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Rebecca, Woman of Africa

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Here, in a thick wood of scrub pine, blackberry, ivy, goldenrod, and crumbling stone walls, at the very edge of America, where “you hear the grating roar / Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,” is a plaque on which hikers pile stones and sea glass, as on the tomb of a Jewish sage or martyr. The plaque reads:

REBECCA WOMAN OF AFRICA

Born in Africa and enslaved in Chilmark, she married Elisha Amos, a Wampanoag man. She was the mother of Nancy Michael. Rebecca died a free woman in this place in 1801.

We come here very often, and I like to think of Rebecca and Amos clinging together on windy nights, whispering their true names, saying, “Ah, love, let us be true / To one another!,” safe at the tip of the continent, on a spot that nobody else wanted but the gulls and the cormorants.

economic benefits of civic engagement

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Last year, CIRCLE and partners released a study showing that US communities that had stronger “civic health” were better able to withstand the effects of the recent recession. Since then, my colleagues and I have been working with the National Conference on Citizenship (NCoC) to explore that connection much more rigorously and comprehensively. Our new study is in production and will be released at the NCoC’s 67th annual conference in Philadelphia on Sept. 14.

Meanwhile, here is an interesting study consistent with our findings and distinctive because of its method. Eagle, Macy, and Claxton analyzed the actual phone calls and other electronic communications in Britain. Instead of using a poll or other sampled data, they actually analyzed all 368,000,000 contacts. They found that the diversity of communications networks in a given community strongly predicted its economic welfare. They say, “Although the causal direction of this relation—whether network diversity promotes opportunity or economic development leads to more diversified contacts—cannot be established, social network diversity seems to be at the very least a strong structural signature for the economic development of a community. ”

In our forthcoming work, we do investigate the causal direction. We argue that civic engagement strengthens networks and that networks improve economic performance.

Philosophy as a Way of Life (on Pierre Hadot)

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Pierre Hadot (1922-2010) was a careful empirical scholar of ancient thought and a clear and modest writer, yet he defended a conception of philosophy that was exciting enough to attract the enthusiastic support of Michel Foucault. I’m becoming directly acquainted with Hadot for the first time via a collection entitled Philosophy as a Way of Life, edited by Arnold Davidson (1995). These are some of Hadot’s most important points:

In the Greco-Roman world, a philosopher was someone who lived the good life. What made a life fully good was a matter for debate, but it was widely understood to involve equanimity-in-community (borrowing a phrase from Owen Flanagan): that is, inner peace or control over one’s own emotions combined with active and ethical engagement with other people. Another essential element of the good life was freedom from error. That didn’t mean full understanding, which was impossible, but the avoidance of logical, scientific, and moral mistakes.

A philosopher need not develop or hold original views or arguments. Socrates was the model sage of all the ancient schools, and he didn’t even write anything, let alone teach positive doctrines of his own. His life–including his dialogic relationships with other Athenians, and the equanimity he displayed on the point of death–was what made him a philosopher.

All the ancient schools developed spiritual exercises designed to train the practitioner to be more philosophical. These exercises included, for instance, describing emotionally fraught situations from the dispassionate perspective of nature or science, and learning to focus on the living present, because it is all that really exists, while the past and future are  sources of irrational emotions. Debating abstract issues with other people was yet another spiritual exercise. While participating in an argument, one took the propositional content seriously, but the point of the dialogue was to improve the participants’ personalities and their relationships.

The philosophical writing that comes down to us, then, wasn’t what the ancients called “philosophy.” It was just the offshoot of one of their philosophical exercises: abstract disputation. Writing was not a satisfactory substitute for actual dialogue, which must involve real people who were friends as well as debating partners. All the schools disparaged as “sophistic” the view that a text could suffice. Nevertheless, the philosophical writing that survives is excellent, especially if one reads it with proper attention to genre, purpose, and form. For example, Marcus Aurelius didn’t report his actual mental states or try to advance true and original propositions. Instead, he recorded standard Stoic moral exercises, beginning with his daily thanks to each of his moral teachers (book 1), and ending with a reminder that all famous men end as “smoke and ash and a tale” (book 12). He listed his own teachers and the exemplary men by name because he would actually visualize each of these people in turn. Those were just two spiritual exercises for which the Meditations was a notebook.

Hadot argues that the ancient conception of philosophy as an integrated way of life shifted, during the Middle Ages, into philosophy as argumentative writing about abstract topics. Early Christians fully understood the ancient ideal, but they split it into two parts. Monks borrowed, developed, codified, taught, and described the spiritual exercises of the ancient schools. The life of a hermit, monk, or friar became “philosophical,” in the ancient sense. Meanwhile, the task of reasoning about logic, metaphysics, and ethics was assigned to universities and understood as a tool for improving theology, supplying “the latter with the conceptual, logical, physical, and metaphysical materials it needed.” Hadot observes,

One of the characteristics of the university is that it is made up of professors who train professors, or professionals who train professionals. Education was thus no longer directed toward people who were to become educated with a view to becoming fully developed human beings, but to specialists, in order that they might train other specialists. … In modern university philosophy, philosophy is obviously no longer a away of life or form of life unless it be the form of life of a professor of philosophy [pp. 270-1].

Although Hadot admires the ancient conception of philosophy and argues that it has been forgotten in the Continental European university, he is not given to pessimism and cultural nostalgia. Matthew Sharpe writes,

Unlike many of his European contemporaries, Hadot’s work is characterized by lucid, restrained prose; clarity of argument; the near-complete absence of recondite jargon; and a gentle, if sometimes self-depreciating, humor. While Hadot was an admirer of Nietzsche and Heidegger, and committed to a kind of philosophical recasting of the history of Western ideas, Hadot’s work lacks any eschatological sense of the end of philosophy, humanism, or the West. Late in life, Hadot would report that this was because he was animated by the sense that philosophy, as conceived and practiced in the ancient schools, remains possible for men and women of his era: “from 1970 on, I have felt very strongly that it was Epicureanism and Stoicism which could nourish the spiritual life of men and women of our times, as well as my own.”

Hadot argues that the ancient tradition of philosophy has lingered among influential writers deeply schooled in Hellenistic thought: Montaigne, Spinoza, Goethe, the young Marx, Nietzsche, Bergson, and Wittgenstein, among others. And it has the potential to flourish again today.

I don’t know whether Hadot addressed the vexing questions that arise for me in reading his work on the ancients: Should philosophy be a way of life? How that would be practiced? By whom would it be taught? And what it would mean for the evidently fruitful and impressive enterprise of modern academic philosophy?

I would be most excited by a revival if it took seriously all three parts of the ancient ideal: equanimity or inner peace; avoidance of error; and ethical political participation. The last is easiest to overlook in an era of psychotherapy, when the “self-help” section of the bookstore is full of ancient philosophical works and modern popularizations, but we don’t seriously study how to improve the world. Hadot ends,

This concern for living in the service of the human community , and for acting in accordance with justice, is an essential element of every philosophical life. In other words, the philosophical life normally entails a communitary [sic] engagement. This last is probably the hardest part of carry out. The trick is to maintain oneself on the level of reason, and not allow oneself to be blinded by political passions, anger, resentments, or prejudices. To be sure, there is an equilibrium–almost impossible to achieve–between the inner peace brought about by wisdom, and the passions to which the sight of the injustices, sufferings, and misery of mankind cannot help by give rise. Wisdom, however, consists in precisely such an equilibrium, and inner peace is indispensable for efficacious action [p. 274].

Cf. some of my own thoughts: “happiness and injustice are different problems“; “If you achieved justice, would you be happy?“; “three truths and a question about happiness” (inspired by Buddhism rather than stoicism); “Must you be good to be happy?” (exploring some relevant psychological evidence); and “the importance of the inner life to moral philosophy” (arguing that the main schools of modern ethics neglect equanimity).

Cathy Cohen’s Democracy Remixed

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Perspectives on Politics (vol. 10, no 3, Sept. 2012) includes a symposium on Cathy J. Cohen’s book, Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics. Cohen studies young African Americans’ political thinking at a time when they are widely stereotyped and disparaged–by Black leaders, among others–for their personal behavior. Cohen explores the political relevance of their attitudes toward sexuality and other conventionally “personal” issues. She uses interviews and surveys to convey the often nuanced and sophisticated ideas of Black youth.

I organize my own review* around the axis of structure versus agency, beginning thus:

In 2009, in the city of Chicago where Cathy J. Cohen lives and teaches, at least 290 school children were shot. Most of the people on both ends of the guns were young African Americans. If the fundamental responsibility of a government is protect citizens’ lives, then such violence puts the very legitimacy of the regime in question, to say nothing of the human tragedy that each gunshot represents.

An epidemic of violence also raises a contested and troubling question of responsibility, or (in more academic terms) of agency versus structure. From one perspective, firing a gun at another young person is a choice. The vast majority of young black Chicagoans would never do such a thing. If citizens see the perpetrators of gun violence as having agency, they are likely to blame them for their choice and respond with surveillance and punishment. They may also be tempted to direct moral disapproval at the group to which they mentally assign the perpetrator: in this case, young African Americans. Dropping out of high school, using illegal drugs, and having premarital sex can also be seen as condemnable individual choices requiring discipline, deterrence, and moral suasion.

Structural explanations, in contrast, look to large social and institutional factors—not only intentional policies but also examples of inaction or inertia. From this perspective, the huge and lightly regulated market for hand guns; the poor performance of urban public schools and police; the strikingly low ratio of adults to children in some poor urban neighborhoods;1 the vast prison system that provides economic benefits to companies, employees, and communities; the persistence of racial discrimination in labor markets; the lack of after-school opportunities and programs; the broad public glorification of violence; and even the disappearance of 650,000 manufacturing jobs in the Chicago metropolitan area since 1960—all would rank as background causes of teen violence.

The African American youth in Cohen’s book hold complex and self-conscious ideas about agency versus structure in their own lives. I argue in my review for the importance of a third topic: political agency. This means neither making individual choices nor being affected by large forces, but rather shaping the world together,  intentionally and collectively. Cohen promotes political agency by giving voice to young Black Americans in her writing and via the Black Youth Project, which she runs. I end with a call for more thinking about large-scale policies that would promote youth political agency.

Carmen Sirianni’s review is the most critical. In this short blog post, I don’t want to summarize his critique or the relevant aspects of Cohen’s book (both are too complicated), but this example gives a flavor of the dispute. “Obama thinks that passing saggy pants laws [is] a ‘waste of time,’ but, he continues, ‘having said that, brothers should pull up their pants’ (p. 142) as a sign of respect for their mothers, grandmothers, and other people in general.” Here are two ways to think about that case:

  1. African American youth are already subject to damaging stereotypes from all kinds of authority figures, and the last thing they need is for the first Black president to pile on. His rhetoric of personal responsibility makes it almost impossible for others to get a hearing for structural explanations of things like teen violence. Worse, Obama represents the neoliberal, carceral state. He should promote justice before he tells anyone else how to dress.
  2. Although how high you wear a belt is an arbitrary matter, setting norms is generally an appropriate role for leaders. Norms strengthen communities. Teenagers are going to break norms. That is no reason for panic, but also no reason for leaders to abandon a paternalistic stance toward children. Generations negotiate their roles through just such struggles.

These are simplified positions that may not reflect Cohen’s or Sirianni’s views accurately, but they suggest the terrain of an important argument.

In my review, I try to convey some of the emotional impact of this book, but Taeku Lee probably puts it better. He writes:

On a very personal note, the net result is that Cohen pulls off something uncommon at the hands of a scholar (especially a political scientist): her work evokes emotions. I do not mean here the eruptions of ire, petulance, and provocation that often result when one academic finds the work of another to be inept, polemical, or mean-spirited. Rather, in reading the book, one cannot help but feel the sense of hope and despair, anger and pride that comes from kindling the bonds of human connection. Cohen achieves this by being unafraid of making a mess: She willingly mixed the politics of her personal convictions with the science in her data analysis; she looks for agency where others might be content to find only structure; she sees in the dimly lit margins shadows of seldom heard, yet at times luminous, voices. In short, she brilliantly performs the dictates of a remix: to breath new life into a tune by sampling fresh beats and, by doing so, extending that tune’s relevance and improving the fidelity of its original aspirations.

*Peter Levine (2012). Race in America. Perspectives on Politics, Volume 10, Issue 03, September 2012 pp 757-760 http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?aid=8667311