(Providence, RI) At an Everyday Democracy board meeting here today, we met Barnaby Evans, the charismatic founder and leader of WaterFire Providence. Every couple of weeks, the downtown of this old city is transformed by the lighting of fires that float above the river. Boats bearing fires, flowers, and people also pass by, and the crowds are entertained and challenged by performances–music, dance, real funerals, libations, and other displays that evoke the myriad cultures of the state. Literally millions of people have observed and participated, and thousands help as volunteers.

I draw a few general lessons:

1. The success of WaterFire depends on a fruitful interaction between a visionary individual with a non-profit corporation, on one hand, and all the performers and active audience members who use his framework to express and exchange their own ideas. Without either the centralized control or the open space for public creativity, the whole would not work.
2. Important civic ideas (in this case, diversity and unity) can be communicated without words. WaterFire generally discourages narration and explanation in favor of movement, music, and symbol.
3. It is effective to draw people into a public space with a glamorous, marquee event and then expose them to much more challenging and interactive events and activities.
4. Attractive public spaces strengthen public life. The general degradation of American public buildings undermines civil society. But a beautiful public space can be created at relatively low cost through regular events. To be sure, downtown Providence had assets before Barnaby Evans founded WaterFire: 18th-century steeples and roofs on the skyline, and a tidal river in the heart of town. But downtown was generally considered ugly and deserted. Lighting the fires transformed the space immediately, and since then, the millions of visitors who have come to watch have encouraged private and public construction. Thus the durable infrastructure of downtown Providence is better because of the ephemeral fires.

Like the anti-fascist movement of the 1930s and the Civil Rights Movement of 1950-1965, a 21st century movement for democracy would need its own aesthetic and symbolic language. It would need more than programs and policies–also images, stories, and sounds. WaterFire is by no means the only example, but in its openness to mass public engagement, its commitment to volunteer labor (even if paid workers would be more efficient), its enthusiasm for cultural diversity, and its effort to create one common public space, it is exemplary.

I don’t study this topic closely, but I gather there’s a lot of research that asks survey subjects their ideology (on a scale from very liberal to very conservative) and sometimes whether they identify as Democrats or Republicans. They are also asked about their attitudes and opinions, and they may be exposed to stimuli, such as watching a treatment video versus a control video. The researchers investigate whether the liberals and conservatives in the sample seem to differ psychologically. So one reads results like this:

Research participants who held more culturally conservative attitudes were more likely to score higher on measures of the belief that knowledge is certain, dogmatism, need to evaluate, and fear of death. They also scored lower on need for cognition than did their less conservative counterparts. Moreover, participants who scored higher on cultural conservatism were more likely to exhibit dogmatic aggression.

I am concerned about the effects of this kind of research: predominantly liberal academics design studies (with control over all the subtleties) and announce unflattering generalizations about conservatives. If these generalizations are true and valid, so be it. But I also have my suspicions about validity. “Liberal” and “conservative,” after all, name very loose configurations of political ideologies that overlap and that vary profoundly over time. I’m told that today, self-identified liberals score higher on tolerance for ambiguity and take more pleasure in irony. I can imagine that the ironists of 1930 were the conservatives, whereas New Dealers were straight-arrows who wanted clear, linear, and explicit arguments and had no tolerance for the reactionary forces arrayed against them. It’s well known that many neoconservatives converted from Marxism, and those two character types seems consistent. As Emerson might say:

Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many–colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus. …  Temperament is the iron wire on which the beads are strung.

One temperament may unite neoconservatives and Marxists, but Burkeans of right and left seem to be be strung on their own wire. Ayn Rand wasn’t exactly an ironist, but Evelyn Waugh was, and he was arguably the true conservative. I’d propose that if we disaggregated the big blocs of conservatives and liberals for the purpose of psychological research, we’d get much more valid and interesting results.

I am reading Robert Sampson’s Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect, which William Julius Wilson calls “one of the most comprehensive and sophisticated studies ever conducted by a social scientist.” Sampson makes a strong case for considering neighborhoods (which are examples of settings or contexts) separately from individual people, and then looking empirically at how the two are related. That is a different approach from assuming that people are the only real or important social entities, whereas things like neighborhoods are mere amalgams of variables. His method also challenges the widespread application of medical treatment models to social issues.

Consider, for example, broccoli. Eating broccoli is a behavior of individuals. Its probability is influenced by an individual’s tastes, desires and beliefs; the availability, market demand, and cost of the vegetable; the alternatives; and prevailing social meanings. We observe a positive correlation between eating broccoli and health. The question is whether the broccoli causes the good health outcomes, when lots of other factors might be implicated. For instance, maybe people who eat broccoli are also people who smoke less. So we control for as many other factors as we can. Ideally, we experiment by giving a randomly selected treatment group broccoli and comparing them to a control group.

Neighborhoods are also observed to correlate very strongly with individuals’ outcomes. People are much healthier, wealthier, and safer in some neighborhoods than in others–in Stockholm as well as Chicago. So it is tempting to treat a neighborhood like broccoli, and examine its impact on residents while holding other factors constant. There are even randomized experiments in which people are given vouchers to move into new neighborhoods. But here are several reasons why neighborhoods are not like broccoli:

• Neighborhoods are defined relatively. Everyone could eat broccoli, but everyone cannot live in a given city’s most fashionable neighborhood. If people were randomly assigned to move into the most fashionable (or hippest, or most dangerous) neighborhood, it would lose its character.
• Neighborhoods are connected. If you switch from French fries to broccoli, no connection is created between the two vegetables. But if lots of people move from Chinatown to Flushing (Queens), the two communities are changed by means of the important new links between them.
• Neighborhoods are spatially related. If Neighborhood B lies between A and C, then residents of B are probably affected by conditions in A and C–unless, for example, a gigantic Interstate separates B from C. Also, A and B may both belong to a larger district that excludes C. One cannot tell the relationships among neighborhoods without mapping them spatially (whereas one can see which vegetables people eat by examining individuals’ choices).
• Neighborhoods are influenced by the reasons people live in them. Broccoli is broccoli whether your mother makes you eat it or you love it stir-fried with chillies. But some neighborhoods are open destinations of choice–everyone who can afford the rent is welcome, and that is part of their charm. Others are racially segregated or deeply traditional, so that an outsider would feel uncomfortable or unsafe moving in. The “effects” of a neighborhood on its residents are often related to the way that people come to live in it.
• Neighborhoods matter intrinsically. Regardless of its effect on residents, we might like to preserve Greenwich Village (or The Mission, or Koreatown). The neighborhood’s survival does not trump human concerns, but it adds an extra concern. In contrast, nutritionists don’t care about broccoli except as means to promote health.
• Perceptions of neighborhoods linger even when their populations or features change, creating lasting effects. Sampson finds, for example, that perceptions of neighborhoods’ disorder in Chicago are weakly related to actual disorder yet predict poverty rates years later, as people choose to relocate and invest in neighborhoods they perceive as orderly. (Unfortunately, both Black and White observers use the proportion of the population that is Black, rather than any objective signs of disorder, to decide which neighborhoods are disorderly.)

One of Sampson’s great contributions is to help develop ways of directly assessing contexts, not merely individuals’ perceptions or experiences of their environments. He and his colleagues call that science ecometrics, although I find that the same word has also been claimed for a branch of ecological economics.

(Those thoughts are loosely inspired by Sampson, not meant as a paraphrase.  See also “more to life than individual attributes.”)

Carolyn J. Lukensmeyer is Executive Director of the National Institute for Civil Discourse and founder and former President of AmericaSpeaks.  I have read the manuscript of her forthcoming book entitled Bringing Citizen Voices to the Table: A Guide for Public Managers. She summarizes the book in a Nonprofit Quarterly article entitled “The Case for Citizen Engagement,” writing,

What if millions of Americans regularly came together to deliberate about a wide range of critical national issues like health care, immigration, and education?  What if the recommendations they made actually guided the actions of our national policy-makers?  … We would be a credible democracy.

Bridget Draxler reports from the annual conference of Imagining America: Artists & Scholars in Public Life. She describes exemplary college-based programs that combine real community engagement, liberal arts education, and digital technology.

Harry Boyte, director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg College and a leading democratic theorist, argues in the Huffington Post that jobs programs can be turned into opportunities for public work. He cites Melissa Bass’s forthcoming book on the history of national service (which I have also had a chance to read in manuscript). As Boyte says,

The [Civilian Conservation Corps] also helped the nation to regain a view of government as an empowering partner — not simply “for” the people, delivering services, but “of” the people and “by” the people,” in Lincoln’s terms. … As people made a commonwealth of public goods, they became a commonwealth of citizens.

Citizens deliberating and interacting with public administrators, students making meaning in partnership with local residents, and paid workers seeing themselves as building the commonwealth–these are three compatible visions of civic renewal offered at an ugly moment. If they’re not inspiring enough, check out Democracy Prep’s fourth graders singing “vote for somebody” in this article that reports our recent study of civic education.

(Chicago) I have the habit of saving all non-spam emails and preserving my old email archives whenever I get a new computer. I saved 22 incoming emails from 1994, and 17,926 so far from 2012. It took just five minutes to graph the trend in email volume, best shown by the number received each day for each 365-day year:

(I may have lost some emails from 2008, when we moved from University of Maryland to Tufts; and 2012 is a projection based on 10 months.)

I show this graph not to make any special point about myself. I suspect both the trend and the total numbers are pretty typical. The growth rate is not exponential (I checked), but it is rapid. I get eight times more email than I did a decade ago. We’ve reached a point where it’s not unusual to receive 6-8 emails that are worth reading and saving per hour during a work day. If that trend continues–hypothetically–then by 2022, I’ll be getting one substantive email per minute, 24 hours per day, 365 days per year.

It’s worth asking whether this is a good way to live.