Author Archives: Peter Levine

“Civic Renewal in America”

Philosophy & Public Policy Quarterly has just published my article on civic renewal. The pdf is available here. The article begins:

Our formal political system is coarse, unproductive, and short-sighted. Outside of formal politics, however, a robust movement is beginning to renew civic engagement in America. In this article, I define what I mean by “civic” work. I then describe some important current examples and contend that the whole field is growing stronger and more unified. (This independent analysis supports the results of a new book by Carmen Sirianni and Lewis A. Friedland entitled The Civic Renewal Movement.) Finally, I argue that this kind of work should matter to academic philosophers–and vice-versa.

This is my effort to pull together all my professional work since 2001 (leaving aside certain themes in moral philosophy that I’ve been writing about). Every section of the article appeared first on this blog, but the printed version is more coherent. The heart of the essay is a list of important, ongoing, practical experiments. Before I get to that list, I propose an argument for the importance of civic renewal, defined in a certain way. I then use network mapping software to show that the various experiments on my list are interconnected. At the end, in what amounts to a defense of my eccentric professional work, I argue that civic engagement is essential for the discipline of political philosophy at this point in its evolution.

immigration legislation: a prediction

The future is inscrutable, and I’m bad at prognostication, but I suspect that Congress will pass no major immigration bill in the near future. Clearly, the congressional leadership would like to pass a bill so that they can avoid attacks for “doing nothing.” However, the gap between the House and Senate looks huge. For most Republican Members of Congress, it’s preferable not to vote up or down on a final bill that will be a compromise and not fully satisfactory to anyone. It’s better to have two bills stuck in conference committee and to be able to attack one or both. This is a great opportunity for Republican candidates to distance themselves from the congressional leadership and the president.

The risk, from a Republican point of view, is that a stalled bill will continue to divide the caucus and anger some key constituencies (especially anti-immigrant activists and conservative Latinos) right through November. Nevertheless, that’s a smaller risk for them than having to pass a compromise bill without any Democratic votes. If they’re lucky, TV will show footage of National Guardsmen watching the southern border and expressing support for their new mission. (I don’t think deploying the Guard requires any legislation.) The GOP leadership can also try to make something else–homeland security or gay marriage–the legislative priority in the fall. Meanwhile Republican candidates can inveigh against their own leaders for failing to pass the legislation that they think their own constituents want. The result will be the status quo (plus a short-term deployment of the Guard).

the age of reason?

Does it make any sense to call the 18th century the Age of Reason? The primacy of reason had been argued long before then and would be defended later. Most (if not all) of the main techniques of rational analysis had been discovered earlier. And many of the era’s leading thinkers held mixed or even negative views about reason. For instance, Hume: “Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”

Nevertheless, the Age of Reason seems an apt title, as long as we define “reason” in a certain way. It strikes me that 1689-1788 was a time of judicious selectiveness, a period when the intellectual options were deliberately narrowed according to certain rational criteria.

In the seventeenth century, alternatives had proliferated. There were countless Protestant sects as well as new strains of Catholicism. The Scientific Revolution occurred, yet alchemy and astrology also flourished. Vital political ideologies ranged from royal absolutism to the communism of the Diggers, by way of constitutionalism, the Mayflower Compact, and the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell. Scholars had unearthed a great variety of ancient texts–not only the ones that we view today as “classics,” but also various Hellenistic, late-Roman, and early-Christian books that few people read any more. More Western scholars could manage Greek than at any time since the fall of the Roman Empire; some also learned Aramaic and Coptic. They not only admired Plato and Aristotle, but also Hermes Trismegistus, Dionysus the Psuedo-Areopagite and Zoroaster. Jesuit missionaries and others brought back the earliest reliable information about China, Japan, and India. See the Wikipedia entry on Athanasius Kircher for a sample of what an intellectually omniverous man could know ca. 1660.

To people of education and discretion a century later, it appeared that men like Kircher knew too much. Some of their erudition had been wasted on fruitless topics. The Age of Reason, if we can generalize about it at all, was a time for sorting out the heritage of early-modern Europe, distinguishing science from the occult, the literary canon from the rest of the library, mainstream religion from various radical sects, civilized people from barbarians, and reasonable political options from crazy ones.

Such consolidation was perhaps inevitable, but gradually a desire built up for broader and less temperate options. A rough definition of Romanticism could be: Views and ideas that would have been dismissed as “irrational” between the Glorious Revolution and the storming of the Bastille.

Congress vs. Facebook

Any American between the ages of 15 and 25 (or any parent or teacher thereof) has probably heard of Facebook, Friendster, and MySpace, the social networking services. Users create webpages with their pictures and self-descriptive information. Visitors can also leave notes and see links to the owners’ friends’ pages.

Such services are hugely popular; in fact my college students use Facebook instead of email. The general idea has lots of potential for other applications. For example, e-ssembly is a new social networking service explicitly designed to facilitate political discussion and organization.

However, via Mobilizing America’s Youth, I learned about HR 5319, the “Deleting Online Predators Act” of 2006. This bill would require schools that accept federal discounts for Internet service to:

prohibit access by minors without parental authorization to a commercial social networking website or chat room through which minors may easily access or be presented with obscene or indecent material; may easily be subject to unlawful sexual advances, unlawful requests for sexual favors, or repeated offensive comments of a sexual nature from adults; or may easily access other material that is harmful to minors.

I can’t imagine a way to block all “harmful” material on a social network. That means that the bill would force high schools to ban social networking software. Granted, the expansion of Facebook to high schools has provoked criticisms. Among other problems, there is some potential for stalkers to create accounts. However, young people have First Amendment rights and need to be able to use new modes of communication. For example, almost everyone agrees that teenagers should be allowed to use email and the web, even though both contain much harmful material. When it comes to social network software, schools can set their own rules and don’t need to be babysat by the federal government. Surely there must be a better way to prevent stalking than by banning social software in all the high schools of America.

the “silent disease” of technocracy: an illustration

Last week, Harry Boyte wrote on this blog: “Technocracy, spreading through society like a silent disease, presents itself as an objective set of truths, practices, and procedures. But it turns people into abstract categories. It decontextualizes problems from civic life. It privatizes the world and creates a pervasive sense of scarcity. It profoundly erodes a culture of equal respect.”

These are strong words, but I’d like to support and elucidate his position with an example. Today, powerful institutions and constituencies are concerned about high school dropouts. They address the dropout problem by trying to isolate discrete underlying causes. Consultants tell them that “reading proficiency in third grade [as measured by test scores] is the single strongest predictor of high-school dropout rate.” When the Business Roundtable and others notice this correlation, they increase the already intense pressure to improve third-grade reading scores. Under the No Child Left Behind Act, schools are required to make “adequate yearly progress” toward uniform success on reading exams. At the third grade, reading tests emphasize phonics and decoding skills. Therefore, teachers–encouraged by consultants and companies that sell tools for diagnosis and instruction–spend a great deal of instructional time teaching decoding skills, often using meaningless text for practice.

This is a perfect example of viewing students as bundles of problems, isolating discrete causes, and applying interventions developed by experts. However, pure phonics instruction probably does not work, even for the advertised purpose of raising reading scores at third grade. Learning to read also requires motivation, cultural knowledge, and comprehension skills. Even if current strategies did produce higher reading scores at age eight, they probably would not mitigate the high-school dropout problem. Although literacy at third grade and completion of high-school are correlated right now, that does not mean that the former causes the latter. Recent evidence finds that many high school students who drop out can manage the academic curriculum but are profoundly bored or alienated in school.

In a technocratic age, people are prone to identify pathologies and provide expert-driven remediation. However, in dealing with the high school dropout problem, we have a clear alternative. Proponents of “positive youth development” hold that adolescents are not incomplete adults who are prone to various pathologies (such as illiteracy and dropping out). Instead, by virtue of their energy, enthusiasm, and fresh outlook, adolescents have special contributions to make: aesthetic, spiritual, athletic, intellectual, and civic. By giving them opportunities to contribute, we actually reduce their odds of getting into trouble more than we would through prevention, surveillance, and discipline.

The research on positive youth development is not yet as strong as we might like. However, assume (on the basis of numerous impressive examples) that it would work better than the technocratic approach described above. Positive youth development would need experts: researchers, consultants, and others who would share accumulated knowledge. But it couldn’t be dominated by specialists. That’s because providing youth with positive opportunities requires local knowledge and voluntary support from across a community, including from youth themselves. No “off-the-shelf” package for community-engagement could possibly be sufficient.