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teaching citizenship by teaching about guns

(Concord NH) While traveling up and down the East Coast and talking about civic education, I opened the New York Times to find that the gun industry uses the same language of “citizenship” that my colleagues and I employ:

The N.R.A. has for decades given grants for youth shooting programs, mostly to Boy Scout councils and 4-H groups, which traditionally involved single-shot rimfire rifles, BB guns and archery. Its $21 million in total grants in 2010 was nearly double what it gave out five years earlier.

Newer initiatives by other organizations go further, seeking to introduce children to high-powered rifles and handguns while invoking the same rationale of those older, more traditional programs: that firearms can teach “life skills” like responsibility, ethics and citizenship.

The people I’ve been hanging around with–from Georgia to New Hampshire–argue that deliberation and debate, community-service, and political participation teach “life skills,” ethics, and citizenship. We cite evidence that these organized forms of civic participation are related to psychological well-being, writing skills, academic success, and employment (among other good outcomes).

Is it possible that a shooting club could also bring such benefits? Before you say “no,” I would direct you to the National 4-H Shooting Sports program, which is billed as “Skills for Life–Activity for a Lifetime.” 4-H has one of the best overall civic development models in the country, and its Shooting Sports program aims to:

teach decision making, teamwork, self- discipline, self-confidence, and problem solving;

promote the highest standards of safety, sportsmanship, and ethical behavior;

encourage an appreciation and understanding of natural resources;

develop leadership abilities;

build character and willingness to assume citizenship responsibility;

furnish enjoyable, positive relationships with peers and adult instructors;

strengthen families through participation in lifelong recreational activities;

build awareness of related career opportunities.

(This all comes from a 4-H brochure entitled “Point Kids in the Right Direction.”) I am suspicious of efforts sponsored by the gun industry to get young children shooting (and buying weapons). According to the Times, an ad in Junior Shooters magazine says, “Who knows? Maybe you’ll find a Bushmaster AR-15 under your tree some frosty Christmas morning!” The motive is transparently commercial and the product is an assault rifle. But 4-H has a well-deserved reputation for actually developing young adults’ leadership and civic skills. And 4-H offers Shooting Sports.

I don’t think anyone conducts comparative research on shooting clubs versus community service programs. We don’t ask which is a better way to teach responsibility and life skills. Of course, the answer might depend on how one defines the goals. If “citizenship” is essentially about caring and non-violence, then community service will have a leg up. If “citizenship” includes a readiness to bear arms in defense of the country or the community, then gun clubs will have the edge. In that respect, the debate is essentially normative–concerning values.

Empirical claims are also relevant. 4-H asserts that Shooting Sports “teach decision making, teamwork, [and] self- discipline.” That could be true (or false). Scholars who investigate community service and political engagement are unlikely to study the possible benefits of gun clubs–or stop-and-frisk policies, or boot camps, or high school football. I assume this is because they do not like these activities very much and are not hoping to find evidence in their favor. Meanwhile, on a different moral planet, Americans who like guns are now positing empirical links between shooting clubs and “life skills.”

Studying things that you hope will work is fine–but your hope is as important as your data. You should have moral principles as well as causal hypotheses. I prize “discursive accountability”: saying what you value and why. I am frustrated by social science rhetoric that bypasses the basic moral questions, and also by the kind of discourse prevalent in the humanities that merely poses moral questions. As I have written in a different context, “Stop problematizing; say something.”

For instance, if you don’t like the idea of 10-year-olds shooting assault weapons, explain why not. Don’t depend on an empirical claim (shooting clubs could make some kids into mass murderers) unless that is your true objection to the shooting clubs. If it is your only objection, be prepared to drop it if the evidence disproves the empirical link. But if you dislike the idea of 10-year-olds with Bushmasters for some other reason, you should be able to say what that is.

Similarly, if you prefer community service, you should be able to justify that preference. I actually have trouble endorsing “service” per se; it rings too much of charity or apolitical altruism. I’d rather see the citizen as a nonviolent fighter for justice. But there is scant evidence that a struggle for justice promotes “life skills” or success on the job market. On the contrary, real political activists sometimes pay a heavy price. So empirical evidence won’t take us where we need to go; the deeper questions are inescapable:

What is a good life for you (or me)?
What is a just society?
How important is your own well-being in comparison to the pursuit of social justice?

Having made that long statement in favor of normative explicitness, I ought to practice what I preach. So, my view of gun clubs as civic education …

Hunting is sustainable and ethical as long as one hunts safely and humanely and uses the meat. Firing at targets is an acceptable pastime. Learning to use a deadly weapon may teach an important lesson about our capacity to kill and thus our profound need for self-control. Owning guns is deeply embedded in some American subcultures. Hunting and target-practice are properly social activities that often involve due respect for peers, adults, and nature. 4-H mentions careers in law enforcement and the National Guard; those are honorable and valuable callings.

On the other hand, in civilian life, it is almost never acceptable to employ either violence or the threat of violence. Even when threatened by a gun, using a gun is almost never the right response. The market for legal guns drives the production of guns used in murder and war. Thus anyone who learns to use a gun should learn not to use it on people. A gun program that presents itself as a citizenship program ought to include lessons about not firing on people and not purchasing or using a weapon more deadly than the legitimate purpose requires. Students should also learn the arguments for and against second-amendment rights and be encouraged to form their own independent views.

I am not saying that these features of civic education are absent in today’s gun clubs, only that they must be present if gun programs are to promote good citizenship. Again, a promising example may be the National 4-H Shooting Sports programs.

addressing climate change by executive action and what that means for constitutional principles

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(Atlanta) The Obama Administration is deciding whether to address climate change by regulating power plants, thus bypassing Congress. In addition to the environmental and economic impact of such regulations, there is also a question about whether governance by executive order is acceptable. That question belongs in a broader discussion about the “imperial presidency,” the dysfunctional US Congress, and the regulatory or administrative state. Although climate change arguably poses a fundamental threat to the republic—and although I hold our current president in high regard—the critique of executive power is an important topic. But instead of simply forming a preference for Congress versus the White House (or the EPA), we ought to consider fundamental principles. The following principles seem relevant:

Accountability: Officials who make momentous decisions should always be accountable to the American people, albeit with a time-delay, so that citizens have a chance to reflect and discuss. The EPA administrator is appointed and confirmed, not elected. The president is elected, but he faces no reelection after his second term. Thus the executive branch is not fully accountable. But very few members of Congress face competitive elections; and a vote (whether for Congress or the president) is a blunt instrument of accountability. We only get one vote per candidate even though he or she may hold hundreds of opinions and positions—and we can’t vote at all for the 434 representatives outside our district. Overall, I’d say the president won about as clear a policy mandate as a politician ever gets, although that may not be saying much. (Score this one a tie.)

Deliberation: The Constitution (Art. 1, sec. 1) vests all legislative (law-making) power in Congress. One important reason is that Congress can deliberate, considering a wide range of arguments and evidence before acting. It can thereby apply what Madison called “the mild voice of reason.”

Congress is not actually very deliberative; discussions within the EPA are generally more mild and reasonable than those on the floor of the House or Senate. Madison would not be too surprised: he acknowledged that the mild voice of reason … “is but too often drowned, before public bodies as well as individuals, by the clamors of an impatient avidity for immediate and immoderate gain.”

But here is an argument for legislative deliberation that does not depend on a high estimate of our legislators or their procedures. Let’s assume that issues like regulating carbon are essentially moral, concerning tradeoffs of goods and conflicting principles. The EPA is ill-equipped to deliberate about value questions. Civil servants lack the mandate and legitimacy to do so. Instead, decision-making within an administrative agency is drowned in empirical data and legal interpretation (two forms of expertise). Although current members of Congress may be ignorant of science and law, they do talk about values in public—and we can hold them accountable for their reasons as well as their decisions. To be sure, the president also articulated and defended values on the campaign trail; but Congress remains a better forum for deliberating values, even when it reaches bad conclusions. (Score this one for Congress.)

Checks and balances: The Constitution makes policies hard to change; usually, at least two separate branches must concur. For instance, Congress has the power to overrule EPA regulations by passing a bill and overriding Obama’s veto. This system of checks and balances is at least adequate and maybe excessive. I say that not just because I support certain forms of government activism that are routinely blocked. From a conservative perspective, too, the proliferation of veto points is an obstacle to reform, accountability, and good government. It gives special interests the power to extract narrow rewards for permitting necessary action. It rewards constant negotiation and procrastination on crucial issues. Thus I have to objection to the president’s taking bold unilateral action, subject to review by Congress and the courts. (Score this one for the President.)

Transparency: Both policies and the reasons for policies should be public and understandable. That is not only a precondition of accountability but also a form of discipline. As Kant and many others have argued, you can’t do many kinds of bad things if you must explain publicly what you are doing and why. Governance is sometimes transparent and sometimes obscure, whether the governing body is the Congress or a regulatory agency, and whether it acts or fails to act. Neither branch seems intrinsically more transparent than the other. If anything, the rules that require public notice and comment and the obligation of agencies to explain their reasoning to courts may make the EPA more transparent than the Congress. (Score a narrow point for the president.)

Rule of law: Laws should establish predictable frameworks for action. Laws should be general and durable. Changes and exceptions are necessary, but they are necessary evils. If revisions and exceptions come to predominate, the rule of law is lost and we have rule by rulemakers. Madison argued that mutable policy “poisons the blessings of liberty itself” (and I expand on his argument here).

Traditionally, this argument favored congressional lawmaking over administrative rulemaking. Passing landmark legislation through any Congress is difficult, and as a result, Congress addresses major topics only rarely. Each time it passes a landmark bill, it creates a structure that lasts for a long time. In contrast, federal agencies, the administrative courts and suboffices that they oversee, and the contractors they employee can constantly adjust their policies. Thus Congress seems, in principle, more likely to make genuine law.

But the actual performance of our Congress matters. Although the frequency with which it passes landmark legislation—liberal or conservative—has fallen dramatically since the 1960s, it has continued to govern and, indeed, to micromanage the rest of the government through constant amendments, resolutions, committee reports that accompany bills, and by larding regular tax and appropriation legislation with irrelevant riders (see this post for details). In contrast, a major new policy enacted by the EPA would be hard to change and might well create a durable framework within which power companies and their customers could plan and operate. (Thus: score one for the president.)

I count the final score as four in favor of administrative action and two against. Clearly, my judgments are contestable. But my main point is that bold executive action on climate change may be appropriate even if one is critical (as I am) of the regulatory state.

public speaking this winter

on modernity and the distinction between East and West

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I think the following information has tremendous, even global significance. It comes from David Shluman’s review of Pankaj Mishra’s From the Ruins of Empire:

As Velcheru Narayana Rao has eloquently shown for southern India, a form of awareness that can be characterized as modern emerged naturally and organically in the Telugu- and Tamil-speaking parts of the subcontinent toward the end of the fifteenth century.¹ It had nothing whatever to do with Western influence or the arrival of Vasco da Gama in Calicut in 1498. Highly original thinkers and poets, writing in all the languages of the south, discovered, or invented, a series of interlocking notions that together comprise a novel anthropology.

Thus we find, with particular prominence, the concept of an autonomous, subjective individual, responsible for his or her fate; a new theory of romantic love; the development of literary fiction as a privileged literary technique; a vogue for skepticism and realism, seen as informing the pragmatics of everyday life; the emergence of a cash economy and the conceptual revolution that rapid monetarization entails; the appearance of a bold, full-throated, unfettered female voice; and a new concept of nature as a rule-bound domain, separate from the human and amenable to disciplined observation and extrapolation. An innovative economic model of the mind, centered on the imaginative faculty, came to define the meaning of being human.²

With this shift in incorrigible assumptions there arose a new kind of state, which we call “Nayaka,” founded by a recently recruited elite of self-made men who had cut free from their ascriptive caste and family backgrounds and who saw themselves as free agents in a world of hitherto unknown opportunities.

I resist generalizations about “the West” because it encompasses too much diversity to be a meaningful category. What do such “Westerners” as Saint Teresa of Ávila, Oscar Wilde, Daniel Boone, Lenin, William Penn, Cole Porter, Thomas Edison, Martin Heidegger, Andy Warhol, Donald Trump, Emily Dickinson, and Hernán Cortés have in common? There is also, of course, tremendous internal diversity in other parts of the world–witness the ancient tradition of materialistic and hyper-individualistic thinkers from India, which is supposedly the home of mysticism and communitarianism.

Also, the borders of any area that we might call “the West” have been too vague and too porous for too long. Did you know that Menander I was a Buddhist Greek king of part of India in the second century BC, named after the Athenian comic playwright, whose coins bore Greek inscriptions on one side and Pali (the language of the Buddhist scriptures) on the other? He and successor kings, with names like Strato I and Theophilos, often depicted themselves as Greek gods in Buddhist poses and called themselves Dharmaraja or “King of the Dharma.” Was this the East or the West?

But I did used to think that the West could be distinguished from the rest of the world on one specific dimension. During the 19th century, in some parts of some European countries or countries settled predominantly by Europeans, two phenomena developed:

Modernity: a social order in which great masses of people are governed by laws and markets more than personal ties; in which few traditions and norms are seen as natural or inevitable and society is understood as an artifact; in which contract has replaced status as an organizing principle; in which individuals are primarily interested in their own personal attributes and rights; and in which technology pervasively mediates individuals’ relationship with nature.

Modernism: a set of intellectual and cultural movements that emerge in modernity, that describe modernity, and that bring modernity into the realm of ideas by renouncing aesthetic or intellectual traditions; instead, the ideal artist invents a new “contract” for each work.

Everywhere that modernity and modernism arrived, even in Paris and New York, they were perceived as new and problematic phenomena that caused distress. But the experience felt different in the West. This was also the age of European imperialism, of gunboats, missionaries, and the East India Company. And it was an age of race-consciousness, in which some people saw themselves as “white” and were seen that way by others. If you lived in a country where people were predominantly white and Christian (“the West”), then modernity and modernism seemed like indigenous changes. “We” were changing–for better or worse. If you lived elsewhere, modernity and modernism seemed to arrive with the imperialists, whether they came as conquerors or traders.

Thus modernists outside of Europe were pro-Western; anti-modernists were typically also anti-Western. In contrast, modernists in America or Europe (perhaps excepting Russia) were simply the progressives within those countries. The distinction was temporal in the West and spatial elsewhere. It was about “us” in the West and about “them and us” elsewhere.

Regardless of our views of modernism/modernity and of European global influence, we often equate the two. For instance, when a group of us viewed graphic art from the Johannesburg-based Artist Proof Studio last summer, the debate was whether young Black South African artists had been “Westernized.” See Leroye Malaton’s linotype “Zoey” below as an example:

Johannesburg is a modern city, and the contributors to Artist Proof Studio are modernists (or post-modernists, which I take to be just a stage in modernism). Authors like Shulman and Rao are asking us to drop the identification of modernity and modernism with the West. If the same social structures and intellectual responses also developed in Southern India in the 15th century, then they may have popped up in many other places as well. They are best understood not as Western inventions but as responses to a certain logic of development and scale. Then modernity and modernism are as much the property of Black South African artists as of (say) contemporary Germans. Neither invented modernity; both contribute to it; both must deal with it. Thinking that way would not solve any of the dilemmas of modern life, but it would make the dialogue healthier and more productive.

celebrating ten years of daily blogging

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On Jan. 8, 2003, I posted a first blog, having decided to try posting every work day. Ten years and 2,403 posts later (one per work day, without any exceptions that I can recall), I’m still at it, propelled by a weird obsession, a chronic case of cacoethes scribendi, and feedback from friends and strangers alike. I’m so obsessive about posting every day that you often could find me, ca. 2004, attaching my laptop to a payphone jack in an airport lobby so that I could upload before the day ended. (Smartphones and pervasive wifi have made connections easier.) Feedback now comes in all forms–comments on the blog itself or on my Facebook page, citations in journal articles, long, critical emails, and random remarks at social gatherings. I appreciate it all. I don’t seem to be running out of steam, nor has the genre died, so I imagine I’ll still be at it at least a few years hence.

Peter Levine

A Blog for Civic Renewal