Monthly Archives: July 2007

public participation in grantmaking

Led by Cindy Gibson, a group of us has helped the Case Foundation to develop an innovative grant competition that involves online voting about which proposals to fund. The Chronicle of Philanthropy ran a story about this competition that, as Cindy says, was “fairly balanced and thorough.” However, it put most of the focus on the voting part of the competition. A vote can be “gamed” or manipulated in various ways. It doesn’t necessarily reflect a group’s judgment, nor does it necessarily increase accountability to the public (since the whole public won’t vote).

I like the Case Foundation’s experiment with voting because it’s part of a broader foray into public participation. There will not just be a vote, but also a structured discussion. Crucially, the proposals will be evaluated for how much they enhance public voice. As in the formal political system, granting people a vote is a gesture of respect; it says that power will not be monopolized at the center. But the vote is insufficient to achieve public judgment. If anything, the voting portion of the Case Foundation’s new program is valuable as a symbol of a deeper commitment. Case is experimenting with a new relationship between the foundation (whose funds are tax-exempt by law) and the public.

persnickety

Early in P.D. James’ mystery Death in Holy Orders (2001), she establishes that her characters will speak formal, allusive, complex English of the type that an average reader could never master in real speech. Here, for example, a divinity teacher is addressing his student:

“You might as well take your essay. It’s on the desk. Evelyn Waugh wrote in one of his travel books that he saw theology as the science of simplification whereby nebulous and elusive ideas are made intelligible and exact. Your essay is neither. And you misuse the word ’emulate.’ It is not synonymous with ‘imitate.'”

“Of course not. Sorry, Father. I can imitate you but I cannot hope to emulate you.”

A few pages earlier, in discussing an anonymous letter, another character says, “And the writer is educated, I’d say. He–or she–has got the punctuation right. In this under-educated age I’d say that means someone middle-aged rather than young.”

I think this is a relatively easy game to play. In the quiet of her study, the author composes careful sentences that incorporate quotes from books she happens to have at hand. In the text, she explicitly mentions the difference between educated, erudite speech and ordinary talk. She thereby creates an air of superiority that some readers seem to enjoy.

Thus I have to admit I was pleased to encounter the following sentence of narration early in the novel: “In addition to its size, Father Sebastian’s office contained some of the most valuable objects bequeathed to the college by Miss Arbuthnot.” This is a howler–the room doesn’t contain its own size. The Baroness James has committed a basic grammatical error. Ha! I only hope the plot turns out to be good.

Sekou Sundiata, 1948-2007

I was very sorry to read in The New York Times that Sekou Sundiata has died. I once had the privilege to speak on a panel with him and have heard some of his performances. (Visit Salon for some sample audio.) Sundiata was a poet, performance artist, and organizer of community performances. His “the 51st (dream) state” is a remarkable portrait of the US after 9/11, full of hope and openness. He was a serious critic of White racism and he had an African aesthetic. Born in Harlem as Robert Franklin Feaster, he took an African name. But “the 51st (dream) state” is intensely patriotic about the USA. We all have complex and overlapping identities. Sundiata had the talent and the integrity to explore his own identities with eloquence and an open mind; and he was brilliant at helping other people to do the same.

perspectives

Here’s our mapping class, a bunch of kids between the ages of 13 and 15 who are interviewing a former chair of the County Council about how to improve their public school system. (I show a photo because we are taking lots of pictures to build a multimedia website.) They have come to the campus of the University of Maryland for the interview. An hour earlier, I was in the adjacent building for a dissertation defense. The (successful) candidate, a philosophy PhD student, had written her thesis on empowerment in international development, drawing on the work of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum.

Despite tremendous differences in vocabulary and methodology, there were some common themes in the two discussions. Both the middle-schoolers and the professors wanted to know how to reform institutions to enhance human development.

I have plenty of insecurities as an academic. I don’t do technically complex work; I don’t have field position within a major discipline. I don’t publish in distinguished venues, and I haven’t synthesized whatever I’ve learned in original, ambitious ways. I don’t know whether I’ll ever make substantial progress on those fronts. But on days like this, I am deeply grateful for the richness and diversity of the conversations I have the privilege to join.

stability of character

I think most people believe, as a matter of common sense, that individuals have stable characters. In fact, it turns out that the word “character” comes from a Greek noun for the stamp impressed on a coin. We think that adults have been “stamped” in some way, so that one person is brave but callous; another, sensitive but vain. We make fine discriminations of character and use them to predict behavior. We also see categories of people as stamped in particular ways. For instance, we may think that men and women have different characters, although that particular distinction is increasingly criticized–and for good reasons.

Experiments in social psychology, on the other hand, tend to show that most or all individuals will act the same way in specific contexts. Details of the situation matter more than differences among individuals. For instance, in a famous experiment, seminary students on their way to give a lecture on helping needy people are confronted with an actor who is slumped over and pretending to be in distress. Whether the students stop depends on how late they believe they are–a detail of the context. All the self-selection, ideology, training, and reflection that goes into seminary education seems outweighed by the precise situation that a human being confronts on his way to an appointment.

On a much broader scale, we are all against slavery and genocide today. But almost all White people condoned slavery in American ca. 1750, and almost all gentile Germans turned a blind eye to genocide ca. 1940. It seems safe to say that context made all the difference, not that our characters are fundamentally better than those of old. (For a good summary, see Marcia Homiak, “Moral Character,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [Spring 2007 Edition], edited by Edward N. Zalta.)

My question is why the common sense or folk theory of character seems so attractive and is so widespread. If human behavior depends on the situation and is not much affected by individuals’ durable personality traits, why do we all pay so much attention to character?

In fact, most people we know are rarely, if ever, confronted with new categories of challenging ethical situations. Neither the political regime nor one’s social role changes often, at least in a country like the USA. An individual may repeatedly face the same type of situation, and these circumstances differ from person to person. Thus a big-city police officer in the US faces morally relevant situations of a certain type–different from those facing a suburban accountant. An American lives in a different kind of social/political context from an Iraqi. Individuals occupy several different social roles at once. But the roles themselves are pretty stable. They are, to varying degrees, the result of choices that we have made.

Thus what we take to be “character” may be repeated behavior resulting from repeated circumstances–which, in turn, arise because of the roles we occupy, which (to some degree) we choose. In that case, it is reasonable to expect people to act “in character,” yet situations are what drive their behavior. By the way, this seems a generally Aristotelian account.