Category Archives: civic theory

a philosophy of civic renewal

In lieu of a blog post by me, here is a profile of me by my colleague Luke Phelan. It is also a brief summary of the more philosophical and theoretical aspects of my forthcoming book–and an excuse to share the book’s cover. …

“Strategy is as intellectually challenging as empirical research and moral argument, but it’s much less studied, taught, and integrated,” said Peter Levine, Tisch College director of research and director of CIRCLE.

Levine lays out his vision for the importance of strategy in his book, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: The Promise of Civic Renewal in America, forthcoming from the Oxford University Press. He spoke about his ideas at the Philosophy & Civic Engagement symposium. The symposium was organized to celebrate Levine’s recent appointment as the Lincoln-Filene Professor of Citizenship and Public Service and his secondary appointment as a research professor in the School of Arts & Sciences philosophy department.

“Broadly, civic engagement is in decline,” said Levine. “We’ve lost the structures that recruit, educate, and permit people to engage effectively as citizens.”

However, Levine says we also live in a period of remarkable civic innovation.

“There are at least one million Americans at work right now on sophisticated and locally effective forms of civic engagement,” he said. “People are motivated to work together on public problems, but policies frustrate the best kinds of engagement. What’s needed are strategies to change those policies.”

Philosophy, particularly moral philosophy, has a special role in shaping those strategies and defining good citizenship.

“Moral concepts are indispensable,” said Levine. “Test scores are a good example. Research might show that smaller class sizes raise test scores, but it can’t tell you if those tests measure something valuable, or if the cost to hire more teachers and build more classrooms is worth paying, or if the state has the right to raise the necessary revenues. Those are value judgments, and civic engagement makes our value judgments wiser.”

Levine argues that the fundamental reason for the kinds of civic engagement that Tisch College promotes and that CIRCLE studies is to strengthen Americans’ moral reasoning and our capacity to solve social problems.

“Civil society functions best when many kinds of people bring their experiences into a common conversation, and then take what they’ve learned back to their work, in an iterative cycle,” he said. “If individuals constantly rely on the same small number of foundational beliefs, it quickly becomes impossible for them to converse or engage. It’s easier to talk to someone with many interests, commitments, and ideas, because each of those is a point of contact, like an organic molecule with lots of surfaces where other molecules can bond.”

Rather than understanding moral reasoning as a linear sequence of steps, Levine envisions it as a network that connects nodes of concrete data and abstract values in webs of associations and configurations, tied together by implications and influences.

For example, you may have a node that “love is good.” However, love can be wrong or can lead to tragedy, as in Romeo and Juliet. Levine argues that our minds are flexible enough to manage the complex meanings and associations that come with value-heavy terms like “love.” We have the capacity to route around conflicting assumptions.

“A strong network does not rest on a single node,” he said. “Its many pathways allow many routes from one node to the next. Yet, in real functioning networks, all the nodes do not bear equal importance: the most vital 20% carry 80% of the traffic. That’s true for the Internet, the brain, and, I think, civil society. A moral mind works like a robust network.”

Levine thinks that this network model of the moral mind captures both how deeply interconnected we are, and how social our processes of reasoning are.

“Each person’s network is at least slightly different from everyone else’s,” he said, “but any two networks share at least some of the same nodes. So we can think of the whole community as one elaborate interpersonal moral network, full of tension as well as consensus. Civic engagement is a process of enriching and enhancing that shared network.”

For Levine, civic engagement is most valuable when deliberation (talking and learning about public matters) is connected to work and making things, particularly collaborative efforts that produce things of public value. Talking and working together forges relationships that he calls “scarce but renewable sources of energy and power.”

We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For assembles evidence that this kind of engagement, although waning in America, actually solves social problems. The book concludes with strategies for civic renewal.

putting facts, values, and strategies together: the case of the Human Development Index

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Amartya Sen, the Nobel laureate economist and philosopher who spoke recently at Tufts, helped design the Human Development Index, which ranks all countries on a single list based on life expectancy at birth, years of schooling, and gross national income per capita. Sen seemed a bit chagrined that he is famous for this. The work took him only a few hours, he said. The formula was extremely simple. He called it a “vulgar index,” because it lumps together diverse variables in a potentially misleading way. He said that he agreed to do it mainly at the urging of his very old friend Mahbub-ul-Haq, who believed that an ordinal ranking for all nations would win media attention and help to undermine the tyranny of GNP growth, too often treated as the only measure of development. Mahbub-ul-Haq was correct, because the HDI gets global attention and has even been a central issue in some countries’ election campaigns. A set of separate indicators wouldn’t get much notice.

In my own small way, I have tried to do something similar by creating the Index of National Civic Health (INCH) for the National Commission on Civic Renewal in the 1990s, which led to the Civic Health Index, which continues today. Our idea was to challenge the dominance of economic growth by adding a measure of civic engagement that could also be tracked. Like the HDI, it was a “vulgar” measure, designed for subversive purposes–or, to put our objective more positively, to provoke a good discussion.

One interpretation of such efforts would go like this: There are facts about the world. A full picture of the world would be very complicated, but we can strive for it. Once we have “the data,” we can choose what to emphasize and whether to use positive or negative adjectives to describe reality. That is a matter of imposing values, opinions, or preferences on the data. Finally, once we have an informed opinion about what to do, we can try to change the world by persuading other people to agree with us. Creating an index is an example of a rhetorical tactic that may prove persuasive. This, then, is the “positivistic” model:

facts > interpreted by opinions > transmitted by strategies > changes in the world

I assume Sen would reject this model. He knows that one can reason about values as well as data, so selecting and morally evaluating information is not just a matter of imposing subjective preferences or opinions on reality. For instance, it is right to see an increase in lifespan as a good thing (all else being equal). Further, what we call “data” is always imbued with norms. Education, for example, is a component of HDI–but what is education? Years spent in school looks like a hard number, but no one believes it’s worth measuring unless it is a proxy for education, rightly understood. In fact, you can’t even tell what counts as “school” without some basic value-judgments. Defining education requires a moral theory of the human good.

Sen knows all of the above, and I interpret his model like this:

reasoning about facts and values (taken together) >> transmitted by strategies >> changes in the world

For instance, Sen reasoned for a long time about human development–a rich and complicated topic–before Mahbub-ul-Haq gave him a strategy to influence the public debate: generating a “vulgar index.” The index changed the world, at least modestly.

I would push the critique of positivism further. A moral theory is no good unless it has beneficial strategic consequences. We can announce that everyone should be equal, but unless we have a plan for making everyone more equal without producing a tyranny or chaos, that statement is worse than no theory at all. Further, the information and ideas (including moral ideas) with which we reason come from somewhere. They are produced by people and institutions. By communicating strategically, we influence the process that produces the data and arguments with which we reason. Thus I would connect all of the following with two-headed arrows: facts, values, and strategies. And I think people in influential positions, like Amartya Sen, should be held accountable for having good strategies, not just good values and data.

mapping the civic movement in higher education

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Last week, at a conference of scholars interested in the civic mission of colleges and universities, I offered some general remarks about how academia can help strengthen democracy. I said something like this:

Although it’s a complex story, we do not live in a good era for democratic government in the US. Whether measured by levels of participation, citizens’ satisfaction with the political system (broadly defined), gaps in engagement and power by social class, the actual performance of public institutions, or norms of public reason and civility–most of the trends do not look good.

But we do live in an era marked by three potentially exciting developments that are relevant to the conference.

First, the last 30 years have seen interesting and important developments in democratic theory, broadly defined. Civic republicanism, deliberative democracy, communitarianism, sophisticated new versions of populism, and cosmopolitanism are some of the intellectual movements that have real momentum.

I am particularly interested in intellectual movements that are related to practical experiments. I entered this broad field 25 years ago by studying the deliberative democratic philosophy of Jürgen Habermas in a sophomore seminar and then spending a summer at the Kettering Foundation in Dayton, OH. Kettering was then organizing the deliberative events that are still known as National Issues Forums. I am not sure whether Habermas is personally all that interested in such practical experiments, but the next generation of deliberation scholars definitely is interested, and the exchanges between practice and experience have been fruitful.

I’d like to take a moment to recognize one particular stream of democratic theory that is exemplary, that has influenced several of us at the conference, and that deserves recognition today because we recently lost its founders, Elinor Ostrom and Vincent Ostrom, in rapid succession. Lin Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in economics for revealing how, when, and why groups of people overcome collective action problems to manage common resources. A definition of good citizenship is implicit in her theory: the good citizen is a person who co-manages the commons. That ideal contrasts at least slightly with some other worthy definitions, such as the citizen as an altruistic volunteer, a judicious decision-maker, a or fighter for justice.

Because Lin found that people regularly succeed as good citizens, but only under certain conditions, her theory had profound implications for public policy, for education, and for the strategies of reformers and activists. For her whole life, she was engaged in dialogues and collaborations with all those kinds of people, in her classroom, in Bloomington (where she and Vincent lived), in Indianapolis, in settings around the world, and online–she helped to explain the structure of cyberspace. And yet I would basically want to honor her as a contributor to the intellectual renaissance of democratic thought.

A second stream of work also begins in academia, but it takes higher education itself as the main site of reform. The presenting complaints are: students and professors have lost a sense of mission and calling; they are not learning all that well or flourishing as people; and they are harmfully disconnected from their peers within academia and (even more so) from the broader society. This conversation took roughly its modern shape during the 1980s and has since spawned a whole range of influential practices. For instance, when students collaborate with community-based organizations that have ongoing partnerships with colleges, the theory goes, they can benefit intellectually and psychologically while contributing to the public good. But that requires engaged scholars, robust community partnerships, appropriate pedagogy, etc.–all of which we have been busily developing for the past thirty years.

The third stream is democratic renewal and innovation that emerges from outside academia. I have already mentioned deliberative democracy, which, in practical terms, means recruiting citizens to talk about public issues. That is a large-scale enterprise now. The National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation has more than 2,000 individual members who are interested enough in organizing and facilitating public discussions (often linked to local action) that they subscribe to the NCDD mailing list, which is full of practical suggestions.

I also already mentioned the idea of citizens managing common resources. In the robust field of civic environmentalism, people are busy doing that, often applying concepts directly from Ostrom. Just to mention one example, the River Network has formal partnerships with 600 local nonprofits that are involved in managing watersheds. America’s 4,600 community development corporations have financed and built 86,000 housing units. (I don’t want to bury you in statistics but merely suggest that these democratic reform efforts are serious business.) The American Libraries Association is a different example of an organization that thinks of itself as the guardian of a commons–in this case, a “knowledge commons.”

Another thread in the tapestry is contributed by broad-based community organizing, which often has a deliberative aspect (participants talk and decide on strategies and goals), but certainly differs from pure deliberation in its emphasis on action–including “Direct Action” events. The Industrial Areas Foundation has 47 regional affiliates now, most of them capable of drawing 2,000 people to a given event.

Innovations that originate within government and as the result of public policy also deserve mention. Just to name one type, Federally Qualified Health Centers provide health services at the local level. By law, they must have governing boards of which more than half are current clients of the center who demographically represent the population that the center serves. They employ 123,000 full-time staff and may have, by my estimate, 120,000 citizen board members.

I could go on. In fact, a book of mine coming out this summer is substantially devoted to mapping the whole field of civic renewal and providing some theoretical underpinning. Maybe it can suffice for this evening to say that there is a lot of civic innovation outside of academia, and I estimate that at least 1 million Americans are actively involved.

By the way, my list of organizations and my count of the civically engaged Americans both depend on what qualifies as authentic “civic engagement.” That is (and ought to be) a contested question, related to fundamental debates about what makes a good society and a good human life. I won’t defend my whole philosophical position here, except to say that the efforts that impress me most always have three dimensions. They are deliberative, involving talking and listening about public issues. They are collaborative, involving actual work that yields public goods or helps build the commonwealth. And they improve civic relationships, which are relationships characterized by mutual respect, appropriate power dynamics, and such civic virtues as loyalty and hope.

Having identified three major streams (intellectual movements, reforms in academia, and civic renewal efforts outside of higher education), my next obvious move is to argue that they must flow together. That’s built into the cliché of “streams.” It’s always easy to say that several important things are going on and now it’s time to combine them. The hard part is actually doing bringing them together. But more than usual, we need combinations of intellectual work and practical experimentation–within and beyond academia–because our students lack compelling political movements that would give their activism shape and purpose. Fortunately, these streams do come together in all kinds of interesting and fruitful experiments that may ultimately produce the political movements we need.

Abe Lincoln the surveyor, or the essential role of strategy

fifth annual Summer Institute of Civic Studies