact would probably deter at least three Republicans, thus defeating the effort. And we might hope that many more, including the Speaker, would avoid the temptation.

But the risk is high enough that civil society must prepare. No republic can depend on the self-denying virtue of its current leaders. We should certainly expect step one: very prominent efforts to depict the election as stolen.

Citing Minnesota organizer Doran Schrantz and others, Micah Sifry envisions a mass response involving “coordinated work stoppages, business closures, and economic withdrawal, to put pressure on business elites and corporations.” I assume that the most effective time for such efforts would be while the House Administration Committee considers challenges to the election, although resistance should persist and grow in the event of an adverse vote in the full House.

Last winter, Minnesotans provided an example of a large-scale and disciplined civil action that depended on prior training and coordination. Robert F. Worth reported that 65,000 residents of the Twin Cities received training in civil resistance. Now is the time for more such preparation, and Sifry recommends Indivisible’s Hands Off Our Vote national kick-off call on Thursday July 30 and Freedom Trainers’ election defense resources. I’m also tracking the 10 Steps Campaign and Vote Riders, among othes.

These groups will tend–overall–to draw people who want the Republicans to lose the election in the first place. That category includes me. However, it is also important for people who may vote Republican to defend the election results, whoever wins. They can be more persuasive inside the House GOP caucus.

I doubt that 218 House Republicans will vote to seat candidates whom they know just lost the election. But it is plausible that 218 Republicans will convince themselves that the election really was stolen by Democrats, relying on lurid charges from the president that circulate in right-wing media. Conservatives will be the best sources of countervailing information.

As examples of efforts to organize and train people in defense of the election that are more likely to draw conservatives, I would cite The Advancing Liberty Coalition, Vet the Vote, and Mormon Women for Ethical Government, among others. Some of these groups emphasize recruiting people as volunteer poll workers while encouraging them to defend the election if necessary.

As Sherilyn Ifill wrote last year: “People are doing things. You will meet those people when you start doing things.”

what it would take for the public to trust science

Posted on July 22, 2026 by Peter

On July 19, the President posted on the social media platform that he owns:

The National Academy of Sciences has historically published analytical Scientific Manuals expressly for our Federal Judiciary. Of course, the Academy has been run by Radical Left Dumocrats who, it turns out, published fraudulent, biased, and misleading Manuals on Climate Change. These bogus Manuals were used by Judges to decide massive “Climate Change” Cases, and have created huge losses across our Country. These Manuals have been totally DISCREDITED. Our Nation’s Federal Judges deserve Facts and Science, not Political Fraud and False Science on Climate. With this TRUTH, I hereby order Federal Suspension and Debarment Officials to review this conduct. Our Taxpayers should not be funding Climate Fraud, and Judges should never have relied upon it. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP

When I heard about this post, I assumed that I would trust the National Academies manual that Trump was denouncing. This was an interesting reaction because I had not seen the document.

I then looked at it (and you can too). It struck me as cogent, informative, and cautious. But I do not independently know whether its claims are true.

Nor do its authors. For the most part, the document refers to large, organized groups, such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the National Research Council. But consider a scientist whose work is very close to the natural phenomena: collecting and measuring atmospheric samples. This person knows what they are doing but not what everyone else’s samples show, let alone how to build the instruments that they all use. And current CO₂ concentrations are only some of the variables that we must measure to understand the climate. The vast majority of what any individual scientist knows comes from reports of what others have done.

As the report that Trump denounced says,

The Earth’s climate system is enormous and complex, consisting of many nested and interlinked subsystems, including the atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, lithosphere, and biosphere. …. Owing to the breadth and complexity of the climate system, climate research spans many different scientific disciplines. For example, research on the physical science of climate and climate change (i.e., understanding of the physical properties of the climate system and how it is changing) encompasses: (1) mathematics and statistics; (2) basic sciences, e.g., physics and chemistry; (3) earth sciences, e.g., atmospheric sciences, climatology, physical geography, oceanography, meteorology, hydrology, biogeochemistry, and cryospheric sciences; and (4) computer sciences and data analysis. Most climate research involves collaboration across these different fields (National Academies 2025)

The chemists must trust the oceanographers, who must trust the computer scientists. In fact, each chemist must trust the other chemists.

Perhaps all of science depends on trust, although that is less obvious in classic cases, like Galileo dropping objects from the Tower of Pisa, than in climate science. The study of the earth’s climate is intensely collaborative, involving many more people than could ever know each other. It depends on the Integrated Assessment Models, which have developed for more than fifty years (Van Beek, Hajer, Pelzer, van Vuuren & Cassen 2020). Anyone who contributes to these models must presume that the previous contributions have been generally reliable, even when new data changes some of the current findings.

Why do I trust those models? Why do I trust the National Academies summaries of them, or Karen Zraick’s New York Times article that drew my attention to Trump’s “TRUTH”?

On one hand, I have no doubt that the cautiously presented conclusions of the National Academies are valid. On the other hand, my confidence has a sociological explanation. Institutions like universities, scientific disciplines, and the Times have treated me well all my life. I have benefited from operating with an overall model that incorporates confidence in what these institutions say plus direct observations that concur with their findings. I have observed the climate get hotter in New England, but I only believe that this is a global trend and a function of humans’ burning carbon because I believe in institutions, like The New York Times, that report on institutions like the National Academies.

Few people are treated as well or have as much experience with these institutions as I do; I am a college professor in the United States. It is unreasonable to ask people to trust institutions that are unaccountable to them and distant from them. I think that scientific institutions can adjust their behavior to be somewhat less distant from the public, but they cannot bear that responsibility alone.

The classic solution has been intermediary organizations that obtain people’s trust and then independently present information. An important example was the 20th century city or town newspaper. In 1972, the General Social Survey (GSS) found that 69 percent of Americans read a newspaper daily.

Some 20th century US newspapers had specific social or ideological slants, but the market was dominated by local monopoly publications. Like the broadcast television networks of the same period, newspapers would have presented the American Academies’ position on the climate as scientific truth. In those days, Trump’s response would have been much more marginal.

In 1998 and 2008, the GSS asked people whether we trust too much in science. In both years, those who never read a newspaper were much more likely to distrust science than those who did read one. When I made a model that controled for age, race, gender, and years of education, reading the newspaper still predicted less distrust in science, net of the other factors (p <.001).

This doesn’t mean that newspapers caused people to trust science. It could be the other way around–people who trusted science subscribed to newspapers. But I think that newspapers devoted resources and skill to building trust and then guided people’s reactions to other institutions, such as science.

The recipe that sustained metropolitan daily newspapers during the 1900s included hard news plus human-interest stories, comics, sports, gossip, and other features aimed at various members of each household, all funded by a combination of revenue from subscribers and advertisers. Once the internet captured advertising revenue, this model disintegrated. By 2014, just one-quarter of respondents told the GSS that they read a newspaper daily, and the GSS subsequently retired the question, as it ceased to be a useful measure of news consumption.

All intermediary institutions have “business models” of some kind. A 20th century newspaper relied on subscribers and advertisers. An American high school typically gets most of its resources from local property taxes in return for training and minding the community’s teenagers and providing sports and entertainment. Among other things, a school teaches scientific findings and respect for science. Similarly, a public university in the United States offers job training and credentials, health services, quasi-professional sports, patented inventions, and high culture in return for tuition, donations, state subsidies, and fees. Meanwhile, the big social media platforms use algorithms to attract attention, which they sell to advertisers.

Each business model determines the institution’s results, including its impact on trust or distrust for science. Metropolitan daily newspapers tended to boost trust, while today’s social media degrade it.

Trust in science is not self-evidently good; in fact, we can trust too much. And the fact that most newspapers were local monopolies was problematic. They generated trust, but arguably at the expense of freedom. The question is whether we can invent business models for the 21st century that yield genuinely civic outcomes.

Sources: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2025. Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence: Fourth Edition. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press; Van Beek, L., Hajer, M., Pelzer, P., van Vuuren, D., & Cassen, C. (2020). Anticipating futures through models: the rise of Integrated Assessment Modelling in the climate science-policy interface since 1970. Global Environmental Change, 65, 102191.

paradigms of attention

Posted on July 20, 2026 by Peter

Attention as selecting information to accomplish a task

Imagine that you run a laboratory in which you give people or animals stimuli (for instance, showing them shapes on a screen or making sounds) and you record their responses.

Sometimes, your subjects miss things in interesting ways. For example, in the Invisible Gorilla experiment, viewers are told to count how many times players pass a basketball, and most fail to notice a person in a gorilla suit who walks across the court (Chabris and Simon 2011).

This general approach dates back at least as far as Wilhelm Wundt’s psychology lab in Leipzig in the 1880s. Since World War II, psychologists have often posed an analogy between their subjects and computers–specifically, the large class of computers called “von Neumann Machines” (van Neumann 1945). These familiar devices have components that collect data (keyboards, cables, cameras), components that apply stored instructions to process data, components that store data, and components (such as printers and screens) that output the computed data.

Von Neuman sketched the design of a “very high speed automatic digital computing system” and then directed the team that built a prototype computer at the Institute for Advanced Study from 1948-51. According to his sketch, this machine’s computing function, its command function, and its memory function would “correspond to the associative neurons in the human nervous system.” The equivalents of our sensory and motor neurons would be “the input and the output organs of the device” (2.6).

If indeed a person or an animal is like a von Neumann machine, and it fails to notice something, the likely causes would seem to be a limitation of sensory function, a scarcity of computing power, or a failure of memory-storage. For example, if we miss the guy in the gorilla suit–as I did when I was first shown the video–it’s either because something was wrong with my eyes, I was focusing all my processing power on counting the basketball passes, or (conceivably) I saw the guy dressed as a gorilla but I failed to remember him. Most explanations emphasize limitations in our processing power, or “information-bottlenecks.” Then “attention” is whatever process we use to direct our finite processing capacity.

Attention as care for another person

Now imagine that you are observing two friends in a conversation. One tells the other a sad story, and you think that she seeks an expression of sympathy or compassion from the other. But instead of displaying any emotion in response to the story, the other begins to talk about himself.

Here it is unlikely that we will think of a computer or an information-bottleneck. The problem is not that Harry is receiving too much data to be able to process Sally’s story. The problem is motivational. Harry does not care enough about Sally, possibly because he cares too much about himself.

Von Neumann machines have no motives and do not care. Their designers do. Engineers can make machines that scan patients to assist with medical care or that identify enemy soldiers to destroy them. Such differences are crucial, but they are not caused by the machines. They are encoded in the machines’ design, which could be different and which can be changed. Further upstream is an institution, such as a hospital or an army, that paid for (or ordered) the machine to be built. Behind the institution are the people who designed, supported, and led it.

Thus, when we think about this second case, we are likely to ask what Harry and Sally want and possibly what the culture and society have taught or encouraged each of them to do–not about their cognitive limitations.

In fact, people can overcome their inability to grasp or process another’s story by devoting more time to it. In lab experiments, reaction-time is often treated as evidence of attention, but in relationships, the time that we devote to attending anything or anyone is a variable under our control. Indeed, some people choose to devote their whole lives to attending to one thing.

Attention as respect for something beyond me

Another example comes from Iris Murdoch:

If I am learning, for instance, Russian, I am confronted by an authoritative structure which commands my respect. The task is difficult and the goal is distant and perhaps never entirely attainable. My work is a progressive revelation of something which exists independently of me. Attention is rewarded by a knowledge of reality. Love of Russian leads me away from myself towards something alien to me, something which my consciousness cannot take over, swallow up, deny or make unreal (2001, p. 87)

In his beautiful and important book, Shop Class as Soulcraft, Matthew B. Crawford quotes this passage and suggests that the same is true of “any hard discipline, whether it be gardening, structural engineering, or Russian,” when “one submits to things that have their own intractable ways. Such hardness is at odds with the ontology of consumerism” (p. 65).

In these cases, a person attends less to another human being than to a complex and integrated object, whether it is a motorcycle, a natural language, or a garden. Duration is a sign of attention. I am not attending to a foreign language unless I commit considerable time to studying it.

The important questions about attention

I have learned from the laboratory research on attention, and I am sure that I would learn more if I read more and would benefit from that study. But this whole literature seems only distantly relevant (if at all) to urgent concerns about attention:

What should we attend to?
Who should we attend to?
What should we do when we notice something about someone else?
Do we attend too much to some things? (Candidates: ourselves, our own pleasures and aversions, trivia, doomscrolling)
Do we attend too little to other things? (Candidates: nature, people who suffer)
Which actions tend to involve worthy attention? (Candidates: skilled manual crafts, “deep reading,” friendship, prayer)
Who and what affects our attention? Is their impact positive or negative?
How can we design contexts in which attention is more often beneficial?

Why the first paradigm came to dominate

Graham Burnett (2026) offers a compelling history of the idea that attention means selecting information to accomplish a task. He mentions that “a huge percentage of the laboratory research on human attention conducted in laboratories in the United States across the watershed decades of the last century was hot-war- and Cold War–directed inquiry into human abilities to track and trigger on a stimulus—work centrally concerned with military operations” (Burnett 2026). Partly due to funding from the Defense Department, but not only for that reason, psychologists used increasingly sophisticated tools for measuring responses to stimuli. I would also emphasize the powerful metaphor of von Neumann-style computers after 1945 and the genuinely fascinating, interdisciplinary field of cybernetics, which peaked in the 1960s. All of these factors help explain why so much research has treated attention as selection of data to process.

Burnett says, “if in the 1950s the entire budget of the U.S. Department of Defense had been rerouted to fund the attentional research of a set of Tibetan monks, we would surely have inherited by 2020 quite a different scientific literature on human attention. Probably less essentially ‘cybernetic,’ and, it stands to reason, less focused on a variety of operationally oriented ‘tasks.'”

As Burnett acknowledges, the fact that any body of research has contingent reasons does not invalidate it. Psychology labs have generated real findings about attention as a solution to cognitive limitations. It’s just that we need to understand other phenomena that also deserve the word “attention” and that seem barely connected to this experimental literature.

Weil’s alternative

Simone Weil (1909-1943) suggests a very different agenda. She begins her short essay (or long aphorism) on “Attention and Will” by announcing, “It is not about understanding new things, but—through patience, effort, and method—coming to understand self-evident truths with one’s whole being.”

As if imagining a psychology lab (although I doubt she had that in mind), she writes, “The will has power only over a few movements of a few muscles, associated with the model of moving nearby objects. I can will to place my hand flat on the table. If inner purity, or inspiration, or truth in thought were necessarily associated with postures of this kind, they could be objects of the will.” But the will is not what concerns Weil. “Attention is an entirely different thing.”

A bit later, she writes,

The poet creates beauty through attention fixed upon reality. The same is true of the act of love. To know that this man—who is hungry and thirsty—truly exists just as I do: that is enough; the rest follows of its own accord. The authentic, pure values ?of truth, beauty, and goodness in human activity arise from one and the same act: a certain application of full attention to the object. The sole aim of education should be to prepare for the possibility of such an act through the exercise of attention.

I conclude with a passage from the same essay:

Solitude: In what, then, does its value lie? For one is in the presence of mere matter (even the sky, the stars, the moon, the blossoming trees)—of things of lesser worth (perhaps) than a human spirit. Its value lies in the superior capacity for attention. If only one could be attentive to the same degree in the presence of a human being…

Sources: Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us (Harmony 2011); John von Neumann, First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC (1945); Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of the Good (Routledge Classics, 2001); Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft (Penguin 2009); Graham D. Burnett, “Human Attention as a Philosophical Problem: The Question, and the Nature of Questions,” Metaphilosophy 57:1-2 (2026): 3–22; Simone Weil, La pesanteur et la grâce (Librairie Plon, 1947).

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