Wallace Stevens’ idea of order

Posted on February 8, 2021 by Peter

Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,   
Why, when the singing ended and we turned   
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,   
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,   
As the night descended, tilting in the air,   
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,   
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,   
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.
     from Wallace Stevens, "The Idea of Order at Key West."

Anchored fishing boats at night will send luminous streaks across the water to point directly at you, the viewer. They seem to partition the sea in an ordered way that gives you the central place. By doing so, they make the dark sea more attractive: organized, deepened, enchanted. Although you are not hallucinating or succumbing to egoism, your impression is misleading, for anyone else will see the streaks pointing at them. From the sky, the sea would not appear partitioned at all, although it must seem that way to you.

George Eliot uses a comparable metaphor:

Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection. These things are a parable. The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person now absent …
Eliot, Middlemarch, part 3, chap. 27

Eliot is concerned about moral egoism. I think Stevens’ main interest is the subjectivity of any order that we impose on nature. If we push such skepticism far, nature vanishes entirely and all we have is our description. But the boats really are at anchor off Key West.

This image from the end of the poem might offer some hints about how to read the earlier portions. It seems that the narrator is by the sea with his friend, Ramon Fernandez, and they have heard a “she” singing. Stevens said he invented the name of his friend, but he later acknowledged that he might have suppressed the memory of the real literary critic, who was not actually his friend, and who might have been too keen to impose order. (The real Fernandez was a communist at the time Stevens wrote this poem, on his way to becoming a fascist collaborator.)

As for the “she,” this is a pronoun without any concrete noun. She has no name and is not called a woman or anything else specific. She has a complex relationship with the sea: she may be describing it, or communicating the sound it makes, or creating it with her song; or she may have been invented by the narrator as a metaphor for the experience.

The narrator explores each of those hypotheses:

[the ocean’s] mimic motion / Made constant cry … [The sea is singing.]
Even if what she sang was what she heard … / it was she and not the sea we heard. / For she was the maker of the song she sang. [She is singing.]
If it was only the dark voice of the sea / That rose … / But it was more than that, /
More even than her voice, and ours … [It is more than she who is singing.]

Perhaps this section–about the moment of a subtropical sunset–offers a synthesis to follow the various theses and antitheses:

        It was her voice that made   
The sky acutest at its vanishing.   
She measured to the hour its solitude.   
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,   
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,   
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her   
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

One can read the poem very literally and imagine that Wallace Stevens, a man from the mainland, and his friend, a man with a Spanish surname, have seen a woman striding along the beach and singing about the sea. But her song has the very special power of making the whole world. Even though the narrator insists that “she was the maker of the song she sang,” her song is coterminous with the object of her singing–the sea–which suggests that she is not different from it but another way of naming it.

At this point, the literal reading collapses–much as a naive interpretation of the streaks of light collapses when you realize that they are not really pointing at you. The poem does not give us direct access to a real moment in the past when a woman, two men, and some boats were visible at Key West. The poem is the object that we see, and it has a writer and some readers.

Under the title of the poem is the name “Wallace Stevens,” which stands for an actual man, married to a woman, who became famous for writing words. It’s reasonable to begin with the assumption that the narrator who tells us, “She sang …” is this man, and that he either really heard her singing or made her up from scratch, thus functioning as her artistic creator.

It’s then reasonable to place the poem in a very long tradition of men writing about women who are their muses, objects of love, creatures of their art, and/or metaphors for abstractions, such as nature. The politics of this tradition is problematic, since the poet with the he-pronouns typically controls the “she” of his verse.* He certainly gets credit for the words that attach to his name. Stevens either maintains this tradition or possibly subverts it, depending on what you think of the phrases “mastered” and “maker’s rage for order” near the end.

I don’t disagree with using gender to analyze the poem, but I think it also asks us to question our metaphysics. Why are we so sure that the narrator is Wallace Stevens, the poet with the he-pronouns? Couldn’t she be speaking, or the ocean, or the reader?

In one recorded dialogue with a student, Basho instructed, “The problem with most poems is that they are either subjective or objective.” “Don’t you mean too subjective or too objective?” his student asked. Basho answered, simply, “No.”
Jane Hirshfeld, The Heart of Haiku

The moment of sunset is neither day nor night. Stevens’ poem is neither objective nor subjective but right on that edge. Basho avoids tipping either way by means of imagism. His poems do not mean; they are. Stevens attempts it in a very different way–by arguing explicitly about the nature of his own verse in ways that skillfully undermine any fixed conclusion about who is saying what about what.

*For a good reading along these lines, see Brooke Baeten, “Whose Spirit Is This?”: Musings on the Woman Singer in ‘The Idea of Order at Key West.’ The Wallace Stevens Journal 24.1 (2000): 24-36. See also: nostalgia for now; homage to Basho; a poem should; and the tree and the rock.

two good books on Black Lives Matter

Posted on February 4, 2021 by Peter

Lebron, Christopher J., The Making of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of an Idea (Oxford University Press, 2017)
Ransby, Barbara. Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the Twenty-First century (Univ. of California Press, 2018).

These are two very different but complementary books.

Lebron offers a history of the idea that Black lives matter, describing thinkers who lived well before the current movement and developed its core principles. His book is an extended definition of the movement, a justification of it, and a contribution to it.

Lebron pairs Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells as pioneers of the idea that whites can be compelled to reckon with racial injustice through “shameful publicity.” He pairs Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston as influential proponents of the idea that actual Black lives are rich and variegated and diverse, not defined entirely by oppression. Both authors “counter-colonize[d] the white imagination” by portraying this richness. He pairs Anna Julia Cooper and Audre Lorde, who demonstrated that you can’t value Black lives unless you value all Black lives, which requires appreciation for gender, sexuality, and other forms of diversity. These writers “teach us the lesson of unconditional self-possession.” And he pairs James Baldwin and Martin Luther King, Jr. as proponents of forms of love which–while significantly different–both imply “unfragmented compassion.”

Lebron is a great source of relatively overlooked quotations as well as an original interpreter of texts as familiar as Douglass’ “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” His overall framework is illuminating.

Ransby is an historian and a participant/observer in the current movement. She offers a wealth of detail about who did what, when, where, and why (up to her publication date in 2018). Like Lebron’s, her book is sprinkled with quotations that amount to arguments for Black Lives Matter, but her timeframe is narrower. She mainly traces the intellectual history of the movement from the 1977 Combahee River Collective’s statement (which, of course, had its own influences).

Ransby is attentive to organized structures. Many Black Lives Matter activists are concerned about concentrated power and prefer flat hierarchies. One source of these ideas is Ella Baker: see Ransby’s own book, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (2003).

However, it would not be accurate to describe Black Lives Matter as unorganized or as resistant to formal structures of any kind. Ransby describes “an assemblage of dozens of organizations and individuals that are actively in one another’s orbit, having collectively employed an array of tactics together.” Many of these organizations are autonomous nonprofits; some are companies or programs within organizations that also have other purposes. Ransby emphasizes the importance of local chapters, of organizations whose main purpose is to “weave together” these local groups, and of significant conferences, such as a gathering of more than two thousand organizers in Cleveland in July 2015. Most dedicated activists in the movement have long resumes of roles in formal organizations.

My impression is that resistance to hierarchy is real and valid. It goes back to the New Left and has drawn additional impetus from feminism. However, the major change from the classic era of the Civil Rights Movement is not that leaders then believed in top-down authority, whereas activists today favor looser networks. It is the profound shift in the sociology of American civil society.

The NAACP, the Urban League, and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters exemplified a model that was influential in the United States during the first half of the 1900s. National organizations often had state units and local chapters; members paid dues that were shared by the three tiers; and leaders were elected at each level, often at face-to-face conventions. Individuals made whole careers within one of these organizations. One reason that the Sleeping Car Porters’ A. Philip Randolph, the National Urban League’s Whitney Young, Jr., and the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins emerged as nationally famous civil rights leaders was that they headed their respective organizations, and smaller groups like King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference imitated the same structure.

However, this format shrank and weakened dramatically in the United States after the 1960s. Instead, US civil society is now dominated by autonomous nonprofits that rely on donations, grants or contracts. They usually have self-perpetuating boards and relate to each other in networks rather than hierarchies. Many are both led and staffed by their original founders. Individuals typically affiliate with several of these nonprofits and add and subtract affiliations frequently.

Many of the organizations that Ransby describes (and they are very numerous) fit this description. I am not sure that anyone knows how to build new organizations that function as the NAACP or a union did in 1960. I wouldn’t say that philosophical opposition to hierarchy is irrelevant or invalid, but I am not sure that movements have much of a choice today. For better or worse, the way we organize ourselves is to form networks of small nonprofits.

launch of Educating for American Democracy #EADRoadmap

Posted on February 3, 2021 by Peter

Join us at the National Forum on March 2nd from 3-4:45pm ET for the official release of the Educating for American Democracy report.

Moderated by Judy Woodruff of PBS Newshour, the forum will feature leading scholars discussing the Roadmap’s guidance about what and how to teach in history and civics. This project is the result of 17 months of work by over 300 contributors.

I was one of the co-PIs, and this project has been my focus (outside of Tufts work) since 2019.

Please join us for the launch of the first truly national and cross-ideological conversation about civic learning and history at a time when our country needs it most.

All are welcome to attend the national forum. Please register and encourage others to register at forum.educatingforamericandemocracy.org.

The COVID 19 Vaccine in the Global North & Global South: Ethics, Access & Resistance

Posted on February 2, 2021 by Peter

This is the video from a recent event sponsored by Tufts Global Education and the Fletcher Global One Health Diplomacy Initiative. Susan Sánchez-Casal organized and introduced the event. I moderated and posed the questions. The experts were Karsten Noko, a lawyer & humanitarian aid practitioner originally from Zimbabwe, and Josep Lobera, a sociology professor at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid & Tufts in Madrid.

In the Global South, billions of people are not going to be vaccinated any time soon because of a shortage of vaccines in their countries. A realistic timetable is 2024. Meanwhile, millions of people in the Global North are going to refuse to be vaccinated because of skepticism and distrust, which is partly caused by elites’ use of weaponized misinformation.

The speakers also explored nuances–including vaccine shortages in the North and hesitancy and misinformation in the South.

syllabus of a course on the Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Posted on January 29, 2021 by Peter

Summary

In this seminar, we will study Martin Luther King Jr. as a political thinker. The whole class will read major works by King and excerpts from biographies and historical documents. Additional readings will be distributed among students, who will contribute insights from their assigned texts to the seminar discussions. The additional readings will include works that influenced King, writings by some of his contemporaries, and recent interpretations. We will investigate King’s understanding of the Civil Rights Movement—why it was necessary and what it aimed to achieve. Specifically, we will study his ideas about the political and economic organization of white supremacy, the impact of racial ideologies, and the importance of racial integration and the right to vote. We will investigate King’s philosophy of civil disobedience and nonviolence as well as a set of values he relates to that philosophy: dignity, sacrifice, self-reflection, self-improvement, love, faith, and freedom. We will relate these values to King’s understanding of justice. Criticisms of King will also be considered. Studying King and his critics will provide a window into post-WWII American political thought. (This course is the Capstone for the Civic Studies Major and open to other majors.)

Grading rubric:

Regular participation in Canvas discussion threads about the readings: 40%. I will post a prompt one week before each class session, and you will reply to my prompt before class. Reading and responding to other students’ comments will be appreciated but not graded.
5-page paper, due at the end of the semester: 30%
class participation: 30%

Criteria for assessing class participation:

Attendance.
Engaging in a discussion that is informed by the assigned texts.
Focusing on the topic and the texts, which does not preclude drawing connections beyond them.
Being responsive to other students. Responsiveness needn’t always be immediate, verbal, or occur within the class discussion itself.
Building on others’ contributions, and sometimes making links among different people’s contributions or between what they have said and the text.
Demonstrating genuine respect for the others, where respect does not require agreement. In fact, sometimes respect requires explicit disagreement because you take the other person’s ideas seriously.
Taking risks, trying out ideas that you don’t necessarily endorse, and asking questions that might be perceived as naive or uninformed.
Seeking truth or clarity or insight (instead of other objectives).
Exercising freedom of speech along with a degree of tact and concern for the other people.
Demonstrating responsibility for the other students’ learning in what you say (and occasionally by a decision not to speak).

Syllabus

Introduction

Monday, Feb 1: Introduction

Wednesday, Feb 3: In lieu of class, please attend Tufts University’s Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Symposium, “Cashing Our Promissory Note: Race, Justice, and Reparation” with Jelani Cobb. The time is 5:00-6:30. Once registered, you get a Zoom link.

1. Predecessors and Early Influences

Monday, Feb 8: Major African American political thinkers, 1885-1940

Students choose one of these authors and be prepared to discuss the author as well as the readings.

Booker T. Washington, “Letter to the Editor” (1885); ”Atlanta Exposition Address” (1895); ”Speech to the National Afro-American Council” (1895); ”Letter to President Roosevelt” (1904); ”Speech to the National Negro Business League” (1915);”My View of Segregation Laws” (1915)
W.E.B. DuBois, “The Evolution of Negro Leadership” (1901);” Declaration of Principles” (1905); ”The Crisis” and” Agitation” (1909); ”Race Relations in the United States” (1928);”Marxism and the Negro Problem” (1933); ”Pan -African and New Racial Philosophy” (1933);” The [NAACP] Board of Directors on Segregation” (1934); ”A Negro Within the Nation” (1935). Plus ”The Talented Tenth” (1903).
A. Phillip Randolph: ”Lynching: Capitalism Its Cause; Socialism its Cure”; editorials on” Racial Equality” and ”The Failure of the Negro Church,“ “The Negro Radicals, “ “Segregation in the Public Schools: A Promise or a Menace, “Negroes and the Labor Movement, “ “The Negro and Economic Radicalism, “ and ”The New Pullman Porter.”
Marcus Garvey, “Address to the Second UNIA Convention” (1921) plus the entry on Garvey in BlackPast
Anna Julia Cooper, as discussed in Christopher J. Lebron, The Making of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of an Idea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 67-84

(Unless otherwise noted in the PDFs, these readings are scanned from Gary D. Wintz, ed., African American Political Thought 1890-1930 (M.E. Sharpe, 1996).)

Wednesday, Feb 10: Theological Influences

Students choose one of these authors and be prepared to discuss the author as well as the readings

Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited, pp. 7-35.
Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, pp. 257-77
Walter Raushenbush, A Theology for the Social Gospel, pp. 57-78 and 95-109
Martin Buber, I and Thou, translated by Walter Kaufmann, pp. 53-69, 96-110, and 160-68

Monday, Feb 15 – Presidents’ Day, no classes

Wednesday, Feb 17: Biblical echoes

Students will choose one of these, read it, and also read a bit online about the context:

Book of Exodus, Chapters 1-3, in the King James Version
Book of Amos, Chapter 2, in the King James Version
Book of Micah, in the King James Version
Book of Matthew, Chapter 26, in the King James Version

Monday, Feb 22: Precursors–Gandhi

Everyone will read:

Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi: The Years that Changed the World (2018), chapter 16 (“The March to the Sea”)

Choose one of these:

Bikhu Parekh, Gandhi, Chapter 4 (“Satyagraha”), pp. 51-62;
Gandhi, Satyagraha (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing Co., 1951), excerpts; and Gandhi, Notes, May 22, 1924 – August 15, 1924, in The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (Electronic Book), New Delhi, Publications Division Government of India, 1999, 98 volumes, vol. 28, pp. 307-310
Karuna Mantena, “Showdown for Nonviolence: The Theory and Practice of Nonviolent Politics, “ in Shelby and Terry, pp. 78-101
Martha Nussbaum.”From Anger to Love: Self-Purification and Political Resistance, “ in Shelby and Terry, pp. 105-126
Reinhold Niebhuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, pp. 231-256

Wednesday, Feb 24: Precursors–African American campaigners against segregation

Everyone watches Episode 1 of Eyes on the Prize, “Awakenings, 1954-1956″

Choose among:

Charles Payne, “Ella Baker and Models of Social Change”; and Ella Baker, “Developing Community Leadership”
Danielle McGuire, At The Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance–A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (excerpts)
James L. Farmer Jr., Lay Bare the Heart: An Autobiography of the Civil Rights Movement (excerpts)

2. Montgomery

Monday, March 1: What Happened?

Choose between:

David Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (1986), pp. 11-82.
Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63, pp. 105-205.

Wednesday, March 3: How Does King Present What Happened?

Martin Luther King, Stride Toward Freedom, chapters 3, 4, and 5.
Speech at Holt Street Baptist Church, Dec. 5, 1955.

Monday, March 8: Why did it turn out as it did?

Charles Tilly, “Social Movements, 1768-2004″
Marshall Ganz, “Why David Sometimes Wins: Strategic Capacity in Social Movements, “ in Jeff Goodwin and James M. Jasper, Rethinking Social Movements: Structure, Meaning, and Emotion (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004) pp.177-98.

Wednesday, March 10: Deliberating What to Do

Reading: Peter Levine, “The Montgomery Bus Boycott: An SNF Agora Case Study.” In class, students discuss the questions in this case.

3. Albany and Birmingham

Monday, March 15: What Happened?

Please watch: Episode 4 of Eyes on the Prize, “No Easy Walk: 1961-1963″

Optional, for background:

David Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (1986), 173-286.
Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63 , pp. 524-561 and 673-802.

Wednesday, March 17: How Does King Present What is Happening?

Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail

Monday, March 22: More Analysis of the Letter

Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail

Wednesday, March 24: King’s version versus the Supreme Court’s

David Luban, “Difference Made Legal: The Court and Dr. King” (start at p. 2156)
Walker v. City of Birmingham, 388 U.S. 307 (1967)

(March 26-28, spring break)

4. March on Washington, Selma

Monday, March 29: Protest and Politics

Everyone reads:

Rustin, From Protest to Politics: Future of the civil Rights Movement. 1965.
Proposed Plans for March (perhaps by Rustin)
Everyone reads or listens to the speech and other documents from that day:
- Program
- Instructions for March Ushers
- Original Speech of John Lewis
- Speech of John Lewis as Given

Wednesday, March 31: Selma

Everyone listens and/or reads the text of:

“Address at the Conclusion of the Selma to Montgomery March” (March 25, 1965)

Please also choose between:

Episode 6 of Eyes on the Prize, Bridge to Freedom: 1965″
David Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (1986), pp. 357-430

5. Issues During the”Heroic Moment” of the Civil Rights Movement

Monday, April 5: What Should be the Goal?

Please read both:

Martin Luther King, “The Ethical Demands for Integration ” (1962) AND
Stokely Carmichael, “Toward Black Liberation, “ The Massachusetts Review, Autumn 1966

Optional readings (valuable interpretations of King’s view): Danielle Allen, “Integration, Freedom, and the Affirmation of Life, “ in Shelby and Terry, pp. 155-169. and Derrick Darby, “A Vindication of Voting Rights, “ in Shelby and Terry, pp. 170-83. [Because of the pandemic, I cannot get access to this book to scan it. The Google book version of these chapters skips some pages; just read what you can.]

Wednesday, April 7: Change from Below or from Above?

Patrick Healy and Jeff Zeleny, “Clinton and Obama Spar Over Remark About Dr. King – The New York Times.pdf Jan 13, 2008
Garth E. Pauley, “Presidential rhetoric and interest group politics: Lyndon B. Johnson and the civil rights act of 1964, “ Southern Communication Journal, vol. 63, no 1 (1997), pp. 1-19
Original text of the Civil Rights Act of 1964

Monday, April 12: Martin Luther King and Malcolm X

Everyone reads these primary texts:

King’s remarks on Malcolm X in 1965 (from a Playboy Magazine interview)
Malcolm X., “Message to the Grass Roots ” (Nov 9-10, 1963)
Malcolm X, “The Ballot or the Bullet , “ 1964 (audio and/or text)

Choose among:

Episode 7 of Eyes on the Prize, “The Time Has Come: 1964-66 ”
August H. Nimtz, “Violence and/or Nonviolence in the Success of the Civil Rights Movement: The Malcolm X–Martin Luther King, Jr. Nexus,” New Political Science 38.1 (2016): 1-22.
Clayborn Carson, “The Unfinished Dialogue of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X ” (1998)
Peniel Joseph, The Sword and the Shield (excerpts TBA)

6. Later Writings and Issues

Wednesday, April 15: The North and Poverty

Everyone watches:

Episode 8 of Eyes on the Prize, “Two Societies: 1965-68 “

King’s 1967 article in response to the Detroit riots: ”The Crisis in American Cities.”

Choose from:

Enrico Beltramini, ”Operation breadbasket in Chicago: Between civil rights and black capitalism.” The Economic Civil Rights Movement (Routledge, 2013), pp. 131-142.
Jesse L. Jackson, “The Movement Didn’t Stop, “ in Mary Lou Finley, Bernard LaFayette Jr., James R. Ralph
Jr. and Pam Smith (eds)., The Chicago Freedom Movement: Martin Luther King Jr. and Civil Rights Activism in the North (University Press of Kentucky 2016), pp. 236-254.

Monday, April 19: Patriots’ Day observed (University Holiday) No Classes

Wednesday, April 21: The War

Listen to audio and/or read the text:

“Beyond Vietnam — A Time to Break Silence” (1967)

Monday, April 26: The end

Everyone watches/listens to:

Episode 10 of Eyes on the Prize, “The Promised Land: 1967-68 ”
Martin Luther King, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” (April 3, 1968)

21st-Century Appraisals

Wednesday, April 28: Major interpretive questions

Peniel E. Joseph, “Waiting till the midnight hour: Reconceptualizing the heroic period of the civil rights movement, 1954–1965 ”

Monday, May 3: The Civil Rights Movement from the perspective of Black Lives Matter

The Combahee River Collective, “The Combahee River Collective Statement , “ BlackPast
Fredrick C. Harris, “The next civil rights movement?” Dissent 62, no. 3 (2015): 34-40

Wednesday, May 5: Summing Up

setting a higher standard for success in civic education

Posted on January 28, 2021 by Peter

Sarah Garland has a good piece in The Hechinger Report on whether schools–and specifically, civic educators–can combat political extremism. She presents the evidence as mixed, and no one thinks that schools are equipped to solve that problem all by themselves.

Meanwhile Weinschenk & Dawes have a new article that re-analyzes longitudinal data from US students and finds that civic education does not boost voter turnout, once other factors are considered.*

My response is the same in both cases. Thousands of dedicated civic educators are doing their best in classrooms and community settings. However, as a society, we have not invested in civics. We have not put much public or private money into it, or built it into policy reforms, or required kids to spend much time on it, or emphasized it when educating future teachers, or even conveyed its importance to most of our youth.

As a result, the aggregate effects from taking a civics course are not likely to be large. Program evaluations and studies of specific classrooms sometimes find big impacts (albeit in the short term, since few evaluations involve long-term follow-up), but the effects of typical courses are limited.

If people take away the conclusion that civics doesn’t work, that will be a self-fulfilling prophesy. (And it would reflect a misunderstanding of the relationship between data–which always describes the past–and envisioning the future.) But it is true that we must invest considerably more in civics to get the results we need.

*Weinschenk, A., & Dawes, C. (2021). Civic Education in High School and Voter Turnout in Adulthood. British Journal of Political Science, 1-15. doi:10.1017/S0007123420000435. See also The Educating for Democracy Act of 2020.

Amanda Gorman rose to the occasion

Posted on January 25, 2021 by Peter

Occasional poetry is verse written to be read or declaimed aloud: for instance, at a wedding, a funeral, a graduation, a coronation–or an inauguration.

Several genres won’t work for these purposes. For instance, the audience probably doesn’t have time for an epic or a ballad. Satire is not what the patron expects, at least not at a funeral or an inauguration.

Lyric verse is also problematic. Lyric poetry since the Romantic period has often aspired to authenticity: the author’s distinctive personality becomes concrete in words. But an occasion is not about the poet. If the poet’s sincere emotion happens to be completely aligned with the event, lyric can work. That can happen at a wedding or a funeral if the poet is a dear friend. But politics is less personal. How many poets are fully committed, to the bottom of their souls, to the presidency of Joseph R. Biden Jr.?

Another major direction has been irony and indirection. A lyric poem doesn’t plainly say what the author thinks; it demands intense interpretive work from the audience. But that won’t work for an occasion, especially a mass event dominated by speeches. The last thing we want at an inauguration is any text that is easy to misinterpret by careless or hostile listeners. Clarity is essential. Although lyric verse can be impressively clear about the concrete objects that it describes, it is rarely clear about the implications.

Some styles of lyric poetry do work well for occasional purposes. For example, in the era of Dryden and Pope, English lyric poetry did not usually aim for authenticity, originality, or ambiguity. Poetry was more often an art of elegant expression. Many poems stated conventional opinions, but with excellent use of formal properties that listeners were prepared to appreciate–clever rhymes and classical rhetorical devices.

Thus (Royall Sir,) to see you landed here
Was cause enough of triumph for a year:
Nor would your care those glorious joyes repeat
Till they at once might be sure and great...

Dryden, "To His Sacred Majesty: A Panegyric on his Coronation" (1662)

According to Elliott Colla, “Occasional poetry remains … more central in non-Western traditions such as Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Japanese, Korean and Chinese.” But in English, the neoclassicism of Dryden and Pope has been little admired. Some astute critics recognize its quality, but very few active poets aspire to write in that vein.

In fact, Romantic and modern lyric poetry is anti-occasional, in the sense that it is written by an autonomous individual for the private consumption of other private individuals, dispersed in time and place. When it seems occasional, it fails (except if that appearance is ironic.)

Most of the previous poems at US presidential inaugurations have dissatisfied me in one of two ways. Some have been genuine lyric poems that fell flat when delivered through a microphone to a mass audience. Robert Frost prepared a somewhat wry commentary in verse about occasional poetry but couldn’t see his text in the bright sunlight and declaimed a lyric instead. Others have essentially been speeches with irregular line breaks. But it is not clear why a poet is qualified to give a speech at a major political event. The poet is a formal craftsperson, not an expert on policy.

One exception was Maya Angelou, who spoke as a leading public intellectual as much as a poet. I thought her poem was basically a speech, albeit with more of a fictional narrative spine. In any case, she enriched the 1993 inauguration.

Amanda Gorman has the advantage of working in the tradition of spoken word poetry: verse written for public performance and usually drawing on oral genres, from folk stories to hip hop. Spoken word is occasional verse; it is written to be performed at events.

Gorman didn’t give a prose speech, because her words were carefully chosen for rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, and assonance:

This is the era of just redemption
We feared at its inception
We did not feel prepared to be the heirs
of such a terrifying hour
but within it we found the power

She accentuated those formal properties in her performance. Indeed, her performance was much better than the words on the page, and that is intrinsic to the genre. (In contrast, T.S. Eliot does a poor job reciting his poems.)

Gorman wrote for the occasion–words that would be useful for Biden and Harris and for Americans of good will who were watching the event. She didn’t necessarily disclose all that she believes about the new administration or the country. (I have no basis to speculate about her full beliefs.) Nevertheless, she was authentic as a performer, much as Lady Gaga gave an authentic performance of the “Star Spangled Banner” or Anya Taylor-Joy poured herself into the role of Beth Harmon in The Queen’s Gambit. Each of these people chose to support the event at which they starred.

This is not to doubt Gorman’s words, but to take them as “occasional” in the best sense of the word. What the nation needed on this occasion was to hear this particular person reassure us that:

Somehow we do it
 Somehow we've weathered and witnessed
 a nation that isn't broken
 but simply unfinished ...

dealing with the big tech platforms

Posted on January 22, 2021 by Peter

We can hold several ideas in our minds, even though they’re in tension, and try to work through to a better solution.

One one hand …

Any platform for discussion and communication needs rules. It won’t work if it’s wide open.
A privately owned platform is free to make up its own rules, and even to enforce them at will (except as governed by contracts that it has freely entered). A private actor is not bound to permit speech it dislikes or to use due process to regulate speech. It enjoys freedom of the press.
Donald Trump was doing great damage on Twitter and Facebook. It’s good that he’s gone.

Yet …

It is highly problematic that a few companies own vastly influential global platforms for communication without being accountable to any public. The First Amendment is a dead letter if the public sphere is a small set of forums owned by private companies.
Twitter’s reasons for banning Trump seem pretty arbitrary. The company refers to how Trump’s tweets were “received” by unnamed “followers” and invokes the broad “context” of his comments. But speakers don’t control the reception of their words or the contexts of their speech. A well-designed public forum would have rules, but probably not these rules.
If a US-based company can ban a political leader in any given country (including any competitive democracy), then democratic governance is threatened.
Facebook, Twitter, and Google profit from news consumption, denying profits to the companies that provide shoe-leather reporting. Fewer than half as many people are employed as journalists today, compared to 10 years ago. This is at the heart of the current, very interesting battle between the Australian government and the big tech. companies.
These companies deploy algorithms and other design features to maximize people’s time on their platforms, which encourages addictiveness, outrageous content, and filter bubbles and polarization.

Regulation is certainly one option, but it must overcome these challenges: 1) private communications companies have genuine free speech rights. 2) Forcing a powerful company to make really good choices is hard; externally imposed rules can be ignored or distorted. 3) The fact that there are 193 countries creates major coordination problems. (I wouldn’t mind if a patchwork of inconsistent rules hurt the big companies–I think these firms do more net harm than good. But it’s not clear that the resulting mix of rules would be good for the various countries themselves.) 4) The major companies are very powerful and may be able to defeat attempts to regulate them. For instance, they are simply threatening to withdraw from Australia. 5) There is a high potential for regulatory capture–major incumbent businesses influencing the regulators and even using complicated regulatory regimes to create barriers to entry for new competitors. Imagine, for example, that laws require content-moderation. Who would be able to hire enough moderators to compete with Facebook?

Antitrust is worth considering. If the big companies were broken up, there might be more competitors. But you must believe very strongly in the advantages of a competitive marketplace to assume that the results would be better instead of worse than the status quo. Metcalfe’s Law also tends to concentrate communication networks, whatever we do with antitrust.

Another approach is to try to build new platforms with better rules and designs. The economic challenge–not having enough capital to compete with Google and Facebook–could be addressed. Governments could fund these platforms, on the model of the BBC. I think the bigger problem is that the platforms would have to draw lots of avid users, or else they would be irrelevant. They would have to be attractive without being addictive, compelling without hyping sensational content, trustworthy yet also free and diverse.

Those are tough design challenges–but surely worth trying.

why protect civil liberties in a pandemic?

Posted on January 19, 2021 by Peter

This article is now in print: Levine, P. Why protect civil liberties during a pandemic? Journal of Public Health Policy (2021). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41271-020-00263-w. Springer is making the full text available here. The abstract follows:

During a public health emergency, a government must balance public welfare, equity, individual rights, and democratic processes and norms. These goods may conflict. Although science has a role in informing wise policy, no empirical evidence or algorithm can determine how to balance competing goods under conditions of uncertainty. Especially in a crisis, it is crucial to have a broad and free conversation about public policy. Many countries are moving in the opposite direction. Sixty one percent of governments have imposed at least some problematic restrictions on individual rights or democratic processes during the COVID-19 pandemic, and 17 have made substantial negative changes. The policies of Poland and Hungary reflect these global trends and continue these countries’ recent histories of democratic erosion. The expertise of public health should be deployed in defense of civil liberties.

Martin Luther King’s philosophy of time

Posted on January 18, 2021 by Peter

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. set himself against two false conceptions of time and offered a profoundly original alternative.

One false idea was what he called in the Letter from a Birmingham Jail the “tragic misconception” that time flows inevitably toward justice. This is a linear, progressive theory. It has always been popular in the United States, where the white majority has tilted toward optimism and self-satisfaction. We tell ourselves that although we have faults, “the current has set steadily in one direction: toward democratic forms” (John Dewey). This kind of optimism has also been influential in liberal Protestantism and can even have a metaphysical underpinning: since God is omnipotent and good, things will work out, both in this life and the next.

It can imply that people should calm down and wait for justice. The “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” is King’s response to messages like this one, which he says he received “from a white brother in Texas”: “All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that you are in too great a religious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth.”

Rev. King answers, “For years now I have heard the word ‘Wait!’ It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never. We must come to see … that ‘justice too long delayed is justice denied.'”

King was equally opposed to the idea that time is static, that a society cannot fundamentally change. One version of this idea says that White supremacy is evil but also foundational and highly unlikely ever to yield. A different version is held by white supremacists. George Wallace, for instance, emphasized that history was, and must remain, static. When he cried, “Segregation today . . . segregation tomorrow . . . segregation forever,” Wallace was denying the passage of time. And he presented this stance as nothing new: “we sound the drum … as have our generations of forebears before us done, time and time again through history.”

King’s alternative view had three features.

First, the flow of time is up to us. History is neither a tragedy–with a foreordained evil conclusion–nor a comedy, inevitably moving toward a happen end. Nor are we stuck in a changeless present. “Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.”

Second, the past is always present. It infuses our own time. In the “I Have a Dream Speech,” King says, “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. . … It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. … But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so we’ve come to cash this check.”

The founding of the republic was almost two centuries in the past, yet the promissory note was still on the books. (And still is today.) That was not quite a metaphor, because King was quite literal about the need for repayment, for reparations. But the idea that the debts of the past are still carried on the nation’s books was one of many tropes he used to convey the continued existence of the past.

Third, we can make the future present. We can envision a better conclusion and pull that vision into our own time. For instance, we can imagine a future when the government founded by Jefferson and Madison pays its debts to the descendants of the people they had enslaved, thus changing the relationship between the past and the present. Once we imagine that moment, we can work to accomplish it.

King’s “Dream” that Black and white Georgians will “sit down together at the table of brotherhood”–while Mississippi is “transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice”–is not a prediction or a forecast. It is an invention whose purpose is to motivate the quarter of a million people who gathered on the National Mall on August 28, 1963.

And it was remarkable that they had gathered there. Popular movements–and especially nonviolent popular movements with idealistic causes–defy realistic predictions. Individuals usually calculate the costs and risks for themselves against the benefits for themselves. To join a social movement, especially in the face of vicious opposition, is costly and dangerous. Any benefits are speculative. It is rational to stand aside and see if other people struggle for justice. If they do, the problem may be solved without an individual’s having to take the risk. And if they don’t, the individual’s sacrifice would have been pointless anyway.

Yet people occasionally defy this logic and rise up together in large numbers in the same time and place. Montgomery in 1955, Birmingham in 1963, the Washington Mall later in 1963, and Selma in 1965 were moments when the future suddenly broke into the present. To delay them would have destroyed them.

In his last speech, “I Have Been to the Mountaintop,” King diagnoses the challenge (oppressed people calculate their individual interests and fail to congeal as a movement) and reminds his audience of the power of acting in concert:

Now what does all this mean in this great period of history? It means that we’ve got to stay together. (Yeah) We’ve got to stay together and maintain unity. You know, whenever Pharaoh wanted to prolong the period of slavery in Egypt, he had a favorite, favorite formula of doing it. What was that? He kept the slaves fighting among themselves. [Applause] But whenever the slaves get together, something happens in Pharaoh’s court, and he cannot hold the slaves in slavery. When the slaves get together, that’s the beginning of getting out of slavery. [Applause] Now let us maintain unity.

Note again the analysis of time. Pharoah wants to keep things static, to “prolong the period of slavery.” As soon as the slaves “get together,” the future comes into view.

People sometimes quote King’s line that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice” to suggest that progress is inevitable–perhaps because of divine providence. He said those words at the conclusion of the Selma to Montgomery march, which had been fraught, controversial even within the movement, and very nearly a failure. That day, a tragic conclusion was all too easy to imagine. After envisioning a future when “society [is] at peace with itself” and “can live with its conscience,” King says, “I know you are asking today, ‘How long will it take?'” He gives a series of calls and responses, each beginning “How long? Not long, because …” This is the context in which he mentions the arc of the universe. He does not mean that it will surely carry us to justice and that we can confidently wait for that day. No one who had marched with him to Montgomery would have imagined that. He is telling his audience that they can bend the arc, that they can move the future closer.

In short, the past is always still present, the future can break into today, we can move our vision across time, and we can determine how things end.

Wallace had imagined waves of white supremacists standing in the way of justice, one generation after another. King instead invoked a series of prophets, “extremists for justice,” who were able to envision history’s conclusion and thus speak to us from their own times. In the “Letter,” King names five religious prophets–Amos, Jesus, Paul, Martin Luther, and John Bunyan–and two secular democratic ones, Jefferson and Lincoln. He also credits six contemporary white men and women (most of whose names I do not recognize) for writing “about our struggle in eloquent and prophetic terms.”

Prophesy means transcending the present to affect the future. In Stride to Freedom, King had written, “Any discussion of the Christian minister today must ultimately emphasize the need for prophecy. … May the problem of race in America soon make hearts burn so that prophets will rise up, saying, ‘Thus saith the Lord,’ and cry out as Amos did, ‘. . . let justice roll down as waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.'” As his career progressed, he constantly returned to the nineteen biblical books traditionally called Nevi’im, prophecies. For instance, in the “I Have a Dream Speech,” King again quoted Amos 5:24 along with Isaiah 40:4 (“Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain”).

This genre of prophecy typically begins with a moral condemnation of the present, often directed explicitly at the most powerful people: the kings, priests, and rich men:

Forasmuch therefore as your treading is upon the poor, and ye take from him burdens of wheat: ye have built houses of hewn stone, but ye shall not dwell in them; ye have planted pleasant vineyards, but ye shall not drink wine of them.
For I know your manifold transgressions and your mighty sins: they afflict the just, they take a bribe, and they turn aside the poor in the gate from their right.
(Amos 5:11-12)

The prophecy may forecast the punishment and fall of these wicked men. “Woe unto you,” says the Lord, through Amos, six verses later. The prophet then envisions a better time, a time of justice. This is not a forecast based on continuing the current trends into the future. Rather, it is moral and hortatory. If the people begin to act righteously, then God will help them make the world better. “Hate the evil, and love the good, and establish judgment in the gate: it may be that the Lord God of hosts will be gracious unto the remnant of Joseph” (Amos 5:15).

King’s last–and arguably greatest–speech was also his most explicitly prophetic. He had come to Memphis to support striking sanitation workers. A mass march had gone badly from his perspective. It had turned violent, at least around the edges. Film of the event strongly suggests that police instigated the violence. King blamed the press for focusing on some “window breaking” instead of the structural violence against Black workers. Yet he was shaken by his own inability to preserve nonviolent discipline. This was the first time he had joined or led a march in which the protesters had failed to turn the other cheek. He was also exhausted and ill, unwilling to speak or even to travel to the venue in the midst of a thunderstorm. He forced himself to go anyway.

We know that he had one less than day left to live, and we must read the speech with that hindsight.

He starts with the now. He says, “something is happening in Memphis, something is happening in our world.” From there, he moves immediately out of the linear flow of time. He asks us to imagine him “standing at the beginning of time with the possibility of taking a kind of general and panoramic view of the whole of human history up to now” and conversing with the immortal Almighty. He traverses history, mentioning some of the high points, and concludes that the time when he would most like to live is the present. Things certainly seem bad, “but I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars.”

Once again, he sees the future in the present, taking the form of a voluntary popular movement. “Something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up.” At the beginning of his career, he would have emphasized the protesters in his immediate surroundings, but now he sees that the uprising is global. People are “assembled today” in Johannesburg, Nairobi, Accra, New York City, Atlanta, Jackson, and where he stands, Memphis. “The cry is always the same: ‘We want to be free.'”

He rehearses the glorious moments of the movement so far, emphasizing the mightiness of a unified nonviolent struggle. He commends the preachers in attendance for their prophetic voices and quotes Amos as the exemplary prophet. He makes the case for economic pressure. He acknowledges people’s fear and exhorts them not to stop when the time is so critical. He recalls when he was nearly assassinated and gives thanks that he survived, because then he could witness the moments when unified people overcame oppression: sit-ins, freedom rides, Albany, Birmingham, Selma. Interestingly, he includes tactical failures, like Albany, and moments when he was not personally involved.

And then he turns to the future, which we know and which he seems uncannily to foresee with less than 24 hours left to live:

Well, I don’t know what will happen now; we’ve got some difficult days ahead. (Amen) But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop. (Yeah) [Applause] And I don’t mind. [Applause continues] Like anybody, I would like to live a long life—longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. (Yeah) And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. (Go ahead) And I’ve looked over (Yes sir), and I’ve seen the Promised Land. (Go ahead) I may not get there with you. (Go ahead) But I want you to know tonight (Yes), that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. [Applause] (Go ahead, Go ahead) And so I’m happy tonight; I’m not worried about anything; I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. [Applause]

I am influenced here by David Luban, “Difference Made Legal: The Court and Dr. King.” Michigan Law Review 87, no. 8 (1989): 2152-2224. Luban insightfully compares King to Walter Benjamin. See also: the I and the we: civic insights from Christian theology; notes on the metaphysics of Gandhi and King; Martin Luther and Martin Luther King; no justice, no peace? (on the relationship between these concepts); Martin Luther King as a philosopher; learning from Memphis, 1968; against inevitability; “Another Time for Freedom? Lessons from the Civil Rights Era,” etc.

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