Nancy Thomas of the Democracy Imperative has collected 12 positive and recent news items about civic engagement, youth, and education. In lieu of my own post on this surprisingly busy day, I recommend Nancy’s list, which is especially valuable at a moment when spirits seem to be lagging.
I admire unexpected, imaginative stagings of Shakespeare that are not stunts but that reveal meanings in the original text. There are many such moments in Ian McKellen’s film version of Richard III (1995). He has cut and edited Shakespeare’s text heavily, but his reading is powerful and illuminating.
This clip shows the first 8 minutes, including Richard’s famous opening soliloquy, “Now is the winter of our discontent …” The movie actually begins with a preceding, wordless scene in which Richard murders Edward, Prince of Wales and Henry VI to put Edward IV (“the son of York”) on the throne. That scene vividly conveys that we are in England around 1930. There has been a fascist takeover, involving the military officer corps and the aristocracy, with the royal family as at least titular rulers. And there has been a bloody split among royal factions. The analogy to the Wars of the Roses five centuries earlier is provocative.
The clip opens with quick shots of several buildings that will serve as scenes and symbols in the film. Among others, these include St. Pancras Station, a great Victorian building (transported in the film to Westminster), which is Edward’s seat of government, and St. Cuthbert’s church in London, a fantastic example of late-Victorian Arts and Crafts style architecture, where a “merry meeting” will occur. These buildings stand for the old world (pre- World War I) that is Edward’s. Richard will govern from the fascist-looking, quasi-modernist Senate House building of the University of London. The soundtrack, meanwhile, is a big band rendition of Marlowe’s “Come Live with Me and By My Love,” which nicely marries the music of the 1930s with the language of the 1600s.
Before anyone speaks, we are quickly introduced to all the major characters. To name just a few, the loving Queen Elizabeth is shown playing and dancing with her innocent young son, later to be murdered in the Tower. The King is shown as a sick and aging Edwardian. The Duke of Buckingham is a cigar-puffing magnate, conspiring with the uniformed Richard like a Weimar industrialist with Hitler. Earl Rivers is the dissolute fellow leaving a tryst with a cabin attendant on a Pan Am flight.
Richard’s opening lines are presented as a public speech, not a soliloquy. From “Now is the winter …” to “… fright the souls of fearful adversaries,” he is addressing the court with a toast. (See 5:39 to 6:44 on the video.) These sentences are usually presented as sarcastic–delivered privately by a venomous, hunchbacked villain to himself or the audience. But they are literally words of praise, and in this rendition, Richard addresses them smilingly to the Yorkists.
But then, with “He capers nimbly in a lady’s chamber” (line 22), Richard is alone, standing before a urinal and then a men’s room mirror. These are the kinds of private places where we rue our own deformities of body and of spirit. Richard then catches our eye in the mirror, turns directly to the camera, and tells us the truth: that he is “determined to prove a villain.” Throughout the movie, Richard will almost always dissemble to other characters but speak truthfully into the camera. Finally, around line 32, the scene moves to the Thames Bankside where Clarence is being transported to prison, and Richard becomes a narrator of events happening in real time.
McKellen has shrewdly divided the 35-line soliloquy into four rhetorical sections, delineating them with changes of settings and perspective, and thus revealing what I think is the real structure of the speech. The whole film is rich with such insights and recovers some of the original shock value of Shakespeare’s over-quoted but under-appreciated early play.
Is it just me, or are people suddenly citing the following quote all over the place: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results”? It is variously attributed to Albert Einstein, Ben Franklin, and Mark Twain, but may actually come from mystery writer Rita Mae Brown. In any case, it’s false because:
1. Even if it is an example of insane behavior, it is not the definition of it.
2. It is often not insane, or even unwise. Any time there is a less-than-100-percent chance of obtaining a great outcome by doing something, you should consider repeating that something until you get the payoff. Quitting after a few attempts would be–if not insane–dumb.
(People who repeat this phrase seem to expect good results even though stating it hasn’t achieved anything in the past. That does not make them insane but it does make them inconsistent.)
Last April, CIRCLE convened scholars, civic leaders, and federal officials met in Washington to develop a federal policy agenda for civic skills. Thirty-three of the participants (not including any federal officials) jointly wrote and signed a report that we released yesterday. Some highlights:
“American citizens and communities can address our nation’s fundamental problems. But to do so requires civic skills, especially the ability to gather and interpret information, speak and listen, engage in dialogue about differences, resolve conflicts, reach agreements, collaborate with peers, understand formal government, and advocate for change.”
“Civic associations—among other institutions–have developed their members’ skills throughout American history. But these associations are in deep decline (notwithstanding some important new forms of online association), and therefore we cannot count on the public’s civic skills to be adequate in the decades ahead.”
Among the recommendations:
“Across federal agencies, develop common principles, values, and language that help build the civic capacities of civil servants and that nurture authentic public engagement. This objective may require both an inter-agency working group on skills within the federal government and convening others outside the government to develop common principles and strategies.”
“Redirect service-oriented programs and opportunities so that they become civic-skill-building and community-capacity-building programs. Go beyond the ‘service’ language. At the same time, recognize that some service and service-learning programs already have strong records of developing civic skills.”
Read the whole thing in PDF here.
Neighbors love a local stream and are concerned about its health. Thanks to them, a pedestrian footbridge is built over it to provide access and to reduce car pollution. It doesn’t matter much whether people cause the bridge it to appear by lobbying the local government to build it, persuading a private company to donate it, or physically erecting it themselves. So long as the bridge was their idea and the fruit of their collective discussion and effort, several advantages are likely to follow: 1) Because they designed it, it will meet their needs and reflect their talents. 2) Because they made it, they will feel a sense of ownership and will be motivated to protect it. 3) Because they are formally equal as neighbors, not ranked in a hierarchy, each will feel a sense of dignity and status. 4) In shaping their public world together, they will gain a feeling of satisfaction and agency that is available nowhere else. And 5) By combining discussion with collaborative action, they will develop skills, relationships, and political power that can transfer to other settings.
None of these outcomes is guaranteed, nor would I ignore the possibility of arguments, tensions, and downright failures. But some of the advantages are impossible to obtain in other ways.
The bridge is just a metaphor. We don’t need to burden the earth with unlimited numbers of new structures. Restoring nature is equally valuable, as are various forms of non-tangible and non-permanent goods: events, performances, ideas, cultural innovations.
I don’t think that who owns the good is of fundamental importance. There are five basic options: no ownership at all (which is the case with the high seas), government ownership, an individual owner, a for-profit corporate owner, or a nonprofit corporate owner. These legal arrangements are relevant, but they do not determine whether people can do public work together. Other factors, such as motivations, norms, expectations, and rewards, interact with the legal status of goods in various complex ways.
Thus a great example of a publicly created space might be a coffee house, papered with posters for local events, populated by a cross-section of the community. That coffee house may belong to and profit one person, who (along with his or her customers) can rightly feel responsible for building a common space. Meanwhile, a government-owned underpass nearby may be the most forbidding and hostile, anti-public space in town.
As Elinor Ostrom noted in her Nobel Prize Lecture, how people manage a common-pool resource depends in part on whether they are organized as (for instance) “private water companies, city utilities, private oil companies, and local citizens meeting in diverse settings.” Their behavior differs, too, depending on the rules of the game: for example “when they meet monthly in a private water association, when they face each other in a courtroom, and when they go to the legislature.” Despite these differences, Ostrom and her colleagues have begun to build one overall framework for understanding the management of common-pool resources–a framework that tends to downplay the dichotomy between state and private sector that seems fundamental in other theories. One could say that in this framework, citizens are at the center and they have available a plurality of institutional forms and combinations of forms.
Still, I think there is a sense of “public” that makes the creation of public goods particularly precious. My imaginary bridge and coffee house may have different legal status, but they share the advantages listed in the first paragraph above. The outputs of government bureaucracies and private corporations usually lack those advantages, which is why people are alienated from the world that those entities jointly create. Governments can incorporate public creativity and work into their operations, and that would be the best way to make people like the government more. Unfortunately, it is not the main trend in public administration anywhere in the developed world.