Author Archives: Peter

my father’s books are going to James Madison’s desk at Montpelier

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(Syracuse, NY) My father, Joseph M. Levine, collected more than 20,000 books as a working library of a professional historian. Many were published before 1800. I am a sort of trustee for this collection, happily responsible for its long-term future.

James Madison, the fourth president of the United States, collected a library of books that informed his thoughts about the Constitution. In his case, the next generation meant his ne’er-do-well son-in-law, John Payne Todd, whose gambling debts cost the family all their property, including the books.

Now the Madison home at Montpelier has been restored to look as it did in James Madison’s day. But Montpelier needs appropriate books to display beside the president’s desk. By mutual arrangement, ten feet of my father’s collection are going there on permanent loan. I am in Syracuse to pick out books that might have belonged in Madison’s personal collection ca. 1820.

This, for example, is the same edition of Montaigne on which James Madison took notes when he was a student. Those notes were the very first substantive writings Madison produced in his life.

CAM00067My father was a Jewish boy from Brooklyn, New York; a Dodgers fan; an FDR liberal. James Madison was a slave-holding Tidewater planter. My Dad studied English intellectual history and was something of an Anglophile. James Madison led the US in a war against Great Britain, yet he was very far from an immigrant New Yorker. How do all these pieces fit together?

The answer is a certain version of liberalism. Dad grew up in a liberal family and neighborhood, but an additional formative experience was studying at Cornell during the McCarthy period. Cornell was stocked with great thinkers, including refugees from totalitarianism and veterans of struggles at home. During Dad’s undergraduate years, Vladimir Nabokov, Frances Perkins, Edwin Arthur Burtt, Buckminster Fuller, Clinton Rossiter, and Richard Neustadt all served on the faculty. They pursued rich cultural ideas, developed the inner life, and fought for social reform. Cornell broadened and liberated minds. The Constitution and the fundamental principles of the American Republic stood with the university and against its enemies.

Dad became an historian to join this community of free inquiry, and also to understand the origins of the modern liberal world. He began his graduate studies interested in the founding period of the US Republic, but he soon moved backwards to explore its origins in Tudor and Stuart England. That period became his lifelong interest and caused him to spend many years in England and to ship literally tons of books and other artifacts back from there.

English history is morally complex, as is the legacy of James Madison. England was a monarchy and a colonial power. But England was also the birthplace of individual rights, representative government, and rule-of-law–at least as those institutions have come to the US. It not only gave us our liberal traditions but also our more radical currents. From the Agitators and Levellers of 1647 to the Commonwealthmen and Whigs of 1750 to the Chartists of 1838, English thinkers developed the idea that political liberty and equality should come first, with cultural equality and economic reform to follow. As the MP Thomas Rainsborough argued in the mid-1600s:

For really I think that the poorest hee that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest hee; and therefore truly, Sr, I think itt clear, that every Man that is to live under a Government ought first by his own Consent to put himself under that Government; and I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that Government that he hath not had a voice to put Himself under.

Madison would certainly have qualified that populism in many ways. The poorest in Virginia were slaves, and Madison wanted to send them back to Africa rather than admit them as equals to the commonwealth. Federalist 10 presents Madison’s objections to “a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person.” He feared that “a common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole ….” But Madison constructed a political order that–when we honor its design–preserves individual liberties, defends minorities, promotes the “mild voice of reason,” and creates an important place for the “republican principle” of political equality.

It seems perfectly fitting that my father’s books should sit by the desk of the man who introduced the Bill of Rights and served as the second Rector of the University of Virginia.

[PS: I shouldn't have written "desk," as I believe the books are destined for a small room outside Madison's study that he used as a library.]

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do marijuana ballot initiatives raise youth turnout?

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We are cited in a couple of recent news articles about whether potential marijuana-legalization ballot measures in Arizona, California, Florida, Massachusetts, Maine, Montana and Nevada could encourage young people to vote in 2014 or 2016. (See Toluse Olorunnipa, “Florida Pot Vote Turnout Seen Helping Democrat Win Governor Race,” in Business Week; and Matt Sledge, “How Marijuana May Influence The 2016 Election,” in Huffington Post.)

It’s tempting to look at the data from previous marijuana initiatives in Washington State and Colorado, but the results are murky. First of all, whether youth turnout rose or fell in those states depends on whether you use the Exit Polls or the Census’ Current Population Survey to estimate it. The former method shows an increase in Colorado in 2012, but the Census doesn’t confirm that trend. In any case, many other factors were in play in those two states–other ballot initiatives and candidate races, demographic shifts, and so on. Even if the increase seen in Colorado was real, it is not clearly attributable to the pot initiative.

Leaving aside the technicalities, I think it’s important to say that marijuana legalization never polls as a high-priority issue for young voters. It’s always far down on their list, well below the economy, jobs, education, and health care. There may be some libertarian-leaning youth (and young people concerned about unfair incarceration*), for whom legalization is a core matter of principle. But they are few. There may also be some young people–as well as some older people–who would just like to be allowed to indulge. But voting is a demanding civic act that correlates with seriousness. If there is an actual stoner voting bloc, I would suspect they are low-propensity voters, quite hard to turn out on a November Tuesday. Other youth voting blocs, from environmentalists to pro-Lifers, will be easier to mobilize.

Again, I do not mean to dismiss the moral seriousness of legalization activists. Whether libertarians or critics of the carceral state (or both), they are raising a real issue, and they will vote if they have a chance. But they are not very numerous. I don’t think they are strongly concentrated among the young. And other issues will matter a lot more to the youth vote in 2014.

(*For full disclosure, I would personally vote to legalize pot and I am very concerned about over-incarceration. But less than 1 percent of state and federal inmates were incarcerated as a result of marijuana laws, so I wouldn’t put my own energy into marijuana legalization as a strategy for reducing incarceration.)

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looking for your own central ideas

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I have been suggesting that people map their own moral opinions as networks and critically examine the shapes that result. My students are doing that (because they have to), and some friends are doing it voluntarily. See my students’ collective map as an illustration.

One way in which networks vary is in their degree of centralization. If you map all your moral commitments and the links among them, you may reveal a network that centers around a single idea, or a very flat network in which no idea has more links than any other–or something in between. I personally favor flatter networks (for abstract philosophical reasons), but I don’t believe my reasons are decisive. So instead, I would pose these questions:

If you have a very flat network, in which no idea is appreciably more important than any other, is that a mistake? Should any of your existing commitments be made more central, because they are particularly important? What would happen, hypothetically, if you added to your network a new general and demanding principle that would link to many other ideas? (For instance: “Always maximize the well-being of all sentient creatures.”) Look at the resulting network and consider whether it has any pull on you.

If you have a highly centralized network, ask yourself whether the ideas that have proven so important deserve their weight. Are you certain that they are valid? Are you sure they are more important than your other commitments? What would happen if, for some reason, you ceased to believe in these central nodes–would the whole network fall apart? And are you able to reason with another person who does not happen to share your central commitments? Could you avoid your central beliefs in order to make arguments that the other person could accept and still navigate through your own network?

Now for a little more technical detail. There are actually several ways in which a node can be central in a network. In the image below, the red nodes are the most central in the sense that they have the most direct links to other nodes (7 each). A better way to say that is that each red node has 7 out of the total 24 links on the map, or 29%.

From Junker et al. BMC Bioinformatics 2006 7:219 doi:10.1186/1471-2105-7-219

From Junker et al. BMC Bioinformatics 2006 7:219 doi:10.1186/1471-2105-7-219

However, the blue node is central in a different sense: it lies on the path between the greatest number of other nodes. To get from any node in one cluster to any node in a different cluster, you have to go through the blue node. Yet the blue node only has 3 direct links (12.5%).

It is worth checking your own moral network for both kinds of centrality because they both matter.

Consider a person who believes in God. Presumably, God should be linked to a lot of other moral ideas–to all of them, at least indirectly. Some believers would aim for a spoke-and-wheel network in which God directly touched every other idea. To drop the network metaphor for a moment, they would immediately invoke God as the reason for every moral belief. “Purity of heart is to will one thing.”

But I do not believe that such a network design is characteristic of pious people in any religious tradition. Typically, faith takes the form of a whole set of linked ideas, some abstract and general and others very concrete. The ideas may include the stories and characters in scripture, the metaphysical attributes of God, the community of believers and their institutions, and the traditions of the faith (see my typology). Monotheists struggle to maintain one reasonably coherent network in which God is very important, but they do not organize their whole network as a single spoke-and-wheel.

Thus, for a monotheistic believer, God could appear as either the blue node or as one of the red nodes in the figure above.

In the blue-node scenario, God is what links everything together. Sooner or later, when discussing moral issues, this person would invoke God as a fundamental reason. Yet God would not be directly and immediately pertinent to most everyday decisions. The person might decide what to buy, how to vote, and how to raise her kids without immediately citing God. The connection to God goes through other ideas, such as “Do unto others as you would have them to do you,” or “Be a good member of the community.”

In the red-node scenario, God is immediately relevant in one domain of life: presumably, the religious domain. When deciding how to worship, what dietary rules to follow, etc., God comes immediately to mind. God is also linked indirectly to the whole network. But God is rather far removed from some domains of life, which might include the economy and politics.

I am using monotheistic faith as an example here, because everyone is familiar with what it means. But we could replace God with a strongly secular principle, such as “science offers the only truth.” In that case, too, the principle might be placed as the blue node, as the red node, or as one of the white nodes.

Overall, the network shown above is fragile because it only holds together thanks to the one blue node. Knock that out and there is no network at all. If the central node is true and deeply significant, then so be it. Deep faith (whether religious or otherwise) means committing to an idea even at the risk of having a fragile network. But if one believes that it is important to deliberate with other people, then the network shown above is problematic because the conversation will break down as soon as your interlocutor denies the contents of the blue node. You will have no other way to make your point than to repeat that node.

I fundamentally believe in deliberation because of human cognitive and motivational limitations. Each of us has a narrow and biased worldview, and the best we can do is to interact with others. That means that if your network is as centralized as the one shown above, you are at risk. On the other hand, if your network is completely flat, maybe you lack a sense of what is most important.

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citizens, stakeholders, publics, interest groups?

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Last semester, as part of Tufts’ Water Diplomacy program, we discussed with MIT professor Larry Susskind a paper in which he advocated for “involving stakeholders before [important] decisions are made.”* In the ensuing discussion, I wrote down the following nouns that were used to describe the individuals who might participate in making these decisions, along with experts and policymakers: “the population,” “the public,” “publics,” “stakeholders,” “groups,” “interests,” “citizens,” “representatives,” “negotiators,” “people” and “everybody” (as in, “You have to get everybody at the table.”) These words may have overlapping referents, but they are not synonyms. They imply different strategies and different core values. To pick up a few:

Stakeholders may include organizations and agencies as well as individuals. They are defined by having an identifiable “stake” in the matter. It is possible to define stakes very broadly so that, for instance, we all have a stake in the sustainability of the globe. (Then everyone is a stakeholder.) But defining people in terms of their “stakes” attaches each person to some particular priority. You are a farmer, an environmentalist, or a government official. That encourages negotiation but not deliberation–if deliberation implies an openness to changing one’s values and priorities.

Citizens must be individual people, although in practice, actual participants in deliberations and negotiations are often representatives of organized citizen groups. The word “citizen” has varied resonances. It can mean a legal member of some defined political community (distinguishing them from aliens). It can mean a person who is not an official, for sometimes we hear about “citizens meeting policymakers,” as if the latter were not also citizens. It can mean individuals who are accountable only to themselves or to their consciences. In that case, it encourages high-minded deliberation rather than negotiation.

The public can mean the great mass of people minus representatives of a relevant in-group, such as the government, the university, or the legal profession. That usage makes the public a relative concept: I am in the public with relation to the US government but outside the public when Tufts University engages its local communities. Sometimes people use a plural form of the word to talk about “issue publics” or “mobilized publics.” Then I think the word means large communities that promote discussion.

Interest groups are usually defined as sectors of the population that can be well represented by formal organizations with mission statements and explicit objectives. Their objectives need not be self-interested; for instance, environmentalists and human rights activists can represent interest groups. The key point is that they can be counted on to pursue a particular objective, and therefore, as long as an organization successfully promotes that objective, it represents them. Interest groups may be organized democratically so that their members have a say in the organizations’ strategies, but that seems optional and it has pros and cons. (It favors voice over exit as a way of determining strategy.)

A community (in this context) seems to be a group of people who may be highly diverse in terms of identities, goals, and interests, but they interact with one another either directly or through intermediaries. So Somerville, MA, is a community to the extent that its very diverse residents interact on matters of common concern. It may also be a community in an aspirational sense: since its residents live in the same city, they should interact.

An interest group is different from a community because membership in an interest group requires support for the interest. A good member of a community seems to owe the other members some concern and loyalty but is not obliged to agree with them. You can belong to a community and seek to change its prevailing goals and values. In contrast, if you disagree with the core goals of an interest group, you do not belong to it at all.

*Susskind, “Water and democracy: new roles for civil society in water governance,” International Journal of Water Resources Development, 2013
Vol. 29, No. 4, 666–677

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what is privilege?

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What do we mean when we say “privilege,” in a political or social context?

Here are some valid everyday uses of the word: “It is a real privilege to be here tonight.” “Playing football is a privilege, not a right.” “I feel privileged and grateful to be enrolled at this college.”

A privilege seems to be some kind of benefit or desirable standing that not everyone has. Some privileges are perfectly appropriate. They create meaningful and worthy categories, such as membership in a given organization or the right to practice a particular profession. According to Elinor Ostrom’s hugely valuable research on how people manage common pool resources (such as fisheries and forests), one of the general principles is the need for clear boundaries between insiders and outsiders. The insiders have the privilege to, for example, fish in a common pond. If everyone has that right, all the fish will be taken.

The problem is unjust privilege. Teaching Tolerance says, for example:

white skin privilege is a transparent preference for whiteness that saturates our society. White skin privilege serves several functions. First, it provides white people with “perks” that we do not earn and that people of color do not enjoy. Second, it creates real advantages for us. White people are immune to a lot of challenges. Finally, white privilege shapes the world in which we live — the way that we navigate and interact with one another and with the world.

Several empirical claims are implicit here: (1) certain advantages accompany whiteness in the US; (2) these advantages persist even when no one deliberately endorses them; and (3) whites tend not to acknowledge their privileges.

Built into those claims are moral premises: (1) It is OK to make distinctions, but not on the basis of race; (2) earned advantages are justifiable but unearned ones are not; (3) it is better to be conscious of privilege.

I happen to share these six propositions–on the whole–but they are controversial. From the left, Bill Mullen writes in Socialist Worker that the concept of white skin privilege divides working-class coalitions, makes racial identity look fixed and inevitable, conceals the underlying cause of racism, and blocks the only path that he believes in, which is economic revolution. A left critic might also reject the assumption that earned privileges are acceptable because they come from talent or hard work. Although there’s a big debate about what this statement implies, John Rawls insists that “no one deserves his place in the distribution of natural endowments” (Theory of Justice, 17).

From the opposite end of the spectrum, David Horowitz asserts that white skin privilege is a radical leftist myth, and “black skin privilege” is the real problem today because official policies that acknowledge race favor people of color.

Meanwhile, people who endorse the use of the phrase tend to talk about other forms of privilege as well. Race is said to “intersect” with gender, sexual orientation, citizenship status, and social class to create webs of privilege.

We will not soon conclude these debates; but some conceptual clarity may help. I think “privilege” is being used to mean unjust advantage, and that raises the question of what constitutes justice. Distributive justice is a whole topic unto itself. Allowing skin color to predict social outcomes is unjust, but preventing that does not fully satisfy justice. Getting what you earn (and only that) would be one definition of justice–not mine. Getting all that you need to meet your potential would be another definition–but I don’t think it’s possible, since human potential is unlimited. Having an equal share of the society’s rights and goods would also not be my definition, for a variety of reasons, including the fact that I don’t mind if other people have much more than I do (for I have plenty). Assuring everyone a reasonable minimum sounds good, but that it is compatible with profound and invidious inequality above the line.

Despite the difficulty, I’d argue that one must first develop a theory of justice before one can identify “privilege” in the negative sense of that word.

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Calling applicants for the Sixth Annual Summer Institute of Civic Studies at Tufts University’s Tisch College (July 7 through July 18, 2014)

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The sixth annual Summer Institute of Civic Studies will be an intensive, two-week, interdisciplinary seminar that considers civic theories and civic practices as part of an effort to develop the new field of civic studies. To date, more than 100 practitioners, advanced graduate students, and faculty from diverse fields of study have participated. The Institute is organized by Peter Levine of Tufts University’s Jonathan M. Tisch College and Karol Soltan of the University of Maryland.

WHAT IS CIVIC STUDIES?

The idea of a field of “civic studies” was proposed in 2007 in a joint statement by Harry Boyte, University of Minnesota; Stephen Elkin, University of Maryland; Peter Levine, Tufts University; Jane Mansbridge, Harvard University; Elinor Ostrom, Indiana University; Karol Soltan, University of Maryland; and Rogers Smith, University of Pennsylvania.

The field can be seen as the intellectual component of the emerging movement for civic renewal.

Civic studies aims to develop ideas and ways of thinking helpful to citizens, understood as co-creators of their worlds. The field does not consider “citizens” as official members of political jurisdictions, nor does it invoke the word “democracy.” One can be a co-creator in many settings, ranging from loose social networks, local communities, and religious congregations to the globe. Not all of these venues are, or could be, democracies.

Civic studies asks, “What should we do?” It explores ethics (what is right and good?), facts (what is actually going on?), strategies (what would work?), and the institutions that we co-create. Good strategies may take many forms and use many instruments, but if a strategy addresses the question “What should we do?”, then it must guide our own actions–it cannot simply be about how other people ought to act.

Civic studies is not civic education. Nor is it the study of civic education. However, when more fully developed, it should influence how citizenship is taught in schools and colleges.

For more on civic studies, see:

PRACTICAL DETAILS FOR THE 2014 SUMMER INSTITUTE OF CIVIC STUDIES

Sessions will take place weekdays from July 7-17, 2014, at the Tufts campus in Medford, MA. The seminar will be followed by a public conference—“Frontiers of Democracy 2014” that will conclude on July 18 at 6 pm. Participants in the Institute are expected to stay for “Frontiers” as well.

Tuition for the Institute is free, but students are responsible for their own housing and transportation. A Tufts University dormitory room can be rented for about $230-$280/week. Credit is not automatically offered, but special arrangements for graduate credit may be possible.

TO APPLY

Please email your resume, an electronic copy of your graduate transcript (if applicable), and a cover email about your interests to Peter Levine at Peter.Levine@Tufts.edu. For best consideration, apply no later than March 15, 2014.  You may also sign up for occasional announcements even if you are not sure that you wish to apply.

Please circulate to practitioners, scholars and students who would be interested in participating.

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what happens if EU members overturn their democracies?

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I’ve had several moving conversations recently with democratic reformers from southeastern Europe. They are near despair about their respective countries. Instead of quoting their confidential assessments, I’ll cite this summary by Tamas Dezso Czigler of LSE:

I have previously written a great deal about Hungary; the latest development is that the government has changed the election rules once more, and introduced the anti-democratic pre-registration of voters, which further heavily distorts the election system. The government also continues to fire judges, even though the act which made this available was annulled by the Constitutional Court. In Romania, the problems are similar and obvious – the government simply does not respect democratic institutions like the Constitutional Court or the President.

Both Hungary and Slovakia have seen the possibly racially motivated murders of Roma in recent years (including children). In addition, Slovakia has introduced a heavily anti-democratic language act, which bans Hungarians from speaking Hungarian in government offices, even if the client and the officer both belong to the Hungarian minority. … There are also fears as to whether Croatia will be able to stay stable, since it has had an even darker history compared to the others. And we hear news about extreme corruption in Bulgaria every day.

Czigler does not happen to mention the strongly anti-Semitic rhetoric in Hungary and Romania. That isn’t the primary issue; I think Jewish residents will be safe against outright violence, and they are few. He is right to highlight the murders of Roma. However, given the historical role of anti-Semitism in this region, it is distressing that explicitly anti-Semitic parties can capture large shares of the vote. This is a sign of deeply anti-democratic and illiberal tendencies.

I would be the first to recognize that US states have also passed “anti-democratic pre-registration” provisions and laws targeting language minorities. But the question is not whose democracy is better. The question is what to do about anti-democratic threats in Europe, given the fragility of the continental system and the importance (to the whole world) of making it work.

Thus I wonder:

A nation must be a democracy to get into the EU. Once it’s in, what happens if it backtracks so that it would no longer meet the specific political criteria for membership? And what happens if a member drops all pretense of democracy and goes the way of Belarus?

EU members face judicial review at the European level. But the governments in Romania and Hungary are contemptuous of their own nations’ courts. What happens if EU members simply ignore the European Court of Human Rights?

I am told that some Hungarian Jewish families have fled to Austria. If true, it implies that there are already refugees of one EU nation in another one. How would the EU handle larger flows of political refugees?

The anti-democratic parties are mostly far-right and nationalistic. That may make coordination somewhat difficult, because a Greek nationalist doesn’t intrinsically care about Hungarian nationalism, for instance. In the 1930s, the attempt to build a Fascist International “was marred by serious conflicts between the participants.” Yet the far right of the various EU member states have common enemies and can do a lot of mischief together. Will they unite?

At least in Romania and Bulgaria, an underlying cause appears to be corruption, meaning the political power of economic oligarchs. Can European economic policy constrain them?

Will the EU ultimately make its weakest members more democratic and liberal, or will those states make the EU as a whole more authoritarian and illiberal?

How do members with deep civic traditions but poor current systems of government (Italy, Belgium) fit into the picture?

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Democracy in schools: Albert Dzur talks with principal Donnan Stoicovy

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Albert Dzur is breaking ground in political theory by revealing how professionals who interact with laypeople can create valuable democratic practices. Democratic theory has generally been blind to the positive potential of work sites, and especially public sector sites such as schools, hospitals, and courtrooms. It has also generally overlooked the democratic contributions of professionals who choose to engage citizens. Often, populist democrats want to trim the wings of professionals, seeing them as arrogant. But engaging citizens in complex institutions requires skill, dedication, and a kind of expertise–all marks of professionalism. Democratic professionalism is thus an important aspect of civic renewal. (See also “Albert Dzur and democracy inside institutions” and “Public Work and Democratic Professionalism.“)

In the The Good Society (which is now the journal of civic studies), Albert has posted an interview with one such democratic professional, Donnan Stoicovy, who is the principal of Park Forest Elementary School in Pennsylvania. For my friends who are interested in civic education and school reform more than political theory, this interview offers a nice overview of a school-wide intervention. It is not unique or unprecedented, but it is thoughtful and impressive. In essence, the principal asked her whole student body to participate in the writing of a school constitution as a way of meeting the state’s mandate to produce a “school-wide positive behavior plan.”

In other schools, administrators hold assemblies and hand out rewards to well-behaved individuals. At Park Forest, the assemblies were deliberative events aimed at setting rules and norms. As I have observed in other cases as well, the kids came up with more demanding rules than their teachers would have proposed.

This case exemplifies professionalism in several respects. One that I would highlight is the need to navigate tricky tradeoffs. The kids’ rules included “No Put Downs” but also “Speak what we believe and not be judged for it.” Sometimes what we believe comes across as a put down of someone else, especially when the individuals in question are ten years old. Skillfully navigating those tensions is complex work.

The interview ends with some discussion of expanding the scale of such examples. Stoicovy cites limited time as one obstacle; “and I think the other [need] is opportunity to collaborate with other people across the country—similar people who are thinking about this.”

Dzur asks whether universities could help. Stoicovy replies:

I would want everybody to know about democratic schools. I would want universities to be teaching more about democratic schools, in general. I would like more of the work at universities to be helping open students’ minds to thinking about having a responsive classroom, eliciting student voice and engaging students in their school. Not just “here’s what discipline is.” And oftentimes they don’t even teach that until they end up in school and it is modeled for them by whoever their mentor is. Universities need to go back to essential questions like “What is the purpose of public education?”

Universities could also model a more democratic approach. Some of them are getting better at having more engagement work, but without modeling it is hard to open peoples’ minds.

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the president on citizenship: all rhetoric?

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In all of his high-profile official speeches, President Obama makes sure to speak strongly and explicitly about active citizenship as the solution to our national problems. I like to highlight and analyze these passages because reporters always completely ignore them, treating them as mere throat-clearing. (See, e.g., my piece on “Taking the President Seriously About Citizenship” in Huffington Post.)

Last night was no exception. The president opened with examples of active citizens in both the public sector and the private sector: “Today in America, a teacher spent extra time with a student who needed it, and did her part to lift America’s graduation rate to its highest level in more than three decades. An entrepreneur flipped on the lights in her tech startup, and did her part to add to the more than eight million new jobs our businesses have created over the past four years.” He added, “it is you, our citizens, who make the state of our union strong.”

President Obama then contrasted constructive citizens with the dysfunctional political system in DC. In the middle of the speech, he returned to the citizenship theme with a series of anaphoric paragraphs: “Citizenship means … Citizenship means. … Citizenship demands a sense of common cause; participation in the hard work of self-government; an obligation to serve to our communities.”

The problem is a gap between this expansive notion of citizenship and the policy agenda. For example, in k-12 and higher education, many wonderful educators and administrators are busy teaching students to be active citizens and trying to make their institutions into more valuable elements of local civil society. They have some friends inside the Obama Administration’s Department of Education. But the education agenda that the president summarized was exclusively about aligning school and college to current job requirements:

Teachers and principals in schools from Tennessee to Washington, D.C. are making big strides in preparing students with skills for the new economy – problem solving, critical thinking, science, technology, engineering, and math.  …

We’re working to redesign high schools and partner them with colleges and employers that offer the real-world education and hands-on training that can lead directly to a job and career.  We’re shaking up our system of higher education to give parents more information, and colleges more incentives to offer better value, so that no middle-class kid is priced out of a college education.

(The information that prospective students are being offered is limited to the cost of a degree, the likelihood of graduation, and employment rates of graduates.)

To be sure, work is not separate from citizenship. The president was right to characterize private and public sector workers as citizens. “Through hard work and responsibility, we can pursue our individual dreams, but still come together as one American family to make sure the next generation can pursue its dreams as well.” Still, workers and future workers must learn about and discuss common social issues. That implies an explicit focus on civics in schools and colleges and opportunities for adult citizens to make decisions together. Those ideas were missing in the State of the Union and have been largely overlooked in the administration’s actual policymaking.

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mapping a class as a moral community

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On the first day of the spring semester, I asked members of a small philosophy seminar to reflect on their own core moral ideas–meaning not only their abstract principles but also their concrete commitments and role models–and how those interconnect. They gave me their data (concealing any ideas that they wanted to keep private), and I mapped the results as one network for the class as a whole.

In general, the ideas cluster by student (each colored differently in this map); but when two or more people share an idea, the borders among individuals begin to break down.

class map 1.17
I hope that over the course of the semester, the map will become more integrated and denser as the students add ideas and connections among ideas and begin to hold more ideas in common. Their thinking should be influenced, in part, by the readings and by me; therefore, ideas discussed in class should pop onto the map. Agreement is not the goal, but members of a discursive community should share reference points. One student actually predicted increased polarization as new ideas are thrown into the mix, and that is certainly possible.

Why did I ask them to give me networks? I could have asked for lists of ideas (perhaps ordered by importance); for structures (with fundamental ideas implying consequences); or for bodies of text that explained each students’ views.

A list seems problematic because one cannot tell whether each item belongs on it. For instance, if it is true that one should maximize the happiness of the greatest number, then that concept should appear on your list. But if not, it should not be there. How can one tell? In contrast, you can ask questions about your network independent of the content of each node. Is the network dense? Does it cover a wide range of ideas? Are the ideas that turn out to be central worthy of their importance? Is the network connected to other people’s networks?

For elaborate reasons, I am skeptical of ordered structures for moral reasoning. But a network is actually a flexible form that can encompass a hierarchical structure. A utilitarian could give me a network that centered around the utilitarian principle. A network model simply does not presume that a moral worldview must be highly centralized or ordered.

Finally, a body of text would be valuable–but it would have to be very long, and I would be inclined to analyze it by looking for the ideas and connections that it implied. Thus the network is an efficient representation of the text, albeit one that leaves unexplained the individual nodes and the reasons for their connections.

(see also: the place of argument in moral reasoning; epistemic network analysis and morality: applying David Williamson Shaffer’s methods to ethics; Emerson’s mistake; character understood in network terms; and envisioning morality as a network)

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