apply to the Institute for Civically Engaged Research (ICER)

Posted on January 19, 2023 by Peter

APSA’s Institute for Civically Engaged Research (ICER) is a four-day, residential institute that provides political scientists with training to conduct ethical and rigorous civically engaged research. Up to 20 scholars will be selected as ICER Fellows and invited to attend the 2023 Summer Institute. ICER Fellows will network with other like-minded political scientists, and together, learn best practices for conducting academically robust, mutually beneficial scholarship in collaboration with communities, organizations, and agencies outside of academia.

ICER is organized in partnership with Tufts University’s Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life. The 2023 Institute will be held in person at Tufts University, outside of Boston, MA, from July 10-13.

The Institute will take place on campus at Tufts University from July 10-13. Approximately twenty fellows will meet each day for intensive discussions and workshops. Thanks to support from the Ivywood Foundation, participation in the Institute for Civically Engaged Research is free, housing on the Tufts campus or a stipend to partially offset the cost of a hotel stay will be provided, and scholarships are available to defray costs of meals and travel. Applicants are expected to seek financial support from their home institution, but admission to the Institute will not be affected by financial need.

To apply, please complete this form. Application deadline: March 31, 2023.

Note: The Institute will operate according to the recommendations and requirements of federal and local public health authorities. We plan for the Institute to be held in person at Tufts University but reserve the right to change these plans as the public health situation warrants.

Learn more here.

my own trust in institutions

Posted on January 18, 2023 by Peter

Gallup has asked representative samples of Americans about their trust in various institutions since the 1970s. For instance, the proportion who expressed a great deal of trust in the medical system fell from 44% in 1975 to 14% in 1993 (recovering to 20% during the pandemic year of 2020, only to return to 15% last year). Between 18% and 31% say that they have a great deal of trust in the police each year, without a clear trend over time. Lately, only 11% express a great deal of trust in the Supreme Court, and that record-low rating has been widely noted.

My own levels of trust reflect my life experiences–which have been privileged and comfortable–plus my best efforts at understanding institutions more objectively. For what it’s worth, this is how I tend to think about them …

In affluent societies with economic and political competition, major institutions basically work as advertised. They do what they are widely described as doing, which is generally to serve people who can afford to pay. For instance, the health system dispenses effective treatments, banks protect depositors and deliver returns for shareholders, schools prepare most students for basic participation in the economy and society, and oil companies pump carbon to be burned.

If you believe that these institutions are scams or run by fools, you are naive and you will make yourself a mark for con artists. Or you may simply miss opportunities, e.g., by putting your money under the mattress instead of earning interest in a bank, by not getting vaccinated, or by failing to attend school.

On the other hand, these institutions are not designed to do very important things, such as preserve the environment, generate full employment, serve people in high need, or empower marginalized communities. So the problem is our array of institutions and their missions, not their basic reliability.

Truly predatory schemes occur. David A. Fahrenthold and my former student Talmon Joseph Smith report that restaurant workers are often required to “pay around $15 to a company called ServSafe for an online class in food safety,” and their money helps to “fund a nationwide lobbying campaign to keep their own wages from increasing.” This is deeply unjust. It is consistent, however, with my basic premise that our institutions serve their explicit constituencies as they advertise. The restaurant business offers competitively-priced food and profits for its investors; it is not set up to protect its own workers or the earth.

Institutions sometimes claim benefits that they clearly fail to offer. For instance, Royal Dutch-Shell claims to be committed to carbon-neutrality while actually boosting its capacity to pump oil, which harms affluent people along with everyone else. Such examples indicate that institutions lie outright, even to advantaged constituencies. However, I never believed that oil companies help the environment, nor are they widely described as doing so. Institutions tend to do what serious sources, such as major newspapers, say that they do.

By the way, the reason that individuals continue to invest in Shell is that they view the financial returns for themselves as more important than their share of the harms of global warming. It is not that individual investors have been fooled by “greenwashing” propaganda. (Institutional investors, such as pension funds, offer an opening because their members may rank protecting the earth as more important.)

My stance poses a circularity problem. I generally believe what I read in The New York Times but not propaganda from oil companies or social media from QAnon. I use words like “serious” and “mainstream,” as in “Mainstream media describe oil companies as contributors to dangerous global warming.” However, not all of us regard the same sources as mainstream. There is no View from Nowhere that sorts out the reliable from the unreliable. The view I am disclosing here is a form of ideology, in the sense of an overall orientation to the social world. It is subject to counter-examples, and I should be open to dropping it entirely. But the only alternative is to adopt a different overall orientation, and this one seems to me to fit the facts pretty well.

MacNeice on other people

Posted on January 12, 2023 by Peter

Canto xvii of Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journey (1939) opens with luxurious experiences, such as watching a morning scene over breakfast and lying in a bath “under / Ascending scrolls of steam,” feeling “the ego merge as the pores open … And the body purrs like a cat.” He writes these passages in the first person plural, and it’s not clear whether he’s alone or with someone at the breakfast table and in the bath. In any case, these moments end; we must leave them. It is a mistake to pursue “the luxury life.”

And Plato was right to define the bodily pleasures 
As the pouring water into a hungry sieve* 
But wrong to ignore the rhythm which the intercrossing
Coloured waters permanently give. 

And Aristotle was right to posit the Alter Ego**
But wrong to make it only a halfway house: 
Who could expect – or want – to be spiritually self-supporting, 
Eternal self-abuse?

Why not admit that other people are always 
Organic to the self, that a monologue 
Is the death of language and that a single lion 
Is less himself, or alive, than a dog and another dog?

Louis MacNeice, Autumn Journal: A Poem (1939), Faber & Faber, Kindle Edition.

*referring to Plato, Gorgias 493c (Lamb trans.): “and the soul of the thoughtless he likened to a sieve, as being perforated, since it is unable to hold anything by reason of its unbelief and forgetfulness.” Socrates continues: this metaphor “is bordering pretty well on the absurd; but still it sets forth what I wish to impress upon you, if I somehow can, in order to induce you to make a change, and instead of a life of insatiate licentiousness to choose an orderly one that is set up and contented with what it happens to have got.”

**Aristotle, Nic. Eth. 1169b (Rackham trans.) “People say that the supremely happy are self-sufficing, and so have no need of friends: for they have the good things of life already, and therefore, being complete in themselves, require nothing further; whereas the function of a friend, who is a second self, is to supply things we cannot procure for ourselves.”

joys and limitations of phenomenology

Posted on January 11, 2023 by Peter

Very close descriptions of human experience can move us by provoking empathy for the person who offers the account and by reminding us of the complexity and richness of our own inner lives.

We are evolved animals, composed of things like cells and liquids and electrical charges, yet some of our experiences seem elusive and mysterious. I am thinking of phenomena like the passage of time, an awareness of another’s thought, or a free-seeming choice. Maybe it’s only due to our cognitive limitations that these experiences appear complex; another kind of creature could easily analyze and describe our condition.* Yet our halting efforts at self-understanding make the world seem elusive and mysterious.

My dog knows things I cannot, like the significance of the smells on all the tree trunks on our block. But he also has tangible experiences that point beyond his ken. For instance, that tag that jingles under his neck says the name of our town, which is why he is allowed to play off-leash in the local park; and our town’s authority derives from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. He is not wired to be able to understand much of that. In similar ways, when we investigate phenomena like our own consciousness and choice (no matter how skillfully and effectively), we are exploring the edges of things that we are not well designed to comprehend. I find this difficulty and mystery consoling. It helps to re-enchant the inner life.

It is one gift of certain fictional and poetic texts. Lately, I have also enjoyed works by the classic phenomenologists Husserl and Heidegger. Yet I am worried about two methodological limitations (which must be already discussed at length in secondary literature): social biases and the influence of socially constructed vocabulary.

For instance, Heidegger offers an 89-page-long analysis of boredom, presenting it as a door to fundamental truths about time and being and an opportunity to discover one’s existential freedom (Heidegger 1930/1995 §19-38; discussed by Slaby 2010).

(Yes, the idea of voluntarily reading many pages by Heidegger--about boredom!–invites parody, but the material is actually quite interesting.)

Heidegger builds his account on three successively “profound” examples of boredom. In the first, the narrator is bored while waiting for a train “in the tasteless station of some lonely minor railway.” Time, which is usually invisible, painfully drags. In the second, the narrator experiences a perfectly pleasant social evening, during which time passes normally. “We come home quite satisfied. We cast a quick glance at the work we interrupted that evening, make a rough assessment of things and look ahead to the next day—and then it comes: I was bored after all on this evening.” Here time does not perceptively drag, yet there is a retrospective appraisal that time was lost and wasted, which hints at insights about the person’s whole life. Third, one makes a judgment without actually going through the experience at all, as in the general statement: “‘it is boring for one’ to walk through the streets of a large city on a Sunday afternoon.” Close inspection of these examples poses the question “Has man in the end become boring to himself?” (Heidegger 1930/1995, §23a, §24b, §30).

Heidegger writes about the boring railway station in the first-person plural: “We are sitting [“Wir sitzen] … We look at the clock—only a quarter hour has gone by” (Heidegger 1930/1995 §23a, emphasis added). The grammar seems inclusive; the reader is expected to be part of the “we.” In fact, the test of the validity of a phenomenological analysis is whether it feels familiar.

However, the writer happens to be an increasingly famous philosophy professor whose experiences will become more engaging soon after the train ride is over. In short, he is privileged. His bias emerges in passages like this:

Is not every station boring, even though trains constantly arrive and depart and crowds of people throng? Perhaps it is not only all stations that are boring for us. Perhaps, even though trains constantly enter and leave, bringing people with them, there is still a peculiar sense of something more in these stations which anyone who passes tenement blocks in large cities has experienced. One could say that, while it may be like this for us, some peasant from the Black Forest will take enormous pleasure in it, and therefore boredom is a matter of taste
(Heidegger 1930/1995 §23d).

Evidently, neither the reader nor the author lives in a tenement house or identifies as a peasant.

Compare a type of experience that is prominent in early 20^th century modernist literature by women (of whom Virginia Woolf is the most famous). Here, boredom “can appear as emptiness or deadness, a lack, or simply passive dissatisfaction.” In this feminist literature, the word “is used, sometimes interchangeably, with a number of other terms defining psychic, spiritual, moral, and physical states in which the self has difficulty accessing authenticity, productivity, and desire—all qualities attributed to one’s success as an individual” (Pease 2021, vii).

This kind of boredom involves long periods of time (months or years) in which not enough of perceived value occurs to make the individual feel satisfied with life. The hours may be filled with specific activities and events that make time pass so that it is not unpleasant or perceived to drag, but boredom is the subject’s appraisal of a whole period of life. It’s like never being able to leave Heidegger’s dinner party (which is not a problem that he encounters).

Since academic research is, almost by definition, conducted by people who hold currently bourgeois roles–albeit often precarious ones–it is crucial not to let first-person phenomenology supplant literary criticism and social science. Researchers and professors need to learn what an experience feels like to other kinds of people.

The other problem involves language. Phenomenology typically connects an inner experience to a word or phrase that names it. The word in question may have a history of being used in diverse ways. A feeling, such as boredom, that we experience as immediate and direct is socially constructed insofar as it has a name with well-known implications (Goodstein 2005, 4). Therefore, changes in the meaning of words may affect our experiences.

Classic phenomenologists sometimes tried to avoid the ambiguous and inconsistent connotations of existing words by coining new ones, which is one source of the difficulty of their texts. But one cannot write with neologisms alone. We need phenomenological accounts of widely used words, in order to reason about how best to use those words.

Heidegger emphasizes the literal root of the German word for boredom, Langeweile, or “long-while” (Heidegger 1930/1995, §19). This etymology will not influence an English-speaker who reflects on being “bored” or a French speaker who experiences ennui. The French word may suggest a degree of superiority, since it comes from the Latin odio, to hate, as in Horace’s famous “Odi profanum vulgus et arceo” (“I hate and shun the vulgar crowd”).

It is difficult to reconstruct the experience of boredom before the English word emerged (only ca. 1750), but it must have been different from today’s experience, if only because in those days it was unnamed and lacked conventional moral connotations. Today, a child who is taught that it is bad to be bored may experience boredom with guilt, resentment, or both.

Goodstein argues that “modern boredom” has loose connections with older ideas, such as melancholy and acedia (spiritual apathy), but “it can be identified with none of them. … Each of these forms of discontent is embedded in an historically and culturally specific way of understanding human experience—in which I call a rhetoric of reflection.” For instance, the pre-modern word “melancholy” assumed that humors could get out of balance: a disease model. Acedia implied that the sinner had become estranged from God. Modern boredom—“the experience without qualities”—is “the plague of the enlightened subject, whose skeptical distance from the certainties of faith, tradition, sensation renders the immediacy of quotidian meaning hollow or inaccessible.” Individuals suffering from modern boredom are out of harmony with society and alienated from their “own doing and being” (Goodstein 2005, 4, 10). Modern people who see themselves as bored are liable to be conscious of their individuality and alienation. They might perceive others as also bored: that is a common experience in school. Even so, all those individual students are alienated from the institution.

In short, Heidegger’s “we” is limited by both his social position and historical period. He has an idiosyncratic and not very empirical understanding of history, and virtually no awareness of his limited social perspective.

Like other works of phenomenology, Heidegger’s account can move us and inform us by resonating with our own experiences, but we must be careful to not to attend only to people who resemble ourselves.

*Heidegger explicitly disagrees that the “particular difficulties” of understanding Being are “grounded in any shortcomings of the cognitive powers with which we are endowed, or in the lack of a suitable way of conceiving—a lack which seemingly would not be hard to remedy” (Being and Time, H.16, Maquarrie & Robinson trans.). But he dismisses the validity of scientific research on human beings, and I think that’s a mistake.

Sources: Heidegger, M. 1930/1995.The fundamental concepts of metaphysics: world, finitude, solitude, trans. W. McNeil & N. Walker. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995 Heidegger. 1930/1983. I also consulted some passages in Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt—Endlichkeit—Einsamkeit, in Gesamtausgabe (collected works) 1923-1944, vol 29/30, Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1983. Also: Goodstein, E. S. 2005. Experience without qualities: boredom and modernity. Stanford University Press; Pease, A. 2012. Modernism, feminism and the culture of boredom. Cambridge University Press; and Slaby, J. 2010. The other side of existence: Heidegger on boredom, in Jan Söffner, Sabine Flach, eds, Habitus in habitat II: other sides of cognition. Bern: Peter Lang, 101-120. See also: introspect to reenchant the inner life; nature includes our inner lives; and a Husserlian meditation.

Cuttings: A book about happiness

Posted on January 6, 2023 by Peter

I began blogging on this site on Jan 8, 2003: twenty years ago. I’ve posted 4,114 short essays since then. To celebrate, I have selected 70 posts that I think retain some value, and all of which relate to one issue: happiness. What does it mean? Is it attainable? Is it the best objective? If we should pursue it, how?

I have edited, trimmed, and organized these 70 posts into a book, entitled Cuttings, that I’m making available here as a draft or version 1.0. I hope to revisit and expand this draft in the years ahead (which is one reason that I am not seeking a publisher for it).

You could download a PDF version of Cuttings, click to view an un-editable Google doc, or download an .epub version, which looks better in readers like iBook and Kindle. If you want an .epub version emailed to a regular email address or directly to a Kindle, please enter that address here.

Because Cuttings assembles short essays that address closely related topics without explicit connective arguments, it resembles–in its genre, although certainly not its quality–the aphoristic works of authors like Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. It fact, it begins with a mini-essay about why aphorisms are apt for describing the “unwedgeable and gnarled oak” of human nature.

Very few of the entries are original, and some could be described as advocating cliches. In numbers 27-29, I reflect on the moral pitfalls of striving to be original and the benefits of absorbing well-worn ideas.

Most of the entries wrestle with texts in some way. Michel de Montaigne gets the most frequent and positive attention. I am happy to see him play that role, although he is a better guide to individual happiness than political justice–a topic for other books. I also frequently address the Hellenistic schools (Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Skepticism) and classical Indian authors whom we classify as Buddhists or, in one case, possibly a Jain. These authors from the Mediterranean and India practiced what Pierre Hadot called “Philosophy as a Way of Life”: that is, philosophy as a set of meditative practices closely related to abstract arguments. I treat selected modern philosophers in a similar way–whether or not they would appreciate that treatment.

Many of the remaining entries comment on poems. Ovid, Keats, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Anne Carson are among the poets I consider at length.

As always, comments–including critical ones–are appreciated and are really the best reward.

(By the way, this 20th anniversary might be an appropriate moment to advertise that you can subscribe to this blog as a weekly email, just like a Substack, or follow it on Mastodon, Post or Twitter.)

toward a new equilibrium in Russia?

Posted on January 3, 2023 by Peter

Anna Colin Lebedev (University of Paris-Nanterre) recently wrote a 30-tweet thread about current Russian opinion that I found illuminating.

She discounts the value of surveys because they make two assumptions that do not apply in Russia (if anywhere): there is a correlation between discontent as measured by polls and explicit acts of resistance, and leaders care about discontent because they want to be reelected. Both are premises of the “public sphere” model elaborated by Habermas, which is only partly applicable in the USA, and hardly at all in Russia. There, Lebedev writes, the risks of explicit protest are very high, but the state may respond favorably to “legal complaints (for example, within the military) … agreements, workarounds, [and] personal contacts.” (I am translating from Lebedev’s French and responsible for any errors).

To use a phrase from James C. Scott that Lebedev doesn’t cite, Russians often opt for the “weapons of the weak“: everyday resistance, foot-dragging, noncompliance, and grudging compliance. These options are available not only to the truly weak but to the people whom Lebedev calls the “intermediate elites who run municipalities, administrations, military institutions, and even businesses.” These elites were already skilled at quiet noncompliance, and many recent examples have been reported: e.g., the Mayor of Moscow declaring prematurely that the objectives of mobilization have been fully met, or teachers failing to administer the awful new civics curriculum that I discussed here while their superiors turn a blind eye.

Lebedev writes: “There are two ways a tree can fall: it can be cut down, or it can be rotted from the inside while it still looks solid. An insect that devours the tree from within is not visible and does not make a difference. But many insects together destroy the tree.”

Destruction isn’t inevitable, and Russia may simply slip down to a new stable equilibrium. As I understand it, for the past two decades, Putin has had: 1) carrots, 2) sticks, and 3) a reputation for competence. His carrots are mostly economic: the Kremlin controls vast revenues that it can distribute to businesses and business leaders, regional governments, security services, and institutions like the church. The sticks can be brutal: consider numerous murders, prosecutions, and the cities of Grozny, Aleppo, and Mariupol. A reputation for competence is essential for making people heed carrots and sticks; otherwise, they will try to get away with doing whatever they want. Putin has appeared competent even to many of his critics. For instance, in the Red Sparrow series by Jason Matthews, he is a diabolical genius.

Entering 2023, Putin has fewer carrots because state revenues are down and the costs of the war are absorbing his funds. If Russia goes ahead with the massive expansion and modernization of the military that Putin’s team have promised, there will be little money left for other constituencies. The Kremlin is still a deadly force when people openly attract its notice. More than twenty critics suddenly died in mysterious circumstances during 2022 alone, not to mention the mass murder of Ukrainian civilians. However, the security services have their hands full and probably cannot address widespread noncompliance. Finally, Putin’s reputation for competence is shattered among Russia’s “intermediary elites,” if not yet among ordinary Russians. To me, it is especially noteworthy that the Russian state probably miscalculated the size and preparation of the army, because this error suggests that it cannot even see itself clearly. The reason was probably corruption rather than deliberate resistance, but these two behaviors merge in practice.

One can easily imagine a downward spiral, in which diminishing “state capacity” on the Kremlin’s side encourages less compliance by intermediary elites, who fail to generate the money, valid information, and mobilized soldiers that the state demands, thus further weakening the Kremlin’s position. The security services might continue to play Whack-a-Mole with actual opponents, who would be vastly outnumbered by ordinary scofflaws.

However, I don’t think the spiral will necessarily go all the way to collapse. The situation could stabilize at a level where Putin simply has less control over his vast country, rather like the situation in the 1990s.

I generally favor decentralization and polycentricity, but the consequences of diminishing state control in Russia will depend on who fills the vacuum. Russians will not be better off if people like the Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin or the Chechen boss Ramzan Kadyrov prosper at the Kremlin’s expense. My late colleague Mancur Olson argued that a “stationary bandit” (a ruler who has a stable monopoly on power) is more likely to promote the national interest than a bunch of “roving bandits,” who will only extract resources for themselves.

A weaker central state would be vulnerable in a crisis, but that does not mean that Putin (or a likeminded successor) would necessarily avoid crises. Facing an explicit enemy, such as a foreign government or a breakaway republic, might generate some genuine patriotic support and help to restore state capacity. Thus the Kremlin might continue to pick fights within the borders of the Russian Federation and beyond.

Chinese investors with connections to the Chinese state might also increase their sway within Russia. I am not sure whether that would be good or bad for Russians–or the world.

A situation like this could last for a long time.

there are tears of things

Posted on January 2, 2023 by Peter

One of the most famous–and notoriously ambiguous–phrases in all of Latin literature is Virgil’s “sunt lacrimae rerum” (Aeneid 1, 462). In his response to the Covid pandemic, Pope Francis interprets the phrase in an environmentalist spirit:

If everything is connected, it is hard to imagine that this global disaster is unrelated to our way of approaching reality, our claim to be absolute masters of our own lives and of all that exists. I do not want to speak of divine retribution, nor would it be sufficient to say that the harm we do to nature is itself the punishment for our offences. The world is itself crying out in rebellion. We are reminded of the well-known verse of the poet Virgil that evokes the “tears of things”, the misfortunes of life and history
(Pope Francis, 2020, 33)

Others have equated the phrase with the Japanese motto mono no aware, which Dennis Washburn defines as “an intuitive sensitivity toward the sublime, sad beauty that inheres in mutable nature and transitory human existence” (Washburn, 2016). In turn, mono no aware can express the First Noble Truth of Buddhism–the essential pervasiveness of suffering (Saito 1997)–or it can be an alternative to that view, a way of collecting and relishing representations of impermanence and loss.

Very literally, Virgil’s three words mean “there are tears of things,” but that statement makes little sense in English and requires expansion–using other meanings of the Latin nouns and/or additional connectives. English translators have proposed phrases as various as “The world is a world of tears (Fagles) or “They weep here / For how the world goes” (Fitzgerald), or even “The universe has sympathy for us” (Stewart, 1971, p. 119).

Gawin Douglas was the first to translate The Aeneid into a relative of modern English (Renaissance Scots), producing a version that Ezra Pound particularly appreciated. Douglas wrote:

Thir lamentabyll takynnys [condition] passit befor
Our mortal myndis aucht to compassioun steir.

The context is important for understanding these words’ sense. The Aeneid begins in medias res with Aeneas, the sole important survivor of defeated Troy, trying to sail from there to Italy. The goddess Juno, who hates him and all Trojans, arranges for a terrible storm to scatter his ships and maroon him on the coast of Libya. Aeneas’ mother, Minerva, appears in the guise of a hunter and directs him to Carthage, which is under construction. He wanders into a temple of Juno, where the art illustrates the Trojan War, depicting Aeneas’ comrades, his enemies, and even himself in battle. Since this is Juno’s temple, we might guess that the paintings are supposed to celebrate Aeneas’ defeat. However, the sight gives him hope–the text says–and he blurts out:

"Sunt hic etiam sua praemia laudi;
sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.
Solve metus; feret haec aliquam tibi fama salutem." 

"Even here praiseworthy deeds have their rewards;
There are tears of things, and mortal matters impress the mind.
Let fear go; this fame will also bring you some benefit."

Aeneas sees his own story as depicted by human artists, provoking thoughts of loss and sorrow but also pride. He utters a concise but mystifying phrase that pairs the words for “tears” and “things.” I imagine a companion following up with questions:

Do you mean that things are intrinsically or fundamentally sad?

– Yes, that is what I feel right now.

Or that these paintings are objects that make people cry?

– That too.

Are you somehow happy to see these sad events depicted?

– I suppose so.

Yet they make you sad?

– That is what I am happy about.

Do you want people who hear about your suffering to be sad?

– Yes, but I want them to relish that sadness.

In the end, I don’t think the original poem really provides a basis for interpreting the phrase as a statement of existential wisdom, comparable to mono no aware or to modern environmentalism. I suspect Aeneas is mostly interested in being depicted heroically in art. “This fame will bring you benefit” is his main point. However, the words “sunt lacrimae rerum” jump out of their context and can translate ideas from remote traditions.

Sources: Pope Francis, Fratelli Tutti: Encyclical Letter on Fraternity and Social Friendship, English version (Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2020); Dennis Washburn, introduction to Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji (W. W. Norton & Company, 2016); Saito, Yuriko. “The Japanese Aesthetics of Imperfection and Insufficiency.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 55, no. 4, 1997, pp. 377–85; Douglas J. Stewart, “Sunt Lacrimae Rerum.” The Classical Journal, vol. 67, no. 2, 1971, pp. 116–22; Gawin Douglas, The Aeneid translated into Scottish Verse. See also David Wharton, “Sunt lacrimae rerum: an exploration in meaning.” Classical Journal 103.3 (2008): 259-279. And see: Nostalgia for Now; Arachne; The Wedding of Peleus and Thetis; The Laughter of the Gods; and compassion, not sympathy (on Seneca).

The Sum of Ostrom, Common Pots, and Persistence

Posted on December 21, 2022 by Peter

I’ve deeply been deeply influenced by Elinor Ostrom (1933-2012). This is my brief introduction to her work, with links to two lectures that I’ve recorded about her, drawing on chapter 4 of my book What Should We Do? A Theory of Civic Life.

Lin Ostrom had many fans, including several of my colleagues at Tufts. Nevertheless, I see myself as her most enthusiastic champion here. Therefore, imagine my delight when a student told me about “The Sum of Ostrom, Common Pots, and Persistence,” a two-story mural by Jamal Thorne in Tufts’ new Joyce Cummings Center. At the time, I was co-teaching a course in the same building in which we discussed how Ostrom’s model applies to religious organizations.

According to the catalogue, “Thorne evokes a seeming past made present through the reclamation of iconic symbols, such as a walnut tree, native flora, a standing clock, lanterns, and a quilt. These variously denote the setting’s connections with the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe, the Underground Railroad, and George L. Stearns, a Boston merchant and abolitionist whose estate was acquired by Tufts in 1920. Furthermore, the inclusion of an abstracted road sign alludes to Thorne’s collaboration with the Math and Economics departments, the varied fields and perspectives represented among faculty, and an appreciation for how the wonders and theorems of abstract thought connect with human behavior.”

One of the murals shows a mathematical representation of the Prisoner’s Dilemma (which, Ostrom argued, people can solve), plus directional signs that point to Aristotle, Da Wei Cheng (1533–1606), who wrote Suanfa Tongzong (General Source of Computational Methods), Hypatia and Euclid (Greek mathematicians), Dorothy Vaughn (one of the Black women mathematicians and computer pioneers who contributed to the Pentagon and NASA), and the Argentine-US mathematician Alberto Pedro Calderon (1920-1998).

Ostrom is all about emergent systems in which people voluntarily contribute and create common goods. Some of these systems are natural: environments in which human beings play positive roles. Some of them are intellectual: Ostrom understood knowledge as a commons that is generated by people in institutions like Tufts. Often commons have cultural dimensions, incorporating the cultural products of the past. Some are indigenous and threatened by modernist schemes. Some, however, are global. Thorne eloquently combines these aspects in an installation for our newest major building.

See also: 142 previous posts on this blog about Ostrom.

Montaigne the bodhisattva?

Posted on December 20, 2022 by Peter

Several influential philosophical traditions assert that everyone is equally important. Since other people outnumber each of us–by billions–we should count ourselves and our interests for almost nothing.

That is a direct implication of classical utilitarianism. Sam Bankman-Fried endorsed it in an interview with Adam Fisher, conducted while he was actually stealing money for himself. (But hypocrisy does not invalidate a moral principle.) Another crisp statement comes in Shantideva’s classical summary of Buddhist ethics, probably written in the 700s CE. Shantideva recommends that we

meditate intently on the equality of oneself and others as follows: ‘All equally experience suffering and happiness. I should look after them as I do myself. … When happiness is liked by me and others equally, what is so special about me that I strive after happiness only for myself … Without exception, no sufferings belong to anyone. They must be warded off simply because they are suffering. Why is any limitation placed on this? If one asks why suffering should be prevented, no one disputes that! If it must be prevented, then all of it must be. If not, this goes for oneself as for anyone … This is why Supushpacandra, although undergoing torture at the hands of the king, did nothing to prevent his own suffering out of sacrifice for many sufferers. … Those who have developed the continuum of their mind in this way, to whom the suffering of others is as important as the things they themselves hold dear, plunge down into the Avici hell as geese into a cluster of lotus blossoms [to save the souls condemned there.]
Shantideva, 8.90, 8.95, 8.102-3, 8.106-7.

Michel de Montaigne acknowledges that “most of the world’s rules and precepts do adopt such an attitude, driving us outside ourselves and hounding us into the forum in the interests of the public weal.” These philosophies advise “that one should forget oneself on behalf of one’s neighbour and that, compared to the general, the individual is of no importance” (Montaigne, “On Restraining Your Will,” 1580, III, 10, p. 1137). Montaigne even says that his father held this view, and it motivated the elder Montaigne to be a devoted public servant.

Nevertheless, Montaigne dissents. He acknowledges one good thing about trying to treat every other person as just as important as ourselves. It teaches us not to be overly attached to our private interests, just as a “bowman, … to hit his target, raises his sights way above it”–or just as “to straighten a piece of bent wood we bend it right over backwards” (p. 1138).

In other words, striving to count ourselves for almost nothing counters the fault of caring for ourselves alone. But our real target should lie between the extremes of self-negation and self-love. For …

the true degree of love which each man owes to himself is … not false love which makes us embrace glory, knowledge, riches and such-like with an immoderate primary passion, as though they were members of our being, nor a love which is easy-going and random, acting like ivy which cracks and destroys the wall which it clings to, but a healthy, measured love, as useful as it is pleasant. Whoever knows its duties and practises them is truly in the treasure-house of the Muses: he has reached the pinnacle of human happiness and of man’s joy. Such a man, knowing precisely what is due to himself, finds that his role includes frequenting men and the world; to do this he must contribute to society the offices and duties which concern him. [C] He who does not live a little for others hardly lives at all for himself: ‘Qui sibi amicus est, scito hunc amicum omnibus esse.’ [Know that a man who feels loving-friendship for himself does so for all men – Seneca] The chief charge laid upon each one of us is his own conduct: that is why we are here. For example, any man who forgot to live a good and holy life himself, but who thought that he had fulfilled his duties by guiding and training others to do so, would be stupid: in exactly the same way, any man who gives up a sane and happy life in order to provide one for others makes (in my opinion) a bad and unnatural decision.
Montaigne 1580, p. 1138.

Montaigne’s position requires a defense. After all, every person is equally valuable, in an objective sense, so why shouldn’t we act accordingly?

First, Montaigne argues that to promote everyone else’s welfare requires ambition. It means climbing the ladder of authority in order to influence the social order. Montaigne is highly skeptical of ambition, seeing it as a snare. Most people who attain high office are actually unable to accomplish much, yet they are quick to take themselves far too seriously:

Most of our occupations are farcical: ‘Mundus universus exercet histrionem.’ [Everybody in the entire world is acting a part — Petronius]. We should play our role properly, but as the role of a character which we have adopted. … I know some who transubstantiate and metamorphose themselves into as many new beings and forms as the dignities which they assume: they are prelates down to their guts and livers and uphold their offices on their lavatory-seat.
Montaigne, 1580, pp. 1143-4.

Those who enter the fray to improve the world also become partisans for particular positions. They take views about how things should be and are prone to disparage their opponents. Montaigne, on the other hand, strives for intellectual humility and uncertainty, and he looks for value in all views. “I am firmly attached to the sanest of the parties but I do not desire to be particularly known as an enemy of the others beyond what is generally reasonable” (p. 1145). After all, “A good book does not lose its beauty because it argues against my cause” (p. 1144).

But why do we need authority or ideology to improve the world? Why not humbly give away most of what we possess? Perhaps Montaigne should have done that–and perhaps I should now. Although he doesn’t directly address this issue, he does argue that wealth is unrelated to happiness. “Metrodorus lived on twelve ounces a day, Epicurus on less; Metrocles slept among his sheep in the winter and, in summer, in the temple porticos; ‘Sufficit ad id natura, quod poscit.’ [What nature demands, she supplies –Seneca.] (p. 1141).

Montaigne acknowledges that people want more than the bare minimum of worldly goods, but that is because we have become habituated to surplus and are averse to losing it to other people. “If I lack anything which I have become used to, I [foolishly] hold that I truly lack it” (p. 1142). Better not to obtain it in the first place. That implies that sharing one’s surplus with others would do them little good.

But Montaigne’s main point–throughout his work–is that happiness is hard to accomplish. Fear of death and other human frailties beset us, regardless of our social circumstances. “We are never ‘at home’: we are always outside ourselves. Fear, desire, hope, impel us towards the future; they rob us of feelings and concern for what now is, in order to spend time over what will be – even when we ourselves shall be no more” (Montaigne, I:3, p, 11). We can address such faults, but to do so requires introspection and self-care. If everyone devoted themselves to helping everyone else, no one would accomplish happiness.

Since I began this post with Shantideva, I should present his probable rejoinder. He would agree with Montaigne that suffering is universal, and the only solution is inward. “Since I cannot control external events, I will control my own mind” (5.14). However, this Buddhist monk would recommend a different path from Montaigne’s. The more we fully grasp the suffering of the vast number of other sentient beings, the less space we have left to care about our own private interests. Caring about our interests–experiencing desire or craving–is the source of all unhappiness. Therefore, setting one’s aim, like an archer, at the good of all sentient beings is actually the best way to liberate oneself from suffering. “Whosoever longs to rescue quickly both himself and others should practice the supreme mystery: exchange of self and other” (8:120)

This doesn’t sound exactly like Montaigne. As I have noted, he rejects the advice to “forget oneself on behalf of one’s neighbour.” He famously retreated from the world’s struggle to read and write in his private tower, making himself his only topic. “My business, my art, is to live my life” (p. 425, from “On Practice”). Also, Montaigne claims modestly that he has not achieved “noble Stoic impassibility” (p. 1153), because he hasn’t accomplished his inner peace by exercising any kind of discipline. Instead, he just happens to be easy-going by temperament.

Still, Montaigne’s writing radiates curiosity and empathy for the vast variety of human beings whom he has encountered in books and life. He abhors cruelty. He offers gentle advice aimed at liberating us from attachment. For instance: “There are so many awkward passages that the surest way is to glide rather lightly over the surface of this world. We should slide over it, not get bogged down in it. Pleasure itself is painful in its deeper reaches” (p. 1136).

And perhaps his essays are a gift. “Here you have not my teaching but my study: the lesson is not for others; it is for me. Yet, for all of that, you should not be ungrateful to me for publishing it. What helps me can perhaps help somebody else” (p. 423, from “On Practice”). This is Montaigne’s way of plunging into hell as a cluster of lotus blossoms.

Sources: Michel Montaigne, The Complete Essays (1580), translated by M.A. Screech (Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition); Shantideva, The Bodhiicaryacatara, trans. by Kate Crosby and Andrew Skilton (Oxford University Press, 1995). See also: compassion, not sympathy; two criticisms of Effective Altruism; “you should be the pupil of everyone all the time”; was Montaigne a relativist?; John Stuart Mill, Stoic; introspect to reenchant the inner life; Emerson’s mistake; the sublime is social; Buddhism as philosophy; etc.

using federal spending to strengthen democracy

Posted on December 15, 2022 by Peter

The federal government is authorized to spend an additional $2 trillion over the next 10 years through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act. I support many of the priorities in these laws.

But government spending should be democratic–at several levels. Operating in a democratic way is consistent with justice and is most likely to be sustainable, because people will feel relatively supportive of government programs that engage them. This is the version of social democracy or Great Society liberalism that I can get behind.

What does spending money democratically mean? First, a fairly elected, deliberative legislature should allocate the funds into large categories. That pretty much happened with these bills (acknowledging many imperfections).

Then the federal agencies and state and local governments that administer the funds should engage relevant communities in deciding how to spend the money in detail and should form partnerships with groups (which may not be federal grantees) to accomplish the intended outcomes of the spending. Finally, the funds should allow many people to be hired and given a voice in the programs–including those who do the blue-collar work.

Spending on public transportation is a good example. The White House says there will be “$89.9 billion in guaranteed funding for public transit over the next five years — the largest Federal investment in public transit in history.” This investment has potential benefits for climate, racial equity, and convenience and quality of life.

States and cities will receive portions of this money. They should give their communities appropriate voice in deciding what and where to build. They should form partnerships with community groups whose goals align (e.g., community development corporations that can build dense housing near the transit). And they should employ workers–often via contracts with businesses–who have a say and who see pathways to influential Green careers.

This approach is inconsistent with libertarian conservatism, which opposes the spending in the first place. It is also inconsistent with technocratic progressivism, which views community engagement with deep skepticism. Doesn’t “engagement” mean NIMBY groups that block valuable projects in their neighborhoods, well-resourced companies that grab government contracts, and process-driven delays that dilute the benefits for both environment and racial equity?

The truth is, public engagement must be done well. A one-time public meeting in which citizens line up at the microphone to yell at public officials–that is a recipe for disaster. A worthwhile process takes planning and money. It requires training and technical support for the federal civil servants, local public employees, and activists who are involved. Since no single training program can accomplish very much, success requires building experienced bodies of employees who have run processes before and have learned to do them better.

We have not tried this approach for many decades in the USA–not since the Great Society, which tried various experiments in community engagement under the heading of “Maximum Feasible Participation” (with mixed success).

Reagan depicted government as the problem, although federal outlays per capita, adjusted for inflation, rose rapidly during Reagan’s term and only stabilized under Clinton. Also, despite a rhetorical commitment to hiring contractors instead of career civil servants, the civil service actually grew in that era. However, I think that federal capacity for public engagement shrank, outside of certain notable programs. More importantly, Congress launched or redesigned very few social programs after the late 1960s. That means that most federal money has flowed into well worn channels, offering limited opportunities for deliberation about what and how to spend.

Then, when the Obama Administration got a chance to allocate a substantial amount of new money in the 2009 stimulus, the progressive technocratic approach clearly won out. Efficiency was the by-word. Funds went to “shovel-ready” projects that were seen as offering the quickest return, or to initiatives informed by behavioral economics that were supposed to “nudge” people without them even being aware, or to competitions (like “Race to the Top”) that were meant to leverage non-federal funds. There was no sense that the public would be involved in defining and solving national problems along with the federal government.

Democratic spending is the path not taken, at least not since ca. 1965. We should find out whether it can produce sustainable, popular, and fair social outcomes in ways that we have not seen in my lifetime. That requires:

Setting aside tiny but real percentages of the federal funds for democratic and deliberative processes and for the training and technical assistance that they require. I am not sure to what extent those purposes are authorized under current law. If it is impossible to spend federal funds this way, then philanthropy should step up.
Considering new rules, such as offering special grants to communities that can demonstrate that they have reached agreement about priorities across traditional lines of difference, such as race, partisanship, or urban/suburban/rural divides. I’d be especially interested in agreements that bridge distant communities, such as coal towns and East Coast cities.
Intellectual leadership: influential people should articulate the value of public engagement. In the Obama Administration, the president did that, albeit somewhat vaguely. No members of his cabinet and hardly any liberal public intellectuals backed him up. The stimulus package and Obamacare came across as strictly technocratic and were assessed only for their outcomes (while democratic culture waned). We need more effective voices to defend democracy this time.

When David Meyers of The Fulcrum asked me yesterday to comment on the fact that the public identifies “the government” as the biggest problem facing us today, I replied that the most promising solution is to spend money democratically. My reply was rooted in the best traditions of the New Deal and Great Society (as I see them), but it’s a fairly marginal view today. It’s an alternative to three prevalent assumptions: that democracy is mostly a matter of fair electoral processes, that activated citizens are often a nuisance, and that protecting democracy means uplifting some kind of political center. I think we must exercise power to improve the world, but do so in ways that empower our full diversity of people in their roles as citizens.

Civic Studies

An intellectual community of researchers and practitioners dedicated to building the emerging field of civic studies