The Census data on volunteering show that there are big gaps by race/ethnicity and especially by educational background. Almost half of college graduates say they volunteer, compared to less than one in ten adults who dropped out of high school. I didn’t attempt any statistical analysis, but it appears that educational background is the important factor. African Americans might volunteer at higher rates than Whites if you controlled for educational background.

Volunteering has advantages for those who do it: it educates and connects people to their fellow human beings. That’s one reason to be concerned about the gap in volunteering. We might also worry that, if most volunteers are well-off and White, there will be inadequate volunteer services in disadvantaged communities. And privileged volunteers may misunderstand or patronize those they serve.

If we are concerned about this gap, we could try to close it by providing more service opportunities and support (including perhaps financial support) for less advantaged Americans.

On the other hand, there is a class-bias inherent in the concept of “volunteering.” If a person with a paid day-job helps other people’s kids at the local school, that’s volunteering. However, if a stay-at-home Mom carefully monitors the neighborhood kids, she is unlikely to describe herself as a volunteer. And if a person chooses to work as a public school teacher, she isn’t a “volunteer” unless she also helps after-hours at a soup kitchen or cleaning up a park.

Thus it’s possible that it’s not actual volunteering that’s mal-distributed, but only the way we define it.

Joshua Goldstein is a young American who lives and works in Uganda. He has written a very interesting essay for his blog about new media in Africa. He argues that blogging, in particular, can help build respectful, human relationships between the developed world and the Global South. (In the interests of full disclosure, Josh is a former Maryland undergraduate–but not a student of mine.)

Here’s an argument, inspired by Tocqueville, that we can assess the health of a democracy by examining the heterogeneousness of its culture.

Truly engaged citizens produce diverse cultural products. That is because cultural identity is always contested; it provokes debates, parodies, and expressions of dissent as well as consensus. Besides, engaged people clump together in communities and associations, each of which inevitably takes on a distinct character. Many communities and associations choose to display their identities through music, statuary, graphic design, narrative history, and other forms of culture.

Conversely, a homogeneous, mass culture is a threat to civic engagement, because when only a few people produce products that reach a mass market, they obtain great influence. Today, various groups of Americans criticize mass culture for being secular, materialistic, superficial, violent, sexist, and racist, and for undermining local, traditional, and minority cultures. These critiques are not always mutually consistent and may not all be valid. But it seems clear that people feel powerless to change mass culture; that feeling demonstrates the tension between mass culture and democracy.

Mass culture is, in part, a product of corporate capitalism. Capital investment increases the audiences for certain books, films, and songs. Sometimes corporate power is relatively weak: for instance, when there is competition among many producers (as in the Jacksonian era of small printers or in today’s age of blogs), or when the government sponsors cultural production (as in Western Europe). However, there remains an intrinsic tendency for liberal and democratic societies to develop mass cultures.

When people are free to choose which cultural products to consume, a small handful of products become enormously more popular than the rest. It is not certain why this occurs, but it seems plausible that people want to know what other people are reading, hearing, or viewing; thus they gravitate to what is already popular, making it more so. That instinct is perhaps especially strong in a democracy, where people are taught to believe that average or majority opinion is a reliable guide to quality. Books are advertised as “best sellers,” movies as “blockbusters,” and songs as “hits” because democratic audiences trust popularity. In aristocratic cultures, on the other hand, elites have disproportionate consumer power and tend to view popularity as a mark of poor quality. Aristocrats want to have unusual tastes. As Tocqueville wrote:

Among aristocratic nations every man is pretty nearly stationary in his own sphere, but men are astonishingly unlike each other; their passions, their notions, and their tastes are essentially different: nothing changes, but everything differs. In democracies, on the contrary, all men are alike and do things pretty nearly alike. It is true that they are subject to great and frequent vicissitudes, but as the same events of good or averse fortune are continually recurring, only the name of the actors is changed, the piece is always the same. The aspect of American society is animated because men and things are always changing, but it is monotonous because all these changes are alike.

Tocqueville thought that mass culture posed a serious threat to liberty. But he proposed a solution. Strong voluntary associations would have the means and the incentive to produce differentiated alternatives to mass culture.

As a follow-up to yesterday, I want to emphasize that Israel may defend itself. However, as a democracy, it needs national unity and the authentic support of fair-minded outsiders. Both will come only if Israel has a reputation for actively seeking a just peace.

Today, Prime Minister Olmert’s office said that “Israel has no intention of harming the Lebanese population and that Israel is fighting against the Hezbollah terrorist organization and not against the Lebanese government or its citizens. … The prime minister said he was very sensitive to the humanitarian situation in Lebanon.”

This is something you have to show and not just say. In fact, treating Lebanese refugees as simply a “humanitarian” problem threatens to reduce their self-respect. Given Israel’s overwhelming conventional military superiority, it should take pains to:

show explicit and deep respect for Arab and Moslem civilizations;

forcefully maintain a commitment to respecting Arab lives;

express solidarity with the democracy of Lebanon, even while complaining about its unwillingness to confront Hezbollah;

explain that Israel’s goal is to coexist in peace with strong, prosperous, independent neighbors;

refrain from undermining the dignity and self-respect of Arab populations, even during wars; and

take all reasonable measures to spare non-combatants.

The last precept would be more difficult to follow if killing civilians in aerial attacks were Israel’s most effective means of self-defense against Hezbollah’s rockets. However, I doubt very much that that is the case.

[Update: See Gideon Levy’s “Days of Darkness” in Haaretz: “Israel is sinking into a strident, nationalistic atmosphere and darkness is beginning to cover everything. The brakes we still had are eroding, the insensitivity and blindness that characterized Israeli society in recent years is intensifying. …”]

Richard Cohen’s Washington Post piece last week began, “The greatest mistake Israel could make at the moment is to forget that Israel itself is a mistake. It is an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now.”

As you would expect, this opening sparked some fire in the blogosphere. In fact, it was the most blogged-about statement of the day, described variously as “poison,” “projectile vomiting,” the “asinine quote of the century,” and a “bizarre attack on Israel,” written by a “self-hating terror enabler,” a “Jew who can be relied upon to provide cover for … malignant pyschosis and racism.” (I quote from half a dozen different blogs.)

Cohen could have argued against the current Israeli military action without calling the country a “mistake.” I doubt that the debate he launched will be productive. It would be more timely to discuss whether the bombing and ground invasion of Lebanon comport with just war theory. We should also debate whether these actions can possibly advance the interests of Israel, rightly understood. As the Israeli Meretz Party is asking, Is there an exit strategy? Is there a plausible scenario in which the invasion leads to peace and security?

However, over the longer term, the question of Israel’s legitimacy is unavoidable. The Jewish state is a democracy that needs the voluntary and enthusiastic support of its own people and the authentic friendship of at least some foreign countries. Therefore, it is not wrong to raise the question of whether Israel is a “mistake”–and if not, why not.

Some complain that Israel is singled out for criticism, even though the neighboring tyrannies receive less scrutiny. But the governments of Syria, Jordan, and Egypt have no legitimate moral claims; they merely have guns. Men enlist in the Syrian army because they are drafted. Subjects obey the Syrian state because otherwise they will be tortured. Other countries deal with Syria because they have no alternative.

A democratic state is a different kind of project. It asserts a right to govern on the basis of justice. It is therefore an appropriate question whether the State of Israel state is just, whereas there is no need to ask that question in relation to Syria or even Jordan and Egypt.

Israel was created by a vote of the United Nations, and its citizens still want to be a nation. Even if the original Zionist project was a mistake, the state of Israel has a presumptive right to exist, just as the USA is legitimate regardless of the merits of Manifest Destiny. America was built on land stolen from the indigenous population so that it could be worked, in significant measure, by imported slaves. We nevertheless have a legitimate–indeed, an excellent–polity that rests today on the consent of the governed. Israel’s foundation was, at the least, less bloody that our own. Like any democracy, Israel must show that its current behavior and laws are just; its origins are history.

Thus, as a friend of Israel, I worry about the defenses of that nation that I read on English-language blogs in response to Cohen’s post. I don’t know how much of the Israeli population these blogs represent, but I have also encountered the same views in offline conversations. The main arguments are: (1) God gave Israel to the Jews in perpetuity; (2) Jews lived in what is now Israel for many centuries of antiquity; and (3) There were hardly any Arabs in Palestine before the Jewish immigration of the late 1800s.

I cannot accept the premise that Israel is God’s gift, nor should the United States or the global community. Unlike the argument that Israel deserves respect because its constitution is just, an appeal to scripture can move no one except fundamentalists. The premise that Jews are the original occupants of Israel is of dubious relevance. Similar logic would imply that those of European ancestry who live today in North and South America, Australia, and South Africa must go back “home” and leave those lands to the native populations. As for the argument that Palestine was “deserted swampland” between 68 CE and 1870–this raises a host of problems.

First, I doubt it’s true. It is hard to tell from the World Wide Web how many Moslem and Christian Arabs really lived in what would become British Palestine in 1890 or 1910. This is an intensely touchy subject, and many people have created responsible-looking websites that provide radically different estimates. Yehoshua Porath’s estimate of more than 200,000 sounds well-argued to me; it appeared in a respectable publication; and it’s perfectly consistent with contemporaneous descriptions of Ottoman Palestine quoted on the Zionist websites, which make the area seem relatively lightly populated but far from “deserted.”

I am not learned about Middle Eastern history and cannot settle the debate about how many Arabs lived in Palestine before the big Jewish immigration. But it does seem risky to tie one’s national self-respect to a claim that there weren’t many of another people present on your land before your countrymen arrived. Mrs. Netanhayu once told Queen Noor of Jordan, “When the Jews came to this area, there were no Arabs here. They came to find work when we built cities. There was nothing here before that.” What if that turned out to be false? Given her rationale for the Zionist project, must Mrs. Netanyahu reject the state of Israel if someone shows her that there were Arabs in Palestine in 1880?

Not only bloggers, but people I have known offline denigrate the old Arab population of Palestine, claiming that the few resident Arabs were pathetically poor and illiterate until the Jews arrived. This is an empirical claim that could, for the little I know, turn out to be true. But it’s morally dangerous to want to believe that another group was so bereft and despondent that their defeat at your hands was a blessing for them. That is a deeply condescending assumption that can easily become habitual.

The Jewish state needs a proper sense of self-respect and a national project that it can confidently defend. It still has a chance, I believe, to embody an inspiring story that unites and motivates its own people and impresses fair-minded outsiders. Its national narrative can still be about an oppressed but peace-loving people who have built a decent society in the face of adversity. But that self-image depends upon just behavior. To be the light unto nations, Israel must be law-abiding, moral, democratic, and a force for peace. Then when someone questions (or seems to question) the nation’s legitimacy, Israelis can reply by emphasizing its goodness.

It seems to me that in the first thirty years of the Jewish state’s existence, it was more sinned against than sinning, and its accomplishments were remarkable. But once Israel became an occupying power with a substantial and restive subject population of Moslems and Christians, the national narrative became untenable. At that point, claims that the country was a “mistake” really started to sting. Some defenders took refuge in caustic arguments about the inferiority of “the Arabs.” Those claims would, at best, provide a poor foundation for national unity. Because it is a democracy committed to the rule of law, Israel must be just if it hopes to survive at all.