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Robert Pinsky, Impossible to Tell

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Imagine a group of people taking turns making clever remarks, echoing and developing each others’ cues. To play the game well is to extend the discussion for another round in a pleasurable way.

For instance, they might be middle-aged Jewish men trading Jewish jokes, like the one

About two rabbis, one of them tall, one short,
One day while walking along the street together …

Or they might be “Basho and his friends,” drinking saki one 17th-century night and improvising long chains of the linked haikus called rengas:

Threading a long night through the rules and channels
Of their collaborative linking-poem
Scored in their teacher’s heart: live, rigid, fluid
Like passages etched in a microscopic circuit.

Or all the stories might flow from a single speaker who has a desperate need, like Scheherazade, not to stop entertaining. And that person might not be an Arabian princess but rather a small boy in a sad apartment, whose mother

… tells the child she’s going to kill herself.
She broods, she rages. Hoping to distract her,
The child cuts capers, he sings, he does imitations
Of different people in the building, he jokes,
He feels if he keeps her alive until the father
Gets home from work, they’ll be okay till morning.

In “Impossible to Tell,” Robert Pinsky weaves these and other stories about story-telling together to create one jazz-like poem. He improvises on the title, which recurs three times in markedly different contexts. Parts of the poem are jokes that made me actually laugh. Parts are like haikus in their fresh descriptions of everyday reality: “In summer, gasoline rainbow in the gutter.” (Note the 7-syllable phrase.) And parts are very sad, like the death of Pinsky’s friend Elliot Gilbert, as seen by his family.

As for the child who tells jokes to keep his mother from suicide,

… maybe he became
The author of these lines, a one-man renga
The one for whom it seems to be impossible
To tell a story straight.

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The Good Society symposium on Civic Studies

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The new issue of The Good Society (vol. 22, no. 2) includes a symposium on The Summer Institute of Civic Studies at Tufts University. The symposium articles are free and open on JSTOR. They are:

  • “The Summer Institute of Civic Studies: An Introduction” by Karol Soltan and me
  • “Civic Studies: Fundamental Questions, Interdisciplinary Methods,” by Alison K. Cohen, J. Ruth Dawley-Carr, Liza Pappas, and Alison Staudinger
  • “What Should You and I Do?: Lessons for Civic Studies from Deliberative Politics in the New Deal” by Timothy J. Shaffer
  • “Living Well Together: Citizenship, Education, and Moral Formation” by Elizabeth Gish and Paul Markham
  • “Civic Studies: Bringing Theory to Practice” by Katherine Kravetz
  • “The Civic Institute Relocated: Designing a Syllabus for Undergraduate Students at a Public University” by Susan Orr; and
  • “Deliberation and Civic Studies” by Matt Chick

As Karol Soltan and I write at the beginning of our introductory essay, the Summer Institute of Civic Studies is intended as a step in the development of a new discipline, by which we mean an intellectual community (a group of thinkers who learn from each other) that is institutionalized, with an association, a journal or journals, educational institutions, a recognized place in universities, conferences, and so on.

The aim of this symposium is to introduce the Summer Institute, mostly through the work of past participants. … Every year, it draws about 20 advanced graduate students, faculty, civic practitioners, and community leaders for two weeks of intensive discussions. Individuals have come from Bhutan, Singapore, Mexico, South Africa, Germany, the Netherlands, Canada, Israel, and all corners of the United States to participate.

Like any healthy intellectual community, civic studies is a field of debate; participants do not sing in unison. But they do have common premises and purposes that, among other things, draw 20 of them to Tufts each July. Those premises could be formulated in several overlapping ways:

1. The goal of civic studies is to develop ideas and ways of thinking helpful to citizens, understood as co-creators of their worlds. Note that we do not define “citizens” as official members of nation-states or other political jurisdictions. Nor does this formula invoke the word “democracy.” One can be a co-creator in many settings, ranging from loose social networks and religious congregations, to the globe. Not all of these venues are, or could be, democracies.

2. Civic studies asks Shaffer’s question: “What should we do?” It is thus inevitably about ethics (what is right and good?), about facts (what is actually going on?) and about strategies (what would work?). 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. For many of us, institutions and institution-making are crucial to this enterprise. They embody ideals and values. They can also be seen as crucial resources.

3. At the very beginning of the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton asks whether “societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are f orever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.” Civic studies suggests that we can govern by reflection and choice. But more importantly, it looks for ways to make that happen. In other words, we are not especially concerned with an assessment of how much agency we actually have as reasoning citizens; we are concerned with enhancing our political or civic agency.

4. As co-founder of the Summer Institute and retiring editor of this journal Stephen Elkin reminds us elsewhere in this issue, [the Good Society's] motto  is Walter Lippman’s statement that “the art of governing well has to be learned.” That is another way of formulating the task of civic studies.

Civic studies is an intellectual community in the making, based on an empirical observation that there are many thinkers, networks of thinkers (some overlapping), and traditions of thinking in a number of disciplines that share the goals listed above.

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Jesus was a person of color

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As everyone knows by now, Fox News host Megyn Kelly said last week, “Jesus was a white man, too. It’s like we have, he’s a historical figure. That’s a verifiable fact, as is Santa. I just want kids to know that.”

In one sense, to say that a given historical figure was white cannot be a verifiable fact, because whiteness is not biological or otherwise scientific matter–it is a social construct that people have invented, have frequently adjusted, and can change again. On the other hand, constructs have real enough presence in the world. Race, for example, is a powerful scheme that we impose on reality. Average white American subjects classify a picture of a face as black or white within 30 milliseconds of viewing it.

So we can ask how the historical Jesus would be viewed if he walked into the room today. That is different from two other questions: how people of his day would have seen him and how people today choose to depict him:

  1. Although the status of race in antiquity is debated, at least some distinguished scholars argue that the ancients did not classify people by skin color or hair, as we are powerfully conditioned to do today. Thus the historical Jesus has a race today but he did not have one while he was alive. He was then neither white nor anything else.
  2. Today, Jesus is often shown as a blond man in America, but usually as a black man in Ethiopia. For a believer, Jesus transcends race and is naturally depicted as a familiar figure, a member of one’s own community.

A third question is how the historical Jesus would be perceived racially if people saw him today. I think Kelly believes that the answer is: White. Our only source, the New Testament, tells us that he was a Jew. That names a political/religious community that had a foundation story tracing all of its members to one ancestor: Abraham. But even according to the story, Abraham had many descendents who were not Jews, and Jews of Jesus’ time had many ancestors. Luke says that Jesus’ paternal ancestor 23 generations back had been Solomon, a Jew, who “loved many strange [foreign] women, together with the daughter of Pharaoh, women of the Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Zidonians, and Hittites. … And he had seven hundred wives, princesses, and three hundred concubines” (I Kings 11).  So, according to Luke, Jesus had a lot of diversity in his family tree–as we all do.

Members of Jesus’ religious/political community lived close by and mixed with members of other communities, such as, for example, the Ammonites, Samaritans, and Nabateans. Many of these communities also spoke Jesus’ daily language, Aramaic, which is an Afroasiatic tongue related to Hausa (spoken in Nigeria), ancient Egyptian, Arabic, and Hebrew. I presume that these neighbors would have been phenotypically as well as linguistically very similar to the ancient Jews. In other words, they would have looked and sounded like ancient Jews even though they believed in different things and fell under different laws. We see a little glimpse of the multicultural milieu in the tomb inscription of the poet Meleager of Gadara (near modern Umm Qais in Jordan): “If you are Syrian, Salam [which is Aramaic]; if you are Phoenician, Naidios; if you are Greek, Xaire; and say the same yourself.”

Once the Jewish religious/political community was smashed by the Romans, many Jews went into exile in the empire, where they retained their traditions and tried to marry endogamously (i.e., within the faith). But conversion was allowed, and intermarriage would have been inevitable. One recent estimate suggests that Ashkenazi Jews have 80% non-Jewish European maternal ancestors. That means that Jesus would look less European than today’s Jews whose ancestors resided in Europe, including many (not all) modern Israelis. Furthermore, most modern Jews outside of Israel cannot speak any Afroasiatic language.

But a lot of people who lived in Jesus’ vicinity and looked and talked like him stayed there after the Roman victories in 70 and 132 CE. I assume those who remained included some Jews; it certainly included groups like the Nabateans and the Philistines. Those groups would become largely Christian by the time that Caliph Umar captured the area from the Byzantine Christian empire around 637 CE. Some still remained Christian after the conquest, while most converted to Islam, but all gradually adopted an ethno-political-linguistic identity as Arabs as a result of being incorporated into the Caliphate and its flourishing culture.

Thus someone who looked at talked like Jesus might well be seen as an Arab today, albeit one who spoke a related language (Aramaic) instead of classical or modern Arabic. That raises another question directly related to Megyn Kelly’s claim: is an Arab white?

Again, this is a meaningless question in scientific terms, but perceptions and subjective classifications are important. So the question really means: Would most people perceive any ancient person who looked and talked somewhat like a modern Arab as white? In “Not Quite White: Race Classification and the Arab American Experience,” the author traces the many different ways in which Arab immigrants to the United States have been classified. For example, under a 1978 directive from the Office of Management and the Budget, Arabs were explicitly defined as white (“persons originating in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa”), but one advocacy group now urges Arab Americans to “Check it right — you ain’t white.” In short, the question is contested, and perceptions vary.

Meanwhile, the phrase “people of color” has become much more common in the last 30 years than it was before, and one reason is its breadth. It acknowledges the advantages that come from being perceived as white in the US. By implication, everyone who is not perceived as white has some commonality of experience, despite their vast diversity. By that definition, I think Jesus would pretty clearly be a person of color.

Note …

I am not saying that Jesus was an Arab, because that word developed its current sense centuries after his death.

I am not denying he was a Jew. He was: but that places him in a religious and juridical category, not an ethnic group. The religious community of world Jewry is ethnically diverse and has changed a great deal over two thousand years.

I am not saying that you are wrong to visualize him as white–or as black. You can visualize and depict him any way you want.

I am saying that if he walked into a US airport today, he would be subject to racial profiling on the basis of his color and features, not to mention clothes and language. That is perhaps theologically apt, but it should make a Fox News anchor uncomfortable.

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a technique for measuring the quality of deliberation

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(Ann Arbor, MI) I’ve proposed that we can map an individual’s thinking about moral and political issues as a set of beliefs and connections. For instance, if a person says that she favors abortion rights because she is committed to individual freedom, she is linking two nodes in a mental map. Because her overall epistemic framework is a network, it will have formal properties, such as density and centrality.

When two or more individuals interact on moral or political issues (talking and/or working together), their respective network maps will come into contact and change. The community formed by people who so interact can be viewed as a larger network of beliefs and connections that also has formal properties.

Certain network structures are better than others for deliberation and interaction. If you are a good deliberator, you enrich other people’s network maps and learn from theirs; you are not rigid. In the context of a liberal democracy, you must be able to “route around” your own faith commitments. You don’t have to drop them, but you must be able to make an argument that doesn’t depend on them. Likewise, your various ideas should be connected rather than isolated, so that you can give reasons for each of your beliefs.

We should be able to observe a moral network map evolve as one person interacts with others, and we should be able to rate individuals and conversations for moral excellence (by asking independent observers to assess them) and then see whether what we posit as the formal criteria of good moral networks are actually found in the best deliberators.

For example, Bloggingheads TV organized a discussion between columnists Bryce Covert (liberal) and Ramesh Ponnuru (conservative) on the topic of why women are paid less than men and what to do about it. I assert that this is a good discussion because I think it is, but also because in a study led by my colleague Felicia Sullivan, this video and several others were shown to representative samples of Americans. Most viewers liked this particular discussion, and they tended to move toward less ideologically consistent views after they watched it–evidence that it had complicated their opinions.

In the slide show below, I begin to diagram the discussion as two interlocked networks of ideas.

I didn’t finish mapping the discussion, but I got far enough to conclude that we should be looking for:

  • The number of nodes and connections. (A higher number implies a richer discussion.)
  • The density of connections. People should tie together more, rather than fewer, of their points.
  • The overlap in the two people’s networks (They need not agree but they should address each others’ views)
  • Change in their respective networks in response to the other’s.

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on snark and smarm

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(on a plane heading to Ann Arbor, MI) Tom Scocca’s article “On Smarm” is getting a lot of attention, including responses by Malcom Gladwell in the New Yorker and Ryan Kearney in The New Republic.

Scocca argues that “snark” is not our problem. It is an appropriate reaction to “smarm,” which is the serious threat. His original piece is learned and insightful in the tradition of Harry Frankfurt on bullshit or Susan Sontag on camp. I recommend it and will not attempt to summarize it. I do miss two things, however. One is a set of true definitions (with necessary and sufficient conditions), as opposed to clusters of examples. What is snark? What is smarm? The other is evidence of trends over time. Everyone in this debate seems eager to posit that our moment is dominated by snark, smarm, or both. But one can easily think of examples from the distant past. (Juvenal was snarky; Augustus was smarmy.) On what basis do we think that either vice has increased of late?

I would propose that:

Snark (presumably a portmanteau of “snide” plus “remark”) means indirect critique. Instead of rebutting the facts or the logic of an argument, snark casts doubt on the sincerity or competence of the source. It is not a full-blown ad hominem argument but a suggestion that the target is untrustworthy. It is usually humorous, although humor doesn’t seem essential.

Smarm is the evocation of positive, sentimental emotions for the purpose of preempting criticism. For instance, bringing a person with Down’s syndrome onto the stage of the 2000 Republican National Convention was smarmy because it foreclosed criticism of the nominee. The particular form of smarm that concerns Scocca is the evocation of civility or niceness to preempt debate about the dominant person or established rules in a given situation.

Both snark and smarm violate a very high standard of deliberative reason, in which one should respond to any given policy, norm, or proposal by evaluating the evidence, norms, and logic behind it. A critical reaction should explicitly challenge elements of the argument, not the speaker. And the critic should be ready to propose and defend some alternative view.

Snark misses that standard because a snarky comment neither explicitly rebuts the target’s arguments nor offers an alternative position. Smarm misses the standard because it doesn’t offer an argument at all, just a sentiment.

But snark can provoke or advance a deliberative discussion. Typically, a snarky comment provokes a reaction, and that can take the form of an explicit defensive argument that then deserves a reasonable response. Thus snark can be an opening move or invitation to deliberation. Smarm, on the other hand, succeeds if it prevents a group from deliberating.

Further, snark is a tool of the marginal and dispossessed, the peanut gallery, whereas smarm (by my definition) is employed by the person in charge, whether that is the President of the United States or just a dad in the front seat of his SUV. I am therefore with Scocca that smarm is the more serious problem, and snark can be justified as a response to it. If smarm casts a feel-good spell that prevents critical thought, snark can break the spell.

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tenured and tenure-track professors are worse teachers?

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(Providence, RI) According to a new paper by David Figlio, Morton Schapiro, and Kevin Soter,* if you take a class with a non-tenure track (contingent) professor, you are more likely to choose to take another class in the same subject and you will get a higher grade on that next class than if you studied with a tenured professor or someone on the tenure track. You are especially likely to benefit from having a contingent professor if you scored relatively low on academic measures before the course.

The measures of success seem reasonably persuasive, and the method seems tight. (The authors compare first-semester students, who generally don’t pick their instructors, and they look at changes in the same students’ grades over time.) The main limitation is that the study only involves Northwestern University, which is certainly not typical of American higher education and could have quirks other than just being highly selective and well-resourced.

It’s also possible that the tenure-track and contingent faculty differ in other ways than their tenure status. I would like to see the results adjusted for the age of professor. I don’t want to be ageist, but that could be a factor, and given the ban on mandatory retirements and the demographics of the tenured professoriate today, it could just turn out that the contingent faculty are younger.

This study is not an argument against tenure, which has other benefits–notably, academic freedom. But it is a cautionary note. It certainly reminds us of the enormous skill and dedication of the many young scholars who are working as adjuncts today. Many would have easily gotten tenure 30 years ago and are now working for $3,000 a course. On the other hand, there is nothing completely new here. As Max Weber said in his lecture “Science as a Vocation” (1917):

According to German tradition, the universities shall do justice to the demands both of research and of instruction. Whether the abilities for both are found together in a man is a matter of absolute chance. Hence academic life is a mad hazard. If the young scholar asks for my advice with regard to habilitation [getting the most advanced degree], the responsibility of encouraging him can hardly be borne. If he is a Jew, of course one says lasciate ogni speranza [abandon all hope]. But one must ask every other man: Do you in all conscience believe that you can stand seeing mediocrity after mediocrity, year after year, climb beyond you, without becoming embittered and without coming to grief? Naturally, one always receives the answer: ‘Of course, I live only for my “calling.”‘ Yet, I have found that only a few men could endure this situation without coming to grief.

*See Figlio, D. N., Schapiro, M. O., & Soter, K. B. (2013). Are tenure track professors better teachers? (NBER Working Paper 19406). Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research. http://www.nber.org/papers/w19406

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how to use empirical evidence

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I’ve written a chapter for a forthcoming book edited by Harry Boyte (Democracy’s Education: A Symposium on Power, Public Work, and the Meaning of Citizenship, Vanderbilt University Press) in which I summarize evidence that colleges and universities can improve the economy by teaching their students civic skills and by being good institutional citizens, participating in local networks for community development.

I think the evidence is reasonably strong. But, like all empirical claims, it has exceptions and caveats. And even if civic education and engagement really do pay economic dividends, something else could work even better: for example, distance-learning, educational video games, or installing surveillance cameras in schools.

Thus we must be careful about how we generate, interpret and use empirical findings. This is where the emerging idea of Civic Studies provides guidance.

Often, social scientists presume that their job is to study a real-world practice that is already fully developed to learn whether—and why—it “works.” Usually they define success in terms of the objectives of the practitioners or their funders. In this case, we would ask whether college-level civic education and engagement generate what politicians demand: jobs.

But nothing simply “works.” Success always requires experimentation, assessment, adjustment, reflection, and new experimentation, in an iterative cycle. By the same token, many things can work if they are developed properly. One could start with civic engagement or with surveillance cameras in schools and improve either one until it enhanced students’ employment prospects.

In the best cases, the researchers who study a given practice are part of the reason that it works. They contribute to its development by offering their data and insights. They choose to work on this practice rather than something else because of a more fundamental commitment. I, for example, have studied deliberation. I want deliberation to work and I hope that the research that I produce will contribute to its success. I have no such commitment to surveillance cameras. I would not study them or strive to improve their impact.

The reason for my hope in deliberation is fundamentally moral. I think a world in which people reason and work together is better than one in which they achieve the same levels of security, income, or welfare without freely collaborating. Deeper down, I believe in a theory that the good life is a life of freedom, reflection, and mutual commitment.

Thus I hope that civic education and civic engagement boost employment because I am fundamentally committed to civic values. My colleagues and I seek evidence of economic benefit to persuade policymakers to support what they should support anyway. If the economic evidence is favorable, we will use it strategically to expand support. If not, our values and commitments should encourage us to improve civic education until it enhances democracy and also produces jobs. Regardless of the empirical results we find, we owe a public explanation of our core values.

A public defense of our values also yields criteria by which to assess the practices that we have been studying empirically. For instance, my chapter for Harry Boyte’s book is about college-level civic engagement (an input) and jobs (an output). I discuss the empirical link between the input and the output, as they exist today. But both are subject to criticism and change.

Today, many civic programs basically take the form of volunteering. But civic education can be reconceived so that it is less about volunteer service than about working on public concerns, where “working” implies serious commitment and accountability for results. “Public work,” in the phrase championed by Boyte and colleagues, means work that is done in public, by diverse citizens, on common issues. Reconfiguring civic education at the college level to look more like public work would satisfy core values that Boyte and colleagues have defended well. It might also strengthen the impact of civic education on jobs and careers. Students would be more likely to learn skills useful for employment if their civic experiences in college were more like paid work.

Meanwhile, jobs could become more public. A given job might serve only the interests of the employer and deny the worker any scope to address community problems in public with diverse other citizens. But even if the employer is a for-profit firm, the job can promote and encourage public work. For example, I presume that the corporate executives, government officials, and labor leaders who attended meetings of the Lehigh University board contributed insights from their daily work to the conversations about Lehigh and Allentown. They then brought ideas from those discussions back to their jobs. If that is true, they were doing “public work” in the Lehigh boardroom and in their own offices. Public work is obviously harder for low-paid service workers and low-ranking bureaucrats, but within many industries and professions, a struggle is underway to recover their public and democratic traditions.

If we made civic education into public work and also created jobs of greater public value, then the alignment between civic education and employment would be stronger and we would find more impressive evidence of economic impact. The data would then satisfy governors and presidents who want to see colleges produce jobs. More importantly, we would be building a better society and the educational system to support it.

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qualms about Behavioral Economics

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In Sunday’s New York Times, Katrin Benhold describes how the current UK Government has embraced “behavioral economics.” The Cameron Government has been influenced by Richard H. Thaler’s and Cass R. Sunstein’s book Nudge to adopt policies like telling people who are late with their taxes how many of their neighbors have already paid. A government can improve your behavior (citizen) by showing that it knows what you are doing, by sharing that knowledge with your fellow citizens, and by demonstrating your similarity or divergence from the norm.

Another example is Mayor Bloomberg’s ban on huge sodas. You can still buy as much soda as you want in New York, but limiting the individual portions to 16-ounces confronts you with an explicit choice if you decide you want to drink more than that. Proponents say the government can get better results with less force by using such techniques, and they call it “libertarian paternalism.”

Real libertarians are not happy. Sean Collins writes in the libertarian magazine Spiked:

This paternalistic approach changes the relationship between government and citizens. Instead of government representing us, working for us, government now works on us, trying to change our interests. It would be one thing if government sought to convince the public in open debate, but those who would nudge or ban do not want to have open debate or discussions. As the term ‘paternalism’ implies, citizens are essentially treated like children who do not speak; they are only spoken to.

Followers of Michel Foucault are not libertarians, but they should be equally concerned. They should recall Foucault’s discussion of the “panopticon,” Jeremy Bentham’s scheme for a prison designed so that each prisoner can be observed at all times but cannot tell whether he is being watched:

“So it is not necessary to use force to constrain the convict to good behaviour, the madman to calm, the worker to work, the schoolboy to application, the patient to the observation of the regulations. Bentham was surprised that panoptic institutions could be so light: there were no more bars, no more chains, no more heavy locks ….

The Panopticon was also a laboratory; it could be used as a machine to carry out experiments, to alter behaviour, to train or correct individuals. To experiment with medicines and monitor their effects. To try out different punishments on prisoners, according to their crimes and character, and to seek the most effective ones. To teach different techniques simultaneously to the workers, to decide which is the best. ….

Although it arranges power, although it is intended to make it more economic and more effective, it does so not for power itself, nor for the immediate salvation of a threatened society: its aim is to strengthen the social forces – to increase production, to develop the economy, spread education, raise the level of public morality; to increase and multiply.” (Foucault, Discipline & Punish)

In defense of the “nudge” idea, I would say that governments have always influenced how choices are presented. It makes sense to be deliberate about the design of choices. I am fine with making you decide to buy soda 16-oz at a time.

Yet there are good reasons to be skeptical about behavioral economics as a tool of governance. Your overall reaction will depend on what most deeply concerns you. You may think that our main problem is unhealthy or immoral personal behavior–people failing to pay their taxes, for example, or drinking 32 ounces of sugary soda at a time. You may, furthermore, believe that to change their behavior by banning or taxing it is often too costly in terms of individual freedom, burdens on the state, or sheer cash. Then it will be appealing to use behavioral economics to influence citizens’ choices, just as it was very tempting to build state prisons according to the principles of Bentham’s panopticon. One guard, very few beatings and executions, yet everyone behaves.

A different stance begins with the idea that modernity poses a threat to the human being as an end-in-herself. Modern rationality is means/ends rationality: we constantly develop and refine tools for getting other people to do what we want, whether those tools are laws and surveillance, bureaucratic files, surveys, advertisements of all kinds, payments and rewards, or taxes and penalties. Each of those devices whittles away at people’s capacity to decide for themselves how to live. From that perspective, manipulation is a fundamental problem, worse than obesity or tax-evasion, and behavioral economics is just the latest and most sophisticated version of it.

Benhold uses the verb “manipulate” in her basic description of the British behavioral economic policies:

Manipulating behavior is old hat in the private sector, where advertisers and companies have been nudging consumers for decades. Just think of strategically placed chocolate bars at the checkout counter. But in public policy, nudge proponents study human behavior to try to figure out why people sometimes make choices that they themselves would consider poor. Then they test small changes in how those choices are presented, to see whether people can be steered toward better decisions — like putting apples, not chocolate bars, at eye level in school cafeterias.

It is better to eat apples than chocolate bars. And it is appropriate for a school to shape students’ behavior. But the classical republican ideal is that no one may influence your thoughts and actions without giving you an explicit justification, and you must have the right to respond if you don’t agree. No one can say, “Do this because I say so.” Your response to being coerced may be as modest as voting against the people who are trying to regulate you, but the exchange of reasons (on their part) and actions (on yours) respects your dignity. Moreover, to the greatest extent possible, the citizens of a republican regime must decide how to constrain and improve themselves and create their own norms. Each is accountable to the others, and nobody manipulates us.

In We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For (pp. 60-2), I discuss more democratic ways to change our behavior:

Human beings are distinctive because we can have ordinary desires plus desires concerning our desires. For example, I may want to put down a difficult scholarly book that I am reading so that I can watch a trivial television show, and at the same time want not to have that desire. … If I turn myself into someone who enjoys scholarly books more and trivial TV shows less, I am not only entitled to believe that I have done the right thing with my time, but that I have also improved myself. In that way, the self (personal identity) is connected to second-order volitions.

I introduce this concept here because we are capable of assessing and altering our own second-order volitions in ways that produce conscious development, not just random change. In the words of the Port Huron Statement that inaugurated the New Left in America, we “have unrealized potential for self-cultivation, self-direction, self-understanding, and creativity.” The Statement proceeds to note that this process of self-cultivation is not individualistic, on the model of a Romantic artist developing his or her own genius. “This kind of independence does not mean egoistic individualism—the object is not to have one’s way so much as it is to have a way that is one’s own. . . . Human interdependence is contemporary fact.”

Indeed, most of the effective techniques for improving our second-order volitions are “relational” and collaborative. Religious congregations, Study Circles and other deliberative forums, internally democratic associations, and participatory social movements convene people to decide on what they should want and then to hold one another accountable for changing their identities by changing what they want. …

Meanwhile, as a whole country, we have both desires and second-order volitions. We want to drive our big SUVs to work, and we want to be the kind of country that does not want to do that. Whereas individual consumer choices elicit our ordinary desires, civic acts such as making arguments in public and voting make us think about our second-order volitions. A good law is not a reflection of what we want but of what we think we should want.

Again, I do not rule out the possibility that a democratically elected government might put apples on the lower shelves of school cafeterias, ban 32-oz sodas, or even inform tax scofflaws how many of their neighbors have paid on time. But each of these acts is a potential threat to the dignity of the persons being regulated, and so it requires explicit public discussion and careful review.

I realize, by the way, that I have combined allusions to libertarianism, civic republicanism, and Foucault in this post, even though they represent very different perspectives. But their differences emerge mostly in what they say about how we should govern. Presented with “libertarian paternalism,” I think they would converge on the same hostile response.

(See also “the new manipulative politics: behavioral economics, microtargeting, and the choice confronting Organizing for Action” and “qualms about a bond market for philanthropy” for similar concerns about another popular idea, social investing.)

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civic engagement: the claymation video

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(Dayton, OH) Edgar S. Cahn has been trying to improve the relationship between citizens and governments since 1964, when, as executive assistant to Sargent Shriver, he helped to implement the mandate to achieve the “maximum feasible participation” of the poor in  anti-poverty programs. Later he founded the Citizens’ Advocate Center and co-founded the Antioch School of Law, helping to invent clinical law programs. And now, to illustrate his new book No More Throw-Away People: The Co-Production Imperative (which I haven’t read), he has produced this great claymation video on engaging citizens. (I believe the metaphor of squares and blobs, referring to formal organizations and loose citizen groups, originated at the Kettering Foundation, which I am visiting today.)

The Parable of the Blobs and Squares from James Mackie on Vimeo.

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ALEC’s secret documents and our political economy

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On a flight to Philadelphia, I am reading the secret documents from ALEC (the American Legislative Affairs Council) leaked to the Guardian. Although they contain some juicy details about declining membership and internal controversies, I find some critical interpretations of these documents a bit overblown. For instance, ALEC will require its state chairs–who are also legislators–to pledge: “I will act with care and loyalty and put the interests of the organization first.” This is being treated as evidence that ALEC’s state chairs must put ALEC before their own constituents and consciences.  To me, it just sounds like boilerplate.

But the documents do give a window into money and politics. Consider that:

Businesses have common interests in lower taxes and weaker regulation. But they face a Prisoner’s Dilemma collective-action problem. Generic “business-friendly” legislation benefits them all (a bit), yet fighting for such legislation costs each firm money and reputation.

The solution is one organization that collects dues from many members and acts in their common interest. But …

Members will be tempted to leave if their narrow interests aren’t prominent enough in the collective agenda. The internal documents show that Coventry Health Care dropped ALEC because it had “joined for a single issue” (presumably health insurance) and Novo Nordisk Pharmaceuticals may have left “because only interested in diabetes related issue.”

By Robert Michels “Iron Law of Oligarchy,” any coalition will be taken over by a relatively zealous few with passionate commitments to ideological values. Dana Milbank writes, “When I first dealt with ALEC as a state government reporter 18 years ago, it was right of center but known for thoughtful policy research. But it has since adopted an aggressive agenda to pass legislation expanding gun rights and voter-identification requirements, and limit the reach of public-employee unions, social-welfare programs, consumer and environmental protections, and Obamacare.”  Not all these issues are in the economic interest of corporate backers, and some have left as a result. The ALEC documents specifically note that many financial services companies left the coalition “Due to controversy.”

Further, ideological disputes may divide potential supporters. The Solar Industries Association “left [ALEC] because their bill did not pass the task force.” (I’ll bet their self-interest in federal support for renewable energy met ideological opposition within ALEC.) The Pioneer Institute was “kicked out of ALEC (?) because of education issue.” Pioneer opposes the Common Core standards on principled grounds that I don’t happen to share, although I respect them. But ALEC supports the Common Core, which has business backing. So ALEC expelled Pioneer.

A coalition can operate more effectively in secret, because members can solve some of their collective-action problems through private negotiations. For instance, if a bank agrees to support conservative social legislation in return for deregulatory policies, that will look terrible. But if such a deal can be arranged privately, it may work. Hence ALEC’s tradition of private meetings.

Even so, the collective-action problems are tricky, and the organization is vulnerable to rules imposed from outside. For instance, according to the documents, “ALEC does not wish to be perceived as a lobbying organization and therefore does not wish to register as a lobbyist in any state.” To register as a lobbyist would bring criticism on its corporate members and trigger disclosure requirements. This means that stronger campaign-finance and lobby-disclosure laws might hamper ALEC somewhat.

In any case, a business coalition that spends more than $1 million on its own staff’s salaries must consider the odds of raising money for any given cause. ALEC’s documents indicate that it is considering working on Native American Tribal Issues, but “there may be little to no private funding for this issue.” It is also considering issues that affect travel and tourism, but “individual companies that join will very susceptible to dropping ALEC if there is public pressure.” (Presumably, tourist industries rely on discretionary consumer choices and could alienate customers easily.)

There can even be such a thing as too much money. The documents suggest that ALEC is a little wary of advocating on behalf of casinos, because “according to Opensecrets.org, the gaming industry contributed directly over $64 million in the 2012 elections and $32 million lobbying expenses. … This industry could potentially out fund other industries at ALEC.”

(By the way, I love the irony that ALEC consults opensecrets.org–a good-government watchdog group–to fine-tune its own lobbying agenda, but it does not disclose any of its own activity as either campaigning or lobbying.)

Although I have itemized some challenges confronting industry when it attempts to influence government, the challenges are much worse for, say, homeless people or poor families. So none of the above is meant to suggest that the political system is fair. The ALEC documents still offer interesting insights into our political economy.

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