Author Archives: Peter Levine

why join a cause?

I have been involved in a lot of causes–mostly rather modest or marginal affairs, but ones that have mattered to me: public journalism, campaign finance reform, deliberative democracy, civilian national service, civic education, media reform, and service-learning, among others. The standard way to evaluate such causes and decide whether to join the movements that support them is to ask about their goals and their prospects of success. To be fully rational, one compares the costs and benefits of each movement’s objectives with those of other movements, adjusting for the probability and difficulty of success. A rationally altruistic person joins the movement that has the best chance of achieving the most public good, based on its “cause” and its strategies.

To use an overly-technical term, this is a “teleological” way of thinking. We evaluate each movement’s telos, or fundamental and permanent purpose. Friedrich Nietzsche was a great critic of teleological thought. He saw it everywhere. In a monotheistic universe, everything seems to exist for a purpose that lies in its future but was already understood in the past. Nietzsche wished to raise deep doubts about such thinking:

the cause of the origin of a thing and its eventual utility, its actual employment and place in a system of purposes, lie worlds apart; whatever exists, having somehow come into being, is again and again reinterpreted to new ends, taken over, transformed, and redirected by some power superior to it; all events in the organic world are a subduing, a becoming master, and all subduing and becoming master involves a fresh interpretation, an adaptation through which any previous “meaning” and “purpose” are necessarily obscured or even obliterated. However well one has understood the utility of any physiological organ (or of a legal institution, a social custom, a political usage, a form in art or in a religious cult), this means nothing regarding its origin … [On the Genealogy of Morals, Walter Kaufmann’s translation.]

I think that Nietzsche exaggerated. In his zeal to say that purposes do not explain everything, he claimed that they explain nothing. In the human or social world, some things do come into being for explicit purposes and then continue to serve those very purposes for the rest of their histories. But to achieve that kind of fidelity to an original conception takes discipline, in all its forms: rules, accountability measures, procedures for expelling deviant members, frequent exhortations to recall the founding mission. The kinds of movements that attract me have no such discipline. Thus they wander from their founding “causes”–naturally and inevitably.

As a result, when I consider whether to participate, I am less interested in what distinctive promise or argument the movement makes. I am more interested in what potential it has, based on the people whom it has attracted, the way they work together, and their place in the broader society. I would not say, for example, that service-learning is a better cause or objective than other educational ideas, such as deliberation, or media-creation, or studying literature. I would say that the people who gather under the banner of “service-learning” are a good group–idealistic, committed, cohesive, but also diverse. Loyalty to such a movement seems to me a reasonable basis for continuing to participate.

rule of law in an emirate

Here is a sophisticated and attractive website that explains the concept of “rule of law” to Qataris, especially high school students in Qatar’s schools. The sponsors include the US Department of State and the American Bar Association’s Division for Public Education, on whose advisory board I serve. (Thus I acknowledge complicity.) The site says that the rule of law is “good for you and good for Qatar!”

But what is rule of law? Specifically, can you have rule of law in a country governed by an Emir?

There are at least two conceptions of rule of law, which have been called “thin” and “thick.” The thin conception is deliberately narrow. Friedrich Hayek defined it thus: “Stripped of all technicalities,” he wrote, it “means that government in all its actions is bound by rules fixed and announced beforehand–rules which make it possible to foresee with fair certainty how the authority will use its coercive powers in given circumstances and to plan one’s individual affairs on the basis of this knowledge.” No one would say that rule of law (on this definition) is a sufficient condition of justice. Rules can be “fixed and announced beforehand” and yet be evil. But Hayek argued that the rule of law was valuable in itself. Thus it might be worth while to promote it in a country like Qatar. To do so would be a public service to the Qatari people and not merely a favor to the regime.

The thin version of rule of law can accompany various forms of government. A democracy might bind itself to act only on the basis of fixed laws, but democratic majorities are often tempted to change their rules on the fly. Thus rule of law is consistent with democracy but hardly synonymous with it. Likewise, an emir or another monarch can, either by habit and preference or under a binding constitutional provision, act according to the thin conception of the rule of law. Many European monarchs used to be very rule-guided, even though they claimed divine right. The Pope acts according to rules within the domain of canon law.

In the passage quoted above, Hayek mentions only two components of a very thin theory: laws must be fixed and announced. One could add other ingredients to a thin theory, e.g., a prohibition on bills of attainder (laws that single out individuals for special treatment). That rule follows from the same Hayekian principle that governments should be predictable so that people can order their affairs accordingly. And so the thin theory grows thicker.

One can also include much more substantive components in the definition of “rule of law”–for instance, equal protection, an independent judiciary, right to a defense, or even freedom of speech and assembly. The more you build in, the less the concept seems compatible with a monarchy, especially if the monarch (as in Qatar) makes legal distinctions between his subjects and the other 80 percent of his resident population that holds foreign citizenship. If rule of law must include ingredients incompatible with monarchy, then it is not clear that we are helping Qatar by producing this website. But I write in the conditional, because I really cannot decide whether a thin concept of rule of law is valid and worthwhile.

the ABA division of public education

Chicago: I’m here for a board meeting of the American Bar Association’s Division of Public Education. With 400,000 members, the ABA is the association of lawyers in the United States; its public education division runs programs and produces materials that contribute to public understanding of the law, rights, justice, the Constitution, and similar topics. Much of the Division’s work is aimed at youth. Its director, Mabel McKinney-Browning, is one of the leaders in the movement for better civic education. She is, among other things, my successor as chair of the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools. The Division’s website provides a wealth of free materials on legal issues. As a member of the Division’s advisory board, I advocate for the ABA to become a political force for civic education. So far, the ABA has resolved to “urge the amendment of the No Child Left Behind Act if reauthorized, or the adoption of other legislation, to ensure that all students experience high quality civic learning . . . [that] is regularly and appropriately assessed . . . and accorded national educational priority on a par with reading and mathematics.” This position is now something that the Association’s lobbyists in Washington are supposed to advocate.

Bernard Gill

Last Tuesday night–it is dark and rainy, and about thirty of stand beside a parking lot on what once was prairie, not far from the narrow, powerful Mississippi. We stand around a baby pine tree and a hole. Rudy Balles, director of an anti-gang program for Peace Jam, holds a piece of braided sweetgrass that he has set alight. He moves slowly around the circle, blowing the smoke onto each of us with an object–I wish I knew its name–made mainly of feathers. The smoke carries our prayers to the Creator. Rudy sings in his deep resonant voice a song from the American Indian Movement. He sings about us and about the land, about peace and justice, and about G. Bernard Gill.

Bernard was a preacher, a leader of the National Youth Leadership Council, a widowed father of four beautiful and successful children, a young African American man of enormous achievement and promise. Right in the middle of the last NYLC Conference, which he had helped to organize, Bernard suddenly died. He told Rudy that he needed to find a cup of water, but he never came back with it. His second child was headed to college; Bernard himself was starting on a PhD. He was a model of passion, compassion, commitment, and ethics. We planted the tree for him, and you can help his family. May his name be a blessing for all who knew him.

quote of the day

“If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their kind. Each crisis seems final, simply because it is new. We are told that the oldest inhabitants of Peru do not cease to be agitated by the earthquakes, but they probably see beyond each shock, and reflect that there are plenty more still to come.” — George Eliot, Middlemarch.