Category Archives: Citizens & Civil Society

Judgement

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The phenomena of judging people is fascinating.

In face-to-face conversation, for example, I find it common to say things like, “this is a judgement-free zone.”

And I think that’s important.

After all, I’m in no position to judge anybody for anything. I have my own faults, my own quirks, my own self; any of which could easily be put under scrutiny and fall short of someone else’s perfection.

So I don’t judge.

Except when I do.

Let’s be honest: if I’m out on the street, surrounded by strangers, I judge the hell out of everybody. That girl who pushed the “walk light” button and crossed the street without waiting –  I judged her. That guy wearing – what is he wearing? – I judged the hell out of him. The person who wrote an article about her gentrifying love for my home town – you better believe I judged her.

I judge people all the time. Faceless, nameless people. Anybody I actually know – real people – get a pass. After all, we’ve all been there, right? Who am I to judge?

I imagine there must be something healthy about judging. Something satisfying to the soul.

A friend told me today that she “hates everyone.”

I say the same sometimes.

Except, of course, I don’t really hate everyone. It’s just a general sense of antagonism towards the world.

It’s the kind of thing you say when the world is just too much.

And we all know the world can be too much some times.

And I suppose that’s how it is with judging. You can be open minded. You can be accepting of all types of people doing all sorts of things. You can refuse to sit in judgement of the real people you meet.

But you still need that outlet. That general feeling of superiority over something. Even if it comes from silently judging a stranger for something you know you’ve done before. There’s something cathartic about it, I suppose.

The real task, then, is to find the appropriate time to judge, the appropriate way to judge. When it’s solely an internal experience completely divorced from the reality of another person.

Is that possible, I wonder? Is it then okay to judge?

Either way, it’s all good, I suppose. After all – I don’t judge.

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The Dangers of Empathy

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Today I attended a talk on “Generative Empathies,” part of the Tisch Talks in the Humanities hosted by Tisch College.

The talk focused on exploring the question, “What does empathy produce?”

While you might imagine possible answers to that question – empathy produces shared understanding, it acknowledges another’s experience, it expresses our shared humanity – I was most taken with some of the concerns raised about empathy.

That is to ask, is empathy always “good”?

What if you are empathetic towards someone or something that is justifiably “bad”? What if you choose the wrong side of an issue because your empathy is misguided?

Perhaps more fundamentally – does feeling empathy relieve you of further ethical work? Does empathy soften a critical eye?

I am reminded, for example, of a recent story in Slate about the research efforts of a group of women incarcerated in the Indiana Women’s Prison to look at that institution’s history.

The traditional story of the prison’s 1873 founding went something like this: after shocking allegations of sexual abuse in a unisex prison, two angelic women fought for the creation of the first all-female prison in the country to protect their incarcerated sisters.

In this simple retelling, the two well-to-do women felt empathy towards wayward women, establishing a women’s prison to rectify their tragedy.

Of course, the story is much more complicated than that.

And empathy is more complicated than that.

There is evidence that the two women each had moral failings of their own. That it was their virtue of wealth more than anything that kept them on the right side of the law. By modern standards their crimes were worse than some of the inmates they oversaw.

There are indications that terrible things happened in their prison. That at least one of the women knew about and even instigated abuse.

Yet they are remembered as angels who saw fit to save the fallen women of their day.

Just who should one feel empathy for in this story?

And importantly, was it appropriate for the prison’s founder’s to claim empathy towards the inmates?

Their empathy was a resource of privilege. Left unjudged for their own crimes, it was easy for them to find empathy for those “less fortunate.”

And perhaps what’s most remarkable about this story that I’m left with little doubt that those two women thought they were doing the right thing. Regardless of their own failings, they thought they were doing what was best for incarcerated women.

Enshrined in empathy, they thought they were the angelic saviors history remembers them to be.

And that is, perhaps, one of the rockiest shoals of empathy – that it might be treated as a free pass, an escape hatch, an all-encompassing rebuttal to any challenge:

I can do no wrong, because I truly care.

Perhaps empathy can be used as such a shield, but it shouldn’t be.

Empathy does not relieve the need for a critical eye, does not lessen the burden to constantly question what is right and what is wrong, does not change your moral obligations.

It simply helps you see more…by demonstrating that you understand nothing.

As one speaker put today, quoting Leslie Jamison in the Empathy Exams, “Empathy requires knowing you know nothing.”

All we can ever really understand, all we can ever really know, is our own experience. Empathy helps us feel around the edges of what we know, comparing our own experiences to others, touching the similarity and feeling for the differences.

Assuming nothing, knowing nothing. Just groping for common ground across a dark chasm of difference.

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The Humility of Learning

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Someone told me recently that education is a quintessentially humbling experience.

If you are truly learning, then by definition you are pushing the limits of what you know. The further you advance in this process, the closer you come to pushing the limits of what anyone knows.

You may even eventually have the capacity to generate new knowledge, but there’s a whole lot of not knowing that comes first. Well, really, there’s a whole lot of not knowing the whole time.

I find that image of education resonate, but also kind of odd – why should a lack of knowledge be shaming in the first place?

To be fair, there are many different ways to not have knowledge.

For example, I have very little patience for those who are willfully ignorant. If you think you know everything, but don’t actually know anything – that’s a problem. If you aren’t interested in exploring other data, viewpoints, or opinions – that’s a problem. If you simply refuse to learn about a topic which is entirely relevant to you – that’s kind of a problem.

But if you simply don’t know something –

Well, that should be forgivable.

Expected, even.

And yet our social norms seem to prohibit admitting such weakness.

I mean, I can’t be the only person whose been known to use the phrase, “yeah, that sounds familiar…” as code for, “I have no earthly idea what you’re talking about.”

It’s like the law of always saying yes in improv – when someone asks if you are familiar with something, it just feels right to claim you are.

The only problem with that, of course, is that you never learn anything if you don’t ask.

The Internet has changed that a bit, I suppose, as I have been known to make a mental list of things to Google later.

But generally speaking, if you don’t ask – if you don’t admit a lack of knowledge – you will never learn.

And that is humbling.

But it shouldn’t be shaming.

We all have a lot to learn. We all have so much to learn.

And none of us will ever know everything.

So I like to sign off sometimes – particularly after a long rant full of my own views, opinions, and biases; after pontificating about anything I claim to know – I like to sign off with the one thing I do know:

I know nothing.

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Predictive Social Science

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One of the great sources of despair in the social sciences is the lack of predictive theories.

Physics can tell us what will happen when we throw a ball in the air, or when we drop two objects simultaneously. Why can’t the social sciences provide similar trajectories for human behavior?

Put another way by economist Richard R. Nelson, “If you can land a man on the moon, why can’t you solve the social problems of the ghetto?”

One argument is that the social sciences are quantitatively stunted compared to their natural science peers; that the science of social has not yet developed to it’s full potential.

Those feeling more kind may argue that human affairs are simply more complex than those of levers and pulleys; that civil society is infinitely more intricate than a Grand Unified Theory. It’s not so much an issue of scientific chops, but rather that there is so much more work to do to solve social problems.

I find both of these arguments rather uninspiring, but what’s notable is that they each lend themselves to the same solution: more data, more formalism, more math, more “science.”

As if predictive social science is just around the corner. As if the solution to poverty is one Einstein riding a wave of light away.

To be fair, the social sciences have made remarkable quantitative advances. In 2008, Nate Silver correctly predicted the presidential contest in 49 states, and the winner of all 35 U.S. Senate races.

Fueled by the promise of better sales and better customers, the field of predictive analyics is on the rise – helping companies better identify what their customers want. Or perhaps, more accurately, what they can get their customers to buy.

In 2012, for example, Target used their big data mining to figure out a teen girl was pregnant – before her father did. It wasn’t that complicated, as it turns out, just watch for the purchase of certain vitamins and you could have a lucrative customer for life.

But creeping on a teenager – or even predicting elections – is a far cry from solving our most pressing social problems.

Why can’t you solve the social problems of the ghetto?

Perhaps our first mistake is to think there is an analytical solution.

Bent Flyvbjerg, a Danish urban planner, argues that a predictive theory approach to the social sciences is “a wasteful dead-end.” Instead we should “promote social sciences that are strong where natural science is weak – that is, in reflexive analysis and deliberation about values and interests.”

Flyvbjerg calls this approach the phronetic model, explaining, “At the core of phronetic social science stands the Aristotelian maxim that social issues are best decided by means of the public sphere, not by science. Though imperfect, no better device than public deliberation following the rules of constitutional democracy has been arrived at for settling social issues, so far as human history can show.”

I’m not sure I agree with Flyvbjerg that “no predictive theories have been arrived at in social science, despite centuries of trying.” Surely, we have not solved poverty, but we’ve come disturbingly close to predicting the patterns of an individual.

But just because we could have predictive theories of social science does not mean that is all we should aim for.

There is important knowledge, valuable knowledge, in quantitative understandings of society. We should pursue those understandings fully, but we should not deign to stop there.

Why can’t you solve the social problems of the ghetto?

Surely, one white, male economist cannot. No matter how much data he has.

But perhaps we can.

Predictive social science, assuming it exists, is only one tool towards a solution. Without phronetic social science – dialogue and deliberation between all members of a society – it is worth nothing.

Of course, this phronetic social science ought to be informed by predictive social science, just as predictive social science ought to be informed by phronetic social science.

The two aren’t competing paths towards the same end – we must pursue them both.

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50 Years from Selma

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Just over 50 years ago, a group of 600 civil rights activists were gassed and beaten during a march from Selma to Montgomery.

Where have we gone since then?

John Lewis, who co-chaired the march as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), is now a Congressman for Georgia’s 5th congressional district.

So, there’s that.

Lewis was actually my commencement speaker when I finished my Masters at Emerson college.

I’m pretty sure most people didn’t know who he was.

Some congressman or something?

Meanwhile in Oklahoma, members of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon (SAE) fraternity were videotaped jovially singing a shockingly racist song.

Every time I hear SAE officials fervently claim that they denounce such acts, I imagine the follow up to be, “We don’t support this behavior – students shouldn’t be videotaped expressing such things!”

After all, everyone knows you should keep your racist thoughts inside your own head. Letting them out, perhaps, only in the comfort of your own home while wearing a smoking jacket in your study.

Ever since they did away with Whites Only clubs, no public place is safe any more.

….We did do away with those clubs, didn’t we?

I sure hope so, but I wouldn’t be surprised to stumble upon one.

Not in name, of course, but in practice. An establishment with just the right price and just the right attitude to keep unfavorables away. If you know what I mean.

So that’s where we’ve come since Selma.

Someone told me this morning that in the last 40 years, college graduation rates for the lowest income bracket has gone up 2%. From 7% to 9%.

Over those same 40 years, graduation rates for the top income bracket has gone up 20%. From 20% to 40%.

So that’s where we’ve come since Selma.

I wasn’t around in 1965 so I can’t speak to what racism was like then.

I sure hope it’s gotten better.

But I do know it’s gotten more proper.

We – as white society generally – have learned that you can’t be videotaping singing about lynchings and dropping the n-word. That’s not acceptable at all.

In polite society, we just find reasons – simple, explainable, non-racist reasons why the white people are always on top and the black people are always behind.

I recently heard a white woman cut a black woman off mid-sentence. “I don’t mean to interrupt you,” she said…as she continued interrupting.

So that’s where we’ve come since Selma.

I suppose a conversation slight isn’t so bad in the grand scheme of things. I’ve been slighted all time – alas, often by men. But I wondered what was happening in each woman’s head – was I the only one wondering how race was part of the dynamic?

Our country is built on black bodies. Black bodies established our economy, and black bodies ripen our prisons.

It’s not that our society is racist – heavens no, we did away with that in Selma – its just that we don’t have good schools to educate black students, we don’t have kind words to welcome black views, we don’t have the capacity to deal with this messy knot of poverty and violence.

It’s not that we’re racist, we just shoot unarmed black men in the street.

So, that’s where we’ve come since Selma.

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Mechanics of Civic Games

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After another great weekend of gaming, this time at PAX East, I, of course, have been thinking about what would go into a good civic game.

And just what is a civic game? Others might have different definitions, but I’d be inclined define that broadly as any game that increases a player’s civic skills, knowledge, or values.

And just how does any game increase someone’s skills, knowledge, or values around any topic?

Well, I suppose there are two broad elements which sets a game’s tone and thereby has the potential to impact a player: content and mechanics.

Content is what the game is actually about: are you in space? In the desert? Trying to survive the zombie apocalypse?

Mechanics is how the game actually works: Does the game rely on luck or strategy? Do you play with dice, cards, or other items? How do you interact with other players?

There is as much variety in styles of game mechanics as there is in types of game content.

It seems to me that a common failing of many education games is that they focus on content rather than mechanics – I have this information I want you to learn, and I “gamify” it with some set of game mechanics in the hopes of making learning more fun.

That’s actually kind of a backwards approach. The content of the game is interesting as a one-sentence overview: you are Little Red Riding Hood fighting zombie werewolves with a 9mm – but the mechanics of the game are what you really want to know:

How do I play?

And the mechanics of the game are absolutely critical in setting the tone and feeling of a game. The mechanics are what truly give a game its unique personality.

It’s not uncommon to hear people say, “I love that game, it’s got this really interesting mechanic…”

The mechanics are not an add-on that bring the content to life, the mechanics are the heart of the game itself.

And good mechanics, I think, are where civic games could really excel.

There is, of course, a whole genre of cooperative games – where players work together and either collectively win or collectively loose. There are semi-cooperative games, where players work in teams or form temporary alliances. These games may be inherently civic – forcing players to interact, work together, or perhaps to find mutual ground.

But, I suspect there are many more mechanics which could impart a civic lesson.

Take, for example, Penny Press. The content is simple: each player is a newspaper assigning reporters to stories and periodically going to press.

But the mechanics are great: there are different types of stories, and the public has different interest levels in those stories. If the public’s not interested in political stories, then the wise player won’t cover political stories – they’re not worth as many points.

Furthermore, public interest in a type of story is boosted by how many reporters are covering that type of story. If everybody’s writing about crime, public interest in crime will increase.

Finally, there are the mechanics of going to press itself. Stories are physically different sizes and you have to successfully lay them out within your newspaper. And you lose points if there are holes.

As a player, you find yourself thinking, “well, I don’t really want to cover sports, but…I need that story to make my layout work.” Even in this digital age, it’s not a bad approximation for the real impact of needing to manage resources.

“Newspapers” may be civic content itself, but it’s the game mechanics which really make it work.

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Confidence

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Someone told me today that the world would be a better place if more people had more self-doubt.

That sounds about right.

I have written before about how unimpressed I am by the common solution to the so-called confidence gap – that is, when it’s raised as a problem that women typically don’t have the confidence level of men, I’m skeptical that the best solution is for “women to be more like men.”

Maybe none of us should be egotistical pricks.

I mean, really, should anyone aspire to be Gilderoy Lockhart?

And I’m a bit uncomfortable putting this all in gender terms – it is true that women, on the whole, have lower levels of confidence than men, on the whole – but I also know plenty of bombastic women and overly humble men.

That’s not to suggest we should just ignore the gender dimension of this issue. It is most certainly a problem that men are generally taught to be aggressively confident while women are generally taught their ideas are worth nothing. That is a problem, indeed.

But just for a moment, let’s pretend we want to instill the same lessons in all young people regardless of their gender, regardless of the race, class, sex or gender identity. Let’s just pretend we want all people to learn the same lessons. And then we can ask:

What’s the right amount of confidence to have?

Probably my least favorite type of person is someone who is overly confident with nothing to show for it. People who are overly confident with everything to show for it aren’t too far behind.

Invariably, it seems, it’s the people who think they know everything who actually know nothing and the people who think they know nothing who actually know everything.

Well, not actually know everything – because the people who think they know nothing know it’s impossible to know everything – but the poetry is better that way.

Irregardless, nothing is worse than a blowhard.

But while stunning over-confidence can be tyrannical, a dramatic lack of confidence can be devastating.

A little self-doubt may be a good thing, but too much self-doubt can be crushing, paralyzing. To wake up every morning convinced of your own incompetence, convinced nothing you ever do will add value – well, that’s no way to live, though many do live that way.

But self-doubt doesn’t have to be debilitating.

A physicist by training, I think often of the men who developed the nuclear bomb. Just what did they think they were doing?

They were inspired by patriotism, by science. They had a fascinating problem at the cutting edge of human knowledge and they brilliantly developed a solution. A solution that ended in death, destruction, and the continual threat of more.

“Now we are all sons of bitches,” Kenneth Bainbridge famously said to  J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Those men probably should have doubted themselves a little more.

A moral life requires constant introspection, constant questioning, constant examining of your true motives and beliefs.

And I think that confidence should probably follow a similar process –

If you aren’t doubting yourself, you are probably doing something wrong.

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Prison Labor

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A new story emerged from Boston’s never-ending snow fall yesterday: first there was a call for people to help shovel the MBTA tracks at a rate of $30/hour. Not long after that, came a clarification: the offer was only open to union members.

Then, at last, an additional observation: state prison inmates were also clearing the tracks.

Presumably, with plenty of snow to go around, these inmates weren’t taking any union jobs, but there are still plenty of concerns with this approach.

For one thing, just how much are the prisoners getting paid for their work? The Department of Corrections hasn’t released those details, but with the median wage of state workers coming to  a meager 20 cents, I’m going to guess they weren’t paid very much.

I was really taken with the reaction to this news. The comments on Universal Hub offer a pretty diverse range of views, coupled with a somewhat hilarious attempt at citing various acquaintance as sources.

Some people were appalled, calling the use of prison inmates “slave labor.” Others were supportive, explaining that the program is voluntary and that it support re-entry.

And then, of course, there’s that old canard:

These are men who commented crimes and have lost the right to be part of society. In order to be invited back into society they’re being punished accordingly…When you commit crimes and are found guilty you give up some of your basic rights.

But how are we to evaluate these conflicting views?

Well, first, I think it’s important to realize this is not anything new. In 2011, Middlesex County inmates went out shoveling with little fanfare. Suffolk County has operated a Community Works Program for years.

That program has a particularly engaging description, reassuring citizens that inmates are under the constant watch of an armed Sheriff’s deputy and that the end result of the program is quite simply a win–win. The inmates give back a measure of the cost of their incarceration while learning the skills needed to conduct themselves as responsible, contributing members of society and the law enforcement community benefits by breaking the cycle of inmate recidivism.

There’s even a happy logo of people with shovels to be extra convincing.

To be honest, I know nothing about this program, and I don’t have enough information to make an informed decision. But I am skeptical.

Maybe shoveling snow in sub-zero temperatures is more enjoyable than being locked in cage, but that doesn’t seem to be saying much.

Perhaps we should go all Roman and have inmates engage in Gladiatorial combat. After all, that would be a way more interesting way to live. I’d bet we’d volunteers.

But these individual, probably well-intentioned, programs are not my problem. The problem is deeper than that.

Today’s Boston Globe reported that the the idea to use inmate labor “came after Mayor Marty Walsh’s office asked all city departments to more efficiently use their resources.”

Because inmates are resources.

Not people.

And that’s the problem. It’s not a problem specific to Boston or to Massachusetts, but to our whole, national, prison system.

The 13th amendment states:

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States

As much as I disagree with the commenter who argued that criminals have lost the right to be part of society, who argued that punishment is the only atonement for their sins, that’s really what this issue comes down to.

I don’t know much about people in prison, but I do know this: they are people.

They aren’t resources to be used efficiently. They aren’t three fifths of a person. They are people.

Living, breathing, feeling, people.

Regardless of their crimes, regardless of their wrongs, regardless of what sins we may see upon their soul – perhaps it’s time we started treating them like that:

Like people.

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Transit and Politics

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The big news yesterday was that MBTA general manager Beverly Scott resigned. Her resignation came after the T shut down train service for a day following record breaking snow fall. A day on which she held a “barn burner of a press conference” in which she defended the T.

Now, for those of you not from Boston, a little history.

The T is in a lot of debt. About $9 billion in debt, including interest.

Now, that doesn’t just come from poor book keeping. The state’s Central Artery Project – eg, “the Big Dig” – focused on improving highway transit, most notably rerouting 93 and putting part of it underground. The highway was falling apart and not able to support the volume of traffic.

What does this have to do with the MBTA? Well, as part of the Big Dig, the state is legally obligated to provide certain environmental justice mitigation. That is, if you’re going to make it possible for more cars to be on the road, you’re obligated to make improvements which mitigate the environmental impact. And not just because we’re all going to die from global warming, but because living near highways is actually really bad for your health.

So, the state was obligated to make transit improvements. And in 2000, Massachusetts passed $3.8 billion in debt from transit improvements off to the MBTA, granted them 1 percent of the revenue from the state’s 5 percent sales tax, wished them well and told them to balance their book.

That didn’t work.

Fast forward to December 2012 and Beverly Scott starts as General Manager. She inherits the oldest transit system in the country and the most indebted transit system in the country.

Frankly, I don’t know what made her take the job in the first place – there’s no single person capable of “turning the T around.”

So I’m not surprised that with nearly “a Gronk” of snow – that’s over six feet – the system had to shut down to pull itself together.

But Scott’s resignation in the wake of the closure wasn’t all together surprising. As Peter Kadzis put it the day before her resignation, “My gut tells me this is more about ritual than politics. The ritual of offering a sacrifice, in the form of Scott, in the name of moving forward.”

So that’s how we’re managing our public transit system now. Ritual sacrifice.

And while Kadzis says it’s not about politics, it seems to me that it’s all about politics.

If it was a sacrifice, it was a political sacrifice. It may not have been driven by a Democrat v. Republican showdown, but it was about human and community interaction in the public sphere. It was all about politics.

It probably didn’t help matters that Scott was appointed by a Democratic Governor and that the Republican Governor who know holds office was part of the administration that saddled the T with the debt in the first place. But more fundamentally, it was about a need to blame someone, to have someone become the embodiment of all that went wrong.

It’s like a slightly less disturbing version of Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery.

Personally, I liked Scott. I thought she was on fire in her press conference and I was impressed that she was so bold in explaining the T’s problematic history. But regardless of how you feel about her, politics seems like a poor way to manage our transit.

As Beverly Scott said in that final press conference:

If there is a silver lining, please can we be talking about what are the long-term …yes, the T needs to be efficient, it needs to push itself, but this is not just about cutting costs.  You can cut every cost you wanted over here and that is not going to wind up taking the place for what has to be systemic, planned, serious, bold reinvestment in terms of this doggone transportation system. Not just to wind up keeping it where it is, but to wind up making it be what it can absolutely be in terms of being a modern, top-notch, serving-with-pride transportation system.

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Frontiers 2015 – Call for Panelists!

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Alumni of the Summer Institute for Civic Studies are organizing a few of the panels for Frontiers of Democracy 2015. We are seeking panelists to help shape engaging sessions on the following topics:

Frontiers will take place in Boston on June 25-27 and all panelists must register for the conference. To be considered for one of these panels please complete this form by Friday, February 20: activecitizen.tufts.edu/civic-studies/frontiers/call/

Whether you come as panelist or not, you should definitely check out Frontiers. As the framing statement on the website explains:

While powerful forces work against justice and civil society around the world, committed and innovative people strive to understand and improve citizens’ engagement with government, with community, and with each other. Every year, Frontiers of Democracy convenes some of these practitioners and scholars for organized discussions and informal interactions. Topics include deliberative democracy, civil and human rights, social justice, community organizing and development, civic learning and political engagement, the role of higher education in democracy, Civic Studies, media reform and citizen media production, civic technology, civic environmentalism, and common pool resource management. Devoted to new issues and innovative solutions, this conference is truly at the frontiers of democracy.

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