Election Spin and the Voice of The People

Posted on November 6, 2014 by Sarah Shugars

There’s nothing quite like the post-election spin and hype machine, a 24-hour media scramble to interpret the Voice of the People.

CNN reports that “a Republican tide ripped the Senate away from Democrats.” And everyone seems to be jockeying to promote their preferred answer to the question of whether the election was a referendum on the President, the Democrats, or the political system in general.

The people have spoken and our political pundits are here to tell us what they’re saying.

It is times like this when I most appreciate the words of Walter Lippmann, “In this deadly conflict between [the Founding Father's] ideals and their science, the only way out was to assume without much discussion that the voice of the people was the voice of god.”

We are taught that the essence of a democracy is to revere the voice of the people as, indeed, the voice of God. As the highest form of Truth. And when every election rolls around, we look hopefully to the polls, desperate to understand what The People are trying to tell us.

But, alas, it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

That is not to say that people, as individuals, are idiots. Lippmann’s view was far more nuanced than that. His disdain for the The People or The Masses should not be confused with a disdain for people.

The challenge, you see, is that, “We have been taught to think of society as a body, with a mind, a soul and a purpose, not as a collection of men, women and children whose minds, souls and purposes are variously related.”

The voice of The People is nonsense, not because the people are nonsensical, but because The People is not a coherent whole.

Individual people do individual things for individual reasons. Perhaps there is some meaning we can gather from their collective data, but…a referendum on a person, a party, or an institution?

No. Individual people can declare opposition to those things. The People cannot.

The False Utility of Civic Engagement

Posted on October 23, 2014 by Sarah Shugars

Civic engagement is often seen as a utility.

There are problems in society, so we need to galvanize “The People” to do something about it. “The People” have power, after all. If only they can be motivated to claim it.

But who are these shadowy Masses who could control our country’s destiny?

Well, they are us.

Walter Lippman was always skeptical of “The Public,” describing them as a “bewildered herd” liable to “arrive in the middle of the third act and will leave before the last curtain, having stayed just long enough perhaps to decide who is the hero and who the villain of the piece.”

In my opinion, Lippman didn’t say this because he was an elitist technocrat, but because he recognized the danger in formulating a “phantom public” which disempowered a key population -

That would be you and me.

There is no real “public,” just lots of individual people with individual lives, beliefs, opinions, concerns, and priorities.

So I get a little skeptical when people refer to “the public” as a tool. Want to change a law? Get a certain number of signatures or a certain number of votes. Want to challenge the status quo? Get a large turnout for a protest or rally. Perhaps a certain number of views on a video where you’ll never believe what happened next.

And perhaps this makes sense. After all, it seems reasonable to have some threshold of demonstrating public support.

But there is no “Public” and civic engagement is not merely a utility.

It is great to engage people in a cause or an issue, to mobilize “people power” in changing the way things are done.

But I believe there is real value, fundamental value, in simply having people live and work and function together.

Communities are better when people – all people – have a voice within that community. People are better when every person around them has a voice.

So go ahead and push for a change. Fight for what you believe in and try to get others to fight along side you. But always remember that true engagement is deeper than that. True engagement is more than a cause or a battle or an issue.

It is listening genuinely to everyone around you. Empowering them to have their voices heard. It is recognizing that we are all better – individually and collectively – when every person is engaged.

Morality for the Broken

Posted on October 22, 2014 by Sarah Shugars

I often call myself broken.

I don’t mean that as a bad thing. It’s just a part of who I am. To be honest, I suspect we are all broken. All not quite right. All wounded and scarred from our past, present, or future.

So forgive me if I use that word cavalierly. I use it to refer to any person – or, perhaps, a given moment – where we aren’t quite the person we want to be. Where the traumas of our past impact the realities of the present.

Perhaps you aren’t good at opening up to people. Perhaps you over share. Perhaps you are terrified by loud noises, inexplicably moved to tears, overcome by violent anger, controlled by addictions, paralyzed by fear.

I don’t know how you are broken, but I suspect you probably are.

I know I am.

Mental health issues are serious, and we should take them seriously.

But to remove the stigma of mental health, we also need to normalize mental health issues. We need to give morality back to the broken. Or perhaps we broken need to take morality back.

And make no mistake, there is a moral component to mental health. Michel Foucault traces this well in his work. Sanitoriums were places where the mentally ill were incarcerated with criminals – eventually separated for the protection of criminals, who were seen as morally superior to the mad.

The mentally ill were left exposed in the cold and put out on display for entertainment. The mentally ill were less than human, and the perceived causes of their madness were inextricably linked to the morality of the day.

Perhaps our modern sensibilities have refined since then, but this implication of immorality has not yet faded from view.

There is nothing wrong with you if you are broken. There is nothing wrong about you.

Friedrich Nietzsche argues that aristocrats invented morality. That they created “the good” to be synonymous with their tastes. Eventually, this paradigm shifted, with those who came to power from lower social rungs declaring blessed are the meek.

But if the moral path is consistently reinvented by those in power, who will speak for the broken? Who will define morality for us?

Guilt as a personal check can be good. Guilt as a crippling response seems unhelpful. Grief can be a healthy process, but depression can be devastatingly paralyzing. Anger, too, has value, but undirected rage can be dangerous.

Who is to tell us what feelings are Right?

I am not prepared to be judged immoral for any of my many faults, nor would I presume to judge others for theirs. And yet, giving everyone a pass to determine what is best for them seems dangerous – perhaps there are some deeds we really ought not to condone.

I don’t know what the answer is, but I do know this – there is a morality for the broken, one that embraces us for who we are and accepts our many flaws. A morality that doesn’t judge how our brokenness manifests, but which understands that it does. A morality that questions what is Right without damning us for our flaws.

A morality for the broken. And we are all of us broken.

A Challenge for Public Work

Posted on October 17, 2014 by Sarah Shugars

I am generally in favor of the idea of public work – people co-creating communities through their work.

It’s a very romantic idea. Revaluing the workers, the creators, the doers who literally shape our world every day.

We may be accustomed to appropriately thinking of teachers as civic workers. But what about the architects who design our schools or the construction workers who build our schools? What about the custodial staff or others who work tirelessly to make the school run? Is their work civic, too? A lens of public work would say it is.

Perhaps what I find most alluring about the framework of Public Work is that it genuinely values the work that every person puts into an effort. It doesn’t so much matter what you bring to the table, but Public Work acknowledges that everyone brings something of value to the table.

But while I find Public Work appealing, I have a hard time appreciating what this ideal would really look like in practice.

For example, I attend a lot of civic events of various types. Sometimes I’m a guest, sometimes I’m a host, and sometimes I am staff.

I’ve noticed over the years that I participate in the work, the content of the event, very differently depending on my role. As a guest I enjoy and engage, as a host I make sure everyone’s having a good time, and as staff I’m focused on the logistics of three steps ahead.

I may be the same person in every mode, but my work is not equal nor, perhaps, equally valued.

I’ve generally attributed this to my own archaic view of social roles. I did, after all, spend much of my childhood in a Victorian-area historic park. So, as much as I am passionate about worker’s rights and respecting all types of workers, I have to admit there is a certain part of me which still defaults to Downton Abbey-type norms.

There’s a certain propriety about the class hierarchy. A certain seemliness which, as much as I may fight it in society, I tend embrace in myself. There’s just a certain way one ought to behave when you are The Help, I suppose.

But as I’ve noticed my own effortless transitions between different roles – an honored guest, a gracious host, a silent staffer – I started to wonder if there was a deeper challenge here.

Don’t get me wrong, class divides are a deep challenge and I fully recognized that not everyone has the same experience as me in this regard. After all, not everyone has the luxury of walking between these roles.

But there is a challenge even deeper than ingrained social roles.

When I am in a supporting role, my biggest challenge may not be that I don’t feel welcome to participate as a guest – it’s that I don’t have the capacity for it.

I am so caught up in the logistic details, so exhausted from the effort so far, and so focused on completing the last few miles that I honestly would rather not participate more fully.

Perhaps this is only a challenge for us introverts, but when I am working an event, I honestly don’t want a seat at the table. I want a seat in the back where I can have a moment of silence of and relax my smile.

If I attended a replica event in the role of a guest, I would have few qualms about chiming in or speaking up. But the very role of staffing – social norms aside – diminishes my capacity to engage in this way.

And this to me is the challenge for Public Work. It is great to say that everyone’s work is valued. It is great to say that everyone’s role is important. That’s the right ethic to strive for, and fully support that view.

But while every person might have the capacity to contribute equally to the work, every role does not. Every worker does not. Someone’s voice will be left out.

And I don’t know the solution to this challenge, because I’m not sure I want to attend an unstaffed event. Really. That would be chaos.

You need people who will make these event run, who will make them go. And those people contribute greatly and importantly – and essentially – to the work. You should, of course, thank them for their efforts, but the challenge remains -

They haven’t been able to contribute all they could contribute. Possibly because of social norms, but also because their work simply didn’t allow it.

Civic Learning in Higher Education

Posted on October 16, 2014 by Sarah Shugars

I had the honor to spend the day listening to an engaging conversation with university leaders, policy makers and advocates from around the country. Tisch College, where I work, hosted the White House’s Civic Learning and National Service Summit – a day long conversation focused on validating, elevating and integrating civic learning in higher education.

A lot of critical issues – and stories to celebrate – were raised throughout the day. I’m afraid I haven’t quite synthesized these into a concise and compelling format, but here are a few of the ideas that I am walking away with -

Civic learning is more than civic engagement. It is broader and it is deeper. It’s not just about engaging students in civic work, it’s about preparing students and educating them to be continually engaged in civic work, to the best of their abilities.

It is about embracing higher education, not as something which can propel an individual to success, but as something which can fundamentally strengthen our democracy.

And embracing civic learning isn’t just a program shift, it is a culture shift. It means creating environments where faculty dedicated to civic learning can thrive. Where staff can dedicate their careers to helping young people and communities flourish.

There is much work to be done – in higher education as in other sectors. But there are many successes to celebrate and many allies deeply engaged in this work. Nothing gets solved in a one day meeting, but the conversation is important.

And the conversation continues.

Taxonomy

Posted on September 2, 2014 by Sarah Shugars

So, I don’t know what you did for fun over the long weekend, but I took advantage of the extra time to finally create categories and tag my blog entries.

I’d intentionally not done this at the beginning – when I began blogging, I had a general sense of the types of things I thought about, but not a coherent sense of what I’d end up writing about. So, I didn’t want to limit myself by category.

But I also didn’t want to create categories as I went – in my experience that just leads to a long list of poorly delimited categories which may or may not actually be helpful for navigating content.

So I waited over a year, and, having a somewhat overdeveloped love of process, I put a not insubstantial amount of thought into the development of categories and the tagging of posts.

For those of you who are moved by such things, here’s how I handled the process. While I’m not likely to repeat it eminently, I am, of course, interested in any changes or amendments you might suggest.

I started with a draft list of categories. A short list of things that I’m pretty sure I write about a lot. Since I personally have written all the posts on this blog, I found this step rather easier than when I have previously attempted this exercise for communal blogs or organizational website. I more or less know what I write about.

Then I made some changes and amendments as I tagged each post. Separate categories for “Citizens” and “Institutions” become one category of “Citizens and Institutions,” which eventually became “Citizens and Civil Society.”

I kept that category separate from “Civic Studies” which, while certainly overlapping, has a more academic lens. Random musings about what it means to be a good citizen based off a conversation I had with a stranger on the bus – that went under “Citizens and Institutions.” If I quoted Robert Putnam, Elinor Ostrom, or even Robert A. Heinlein, that probably got a “Civic Studies.”

And, both of those categories stayed separate from “community” which, while also intertwined with the above, tends to focus more on my communities – organizations I work with or, occasionally, interactions in the cities I visit.

“Justice” served as an umbrella category – though I was tempted at times to break it down. Racial justice, economic justice, and LGBT rights seem to be my most common topics within this category. I’m not sure how often I articulate a connection between these topics, but keeping them together felt right.

Interestingly, I believe many of my posts about gender equity ended up under “social norms.” Perhaps I’m too tired of fighting those battles and have devolved to simply being annoyed. A sort of, did you hear what society says we should do? sort of sarcasm.

History, Marketing Communications, and Physics (or, perhaps more generally, STEM) each earned their own categories as the starting point for much of my thought – being formally trained in two and generally interested in the other.

Perhaps my biggest struggle was around morality – as it were. I don’t have many declarations of what it means to be moral, but I do spend several posts exploring what it means to be a good citizen – and, almost by default, what it means to be a good person.

I ended up putting these posts under the “Citizens and Civil Society” banner. I couldn’t quite bring myself to declare “morality” as a core interest, and…I’m not sure that I’m concerned about morality, per se. I’m concerned about being a good person, and I’m concerned about being a good citizen. And I’m concerned about being the best person and best citizen I can be…but, morality? Some how that didn’t feel like the right word for it.

So, with all those categories declared and all my posts tagged, this is how things shook out for 249 posts, many of which have multiple tags:

Citizens & Civil Society – 108 posts
Miscellaneous Musings - 75 posts
Civic Studies – 60 posts
Community – 53 posts
Justice – 51posts
Social Norms – 39 posts
History - 31 posts
Unpopular Opinions – 20 posts
Marketing Communications – 19 posts
Mental Health – 16 posts
Physics – 14 posts
Meaninglessness – 10 posts
Utopia - 10 posts
Network Analysis - 9 posts

Once I had completed this process, I couldn’t help but take a look at something -

I’ve written before about moral networking – a process by which use network analysis to interpret your moral views. This can be a helpful process for self-reflection and a helpful process for deliberation.

But I find myself skeptical of its use as a quantitative, network analysis tool. It’s too…soft. Too driven by gut feelings and what you’re thinking of at a given moment. Combining individual networks into a collective network presents an even greater challenge – what does it mean for two nodes to be the same?

If we use the same word, do we mean the same thing?

David Williamson Shaffer’s work on Epistemic Network Analysis can provide some guidance here. Shaffer argues that the way professionals think can be modeled as a network – being an urban planner doesn’t mean you’ve memorized a set of facts, it means having crafted approaches and ways of thinking which help you address the topics you encounter.

The “scientific method” aren’t just steps you memorize, it’s a way of thinking.

Shaffer carefully constructs models of a professional’s network, then tracks the development of a personal network in a novice training to be a professional.

The key here, is that to develop the networks, Shaffer and his team conduct in-depth interviews with professionals and novices, record training conversations between professionals and novices, and then systematically code all this information.

They look not only for ideas, but specific ways of thinking.

I’d love to try something like that out for moral networking, but, lacking the time and resources to do this properly, I’m left to play with the poor man’s coding in my little sandbox.

I’ve previously played around with using simple word counts as a way to visualize the connections between my blog posts.

That, of course, has many challenges, including, for example, the many meanings of the word “just.”

So, recognizing the imperfection and probable meaninglessness of this next analysis, once I had my posts tagged, I had to map them:

Blog_categories

Nodes are sized by the frequency of use, and edges are sized by the number of times linked categories appeared together.

As the chart above indicates, Citizens and Civil Society (shorted above to “Citizens”), was by far the most frequent category, with 108 tagged posts. It also had the highest degree (linked nodes), with 13 connected nodes – out of 14 total for the network. It is also most central to the network, with a betweenness centrality of 0.063.

There are a total of 68 edges.

The network is fairly connected, with an average path length – the distance from one node to any other node – of 1.25. The network diameter is 2 – if Kevin Bacon were one of the nodes, no other node would be more than 2 degrees from Kevin Bacon.

Marketing Communication and Network Analysis both have the fewest connections – each with a degree of 5. However, I wrote 19 post about marketing and only 9 (now 10) on networks.

This is, of course, still a very soft analysis. Still very based off my own biases and gut decisions.

But it’s a fun project for a holiday.