(Clinton, TN) I spent yesterday in the office of a Washington, DC law firm, which Streetlaw was borrowing for a board retreat. We sat around a marble table in suits and ate delicious catered food for lunch. Today, I’m at Alex Haley’s former farm in Clinton, Tennessee, now owned by the Children’s Defense Fund and used as a meeting site. I’m here for another retreat: this one convenes community activists, mostly people of color, and mostly young. There are rocking-chairs on the porch and pictures of people like Maya Angelou on their visits here. And tomorrow I’ll be in Denver for a conference of the American Association of Colleges & Universities. The setting will be a big Marriott, and most of the attendees will be professors or college administrators.

There are some consistent themes–education; seeing young people as citizens–and some commonalities in the formats of these meetings. For example, we take turns talking; we don’t sing or shout. But you could write a book about the differences.

It’s very common in psychology (and in all the disciplines influenced by psychology) to construct scales that measure mental constructs. We can’t directly observe confidence, responsibility, spatial awareness, or any type of intelligence. But such mental constructs can exist even if they can’t be observed–unless the behaviorists were right, but they seem mostly to have disappeared.

The standard psychological method is to generate a list of survey questions (or checklists to be used by observers) that seem to measure some aspect or component of the mental construct that’s being studied. These items are said to have “face validity”–on their face, they are relevant to the mental construct of interest. These questions are then asked of a sample of people. The questions that cluster together statistically are kept; the outliers are discarded. The list is reduced to a small set of questions that can explain most of the variance in the results. Often, items can be separated into different categories that do not correlate with each other. Then one concludes that the mental construct actually includes several underlying “factors.”

I see the value of doing this, in part because I do believe in empirically identifiable mental constructs that aren’t directly observable. However, as a philosopher, my instinct is to see decisions about “face validity” as basically value judgments. For example, if we listed the behaviors and attitudes that make someone an “engaged citizen,” the reason to include each item would be our belief that the particular attitude or behavior was good. Voting is on CIRCLE’s list of civic indicators, and to defend that choice, we owe an argument about why people should vote. Whether voting correlates with volunteering or protesting may be interesting, but it isn’t necessarily the point. Either voting is part of civic engagement, or it isn’t; the reasons have to do with our sense of how a society should function.

My concern, in short, is that psychological research may look more scientific than it is, and the really important questions may be value-judgments buried at an early stage of the empirical method.

Senator John Edwards has announced a platform called “The One Democracy Initiative: Returning Washington to Regular People.” Under the heading of “open and democratic media,” Edwards endorses net-neutrality rules and laws against concentrated media ownership. He proposes full public financing of Congressional elections, which I believe is the only way to reduce the power of special interests. He also proposes a ban on campaign contributions from lobbyists and a ban on bundling. Under the heading of election reform, he calls (among other things) for a universal system of paper ballots.

Overall, the Senator has chosen to adopt the strongest versions of the ethics and “good government” proposals that have been considered since Watergate by Public Citizen, Common Cause, the League of Women voters, and their allies. I defended all these ideas in my 1999 book, The New Progressive Era (although I talked about common-carrier rules instead of “net neutrality”). It’s intriguing to imagine what would happen to Edwards’ platform in Congress. Of course, for him to win the presidency, there would first have to be a pretty profound shift in the political landscape.

Meanwhile, Edwards calls for national deliberation to take place every two years on a different issue. He would use a combination of technology and face-to-face meetings to involve one million citizens. Edwards cites AmericaSpeaks and the November Fifth Coalition as sources for his “Citizen Congress.”

It’s a strong program, but there’s room for other candidates to match Edwards or to make forays into other aspects of a “democracy agenda”–for instance, expanding the opportunities for national and community service, improving civic education, rethinking the federal civil service, and revising No Child Left Behind so that citizens can get more involved with their schools.

[See also Archon Fung’s op-ed in the Boston Globe.]

I recently read Brat Farrar, a good old mystery by Josephine Tey. I suspect she had very strong class prejudices, but that didn’t prevent me from enjoying the novel. It did make me think about why people who make their living from renting land should have higher status than everyone else–at least in the England of 1950, and perhaps even today. Renting agricultural land doesn’t seem like a particularly distinguished or refined way of life.

I think this is the reason. In the early middle ages, land wasn’t really owned. It wasn’t a commodity. Instead, some people were assigned to work certain parcels of land, and others were supposed to guard it. King Alfred, in his very loose translation of Boethius (book 2, xvii), wrote that the King “must have men of prayer, men of war, and men of work.” The men who worked were peasants, expected to toil on the land that their fathers’ had tilled. The men who fought were equestrian soldiers–knights. The local knight was the lord of the manor. He had a lord who was a noble, and that noble had a lord who was the king. Each had different roles in wartime. The best analogy is a modern military structure, not a system of private property. This made sense because the peoples of Europe had been nomadic: mobile fighting groups rather than property-owners.

As the middle ages progressed, a new class silently arose: people who made their living from trade. They became wealthy and powerful, but they didn’t fit the social theory of feudalism that King Alfred had presumed. In the 15th-century chronicles (e.g., Froissart), all non-nobles are “villains,” even though the most powerful people of his day, arguably, were the merchants.

Between the 15th and the 19th century, the feudal system of agriculture transformed into a system of private property. The lord of the manor became its owner, and his title to his land was just like the title to his townhouse or his horse. He could sell it at will. The peasant became a renter. The greater nobility lost its special function and became large landowners. Only the monarch retained his traditional role as the lord and protector, but not owner, of the land.

But the traditional social scheme lingered remarkably–it may even linger today. Contemporaries of Shakespeare and Jane Austen could take money that they earned in trade and buy land to rent out. Their children, who grew up only on the proceeds of rent, were gentry. They were “men of war” instead of “men of work,” except that no fighting was really necessary any more.

In Brat Farrar, the family occupies a manor house that they have inherited from centuries of direct ancestors. They cannot afford to live their comfortably middle-class life on their rent alone. They seem not much wealthier than their tenants, one of whom buys a better horse than they can afford. They supplement their income with a small business. But still, even in 1950, they are fully respectable because some of their cash comes from renting land.

I gave the lunchtime plenary speech at the annual service learning research conference on Saturday. I have pasted the text “below the fold.” (Click “continue reading” to continue reading the speech.) I argued that proponents of service-learning–and of other forms of youth civic work–need to engage the national policy debate. One way is have influence is to generate the kind of research that may impress particular categories of national leaders, such as those who really care about equity in education. The other way is to provide an alternative model of politics and thereby change the way that the national political debate unfolds.

A valid criticism of my speech is that I gave too little attention to the hard and successful work that has already been done to build service-learning as a bottom-up movement. It has spread from school to school; and as it had grown (with minimal federal support), the quality has probably improved. However, I believe that the movement remains limited and vulnerable without more favorable national policies–and no one but us can influence policymakers.

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