Monthly Archives: June 2006

the effects of canvassing–on canvassers

Canvassing is a common experience, especially for young activists on the left. In a 2002 survey available from CIRCLE, people were asked, “Have you worked as a canvasser–having gone door to door for a political or social group or candidate?” Seven percent of young people (and 11 percent of the young people who were involved in politics) said that they had.

Dana Fisher wrote a Working Paper, funded by CIRCLE, that examined the canvassing experience. She has now expanded her paper into a book entitled Activism, Inc.: How the Outsourcing of Grassroots Campaigns Is Strangling Progressive Politics in America. I blurbed it (along with Senator Bradley, Ralph Nader, Harry Boyte, Bill Schambra of the Bradley Center, and Doug McAdam). I said:

For idealistic young progressives today, there is basically only one paid entry-level job left in politics: canvassing. Dana R. Fisher is the first to study this crucial formative experience. Essentially, she finds that the canvass is an alienating and undemocratic experience. As a result, we are squandering the energy and ideas of a whole generation. What’s more, a progressive movement that relies on regimented canvassing is doomed to defeat because it lacks an authentic connection with citizens. Unless we take seriously the rigorous evidence and acute arguments of Activism, Inc., the future looks grim

Never having been on a canvass, I can’t guarantee that Fisher’s very critical portrait is comprehensive or fair. But I am sure that her account should trigger a robust debate about the effects of canvassing on young progressives. Indeed, Greg Bloom has kicked off that debate by writing a thoughtful series on DailyKos that makes similar points to Fisher’s. The comments that veterans of canvassing have made in response to Bloom have been very interesting and, in the main, support his critique. See also this response by a canvass organizer.

roots of American inequality

The Economist has a useful article on inequality in America, but even more useful is the collection of academic papers on that topic that the magazine has provided online. I picked a paper by Miles Corak entitled “Do Poor Children Become Poor Adults? Lessons from a Cross Country Comparison of Generational Earnings Mobility” (pdf).

Corak’s Table 2 tells a striking story. In the United States and the UK, half of a father’s economic advantage is transmitted (on average) to his son. (The data are limited to males for technical reasons.) There is a very high monetary return from investing in college education: 18.9 percent in the US. And there is a high correlation between fathers’ educational attainment and sons’ performance on a standardized test. In Scandinavia, by contrast, less than one fifth of a father’s economic advantage is transmitted to his son; there is a low rate of return to college (7.9% in Denmark) and not much of a correlation between fathers’ educational attainment and sons’ test scores. The other countries in the sample fall in between the US/UK and Scandinavia on all these measures.

Corak’s data are consistent with a picture of America as a highly competitive society in which those who perform well in school win great rewards. The best performers are the hardest working and smartest young people; thus the system feels like a meritocracy. However, high-performers usually have well educated and wealthy parents.

There cannot be law of nature that academic performance is heriditary, since the father/son correlations are much weaker in Canada and Europe. Instead, I suspect that American parents are able to effect their kids’ chances of success in the meritocracy by how they raise them.

For example, the size of a kid’s vocabulary is a valuable resource in school, yet Betty Hart and Todd Risley have found that three-year-old children of professionals have larger vocabularies than the parents of three-year-olds on welfare. There are profound differences in the way language is used, by social class. These differences are attenuated in European societies where the state is more likely to provide good daycare and where schools aim at equality.

I also wonder whether middle-class American parents work especially hard to give their children competitive advantages, because they realize the high stakes. Annette Lareau has found that suburban adults (without regard to race) try to use every second of the day in a “strategy of concerted cultivation,” to give their kids work- and school-related skills. Whereas working-class urban parents try to let their kids be kids–a strategy that would work much better in Sweden than in the USA.

Las Meninas and mirrors

Last fall, after a business trip to Madrid, I posted a mini-essay about Velazquez’ great, complex, and enigmatic painting, Las Meninas. My essay was mainly about the difficulty of looking at and enjoying a work so famous and so heavily interpreted–and how that same self-consciousness is a subject of Las Meninas itself.

Now Colin Dexter from London has written to propose a theory that, to the best of my knowledge, is original as well as plausible and attractive. As he puts it: “Surely the whole painting is a mirror image.” See here for two slightly different versions of his theory.

In poking around for online histories of mirrors (to confirm that there could have been very large mirrors at the Spanish court in 1656), I found this fascinating excerpt from Glass: A World History by Alan Macfarlane and Gerry Martin:

Some who have traced the rise of autobiographical writing during the Renaissance have suggested that this ‘discovery of the self’ was linked to mirrors. Likewise it is pointed out that Renaissance artists such as D?rer explored the inner man through the use of mirrors during their painting. This is an argument forcefully put by Lewis Mumford and he cites the self-examining portraits of Rembrandt as the high point in this artistic introspection.

The timing of the causal link is right; good mirrors developed in almost exact pace with the development of a new individualism between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. The geography is right; the epicentres of Renaissance individualism in painting and other art forms were Italy and the Netherlands, two of the most advanced areas of mirror-making and their use. The psychological link is plausible; people saw themselves in a new way that detached them from the crowd and allowed them to inspect themselves more carefully. We can see the process at work in a number of great artists. Yet as with all supposed connections there are doubts. Most cultures have mirrors of some sort and one wants to know more about how mirrors are used, the relative clarity of metal and glass mirrors and so on.

On the question of use, it is clearly important to discover the way in which mirrors were regarded. In the west they were largely looked into to see the person. This was both a cause and consequence of growing individualism. In China and Japan and perhaps other civilisations mirrors were used for different purposes. It is worth examining one example in some detail to see the differences that mirrors and culture could make.

A number of analysts, both foreign and Japanese, agree that in Japan mirrors were traditionally used in a very different way from that in the west. They looked through the mirror image and through the ‘observing self.’ The mirror was not an instrument of vanity and self-assessment, but of contemplation, as can be seen in Shinto shrines where the mirror is the central object. The individual does not gaze into the mirror to see a rounded portrait of the physical and social person in front of the mirror, but to gaze through the physical into the innermost, mystical self.

I like the idea that mirrors were both a “cause and consequence” of individualism–the kind of individualism that we see so strikingly in Las Meninas. It makes sense to me that the technology of reflective glass would have different effects depending on the cultural context. Likewise, I reject the simple theory that the invention of printing increased freedom and undermined authority. There was a complex reciprocal relationship between technological and cultural change in the era of Gutenberg–just as there is today.

looking for deliberation in new places

I recently came across a very interesting paper by Nina Eliasoph entitled, “What if Good Citizens’ Etiquette Requires Silencing Political Conversation in Everyday Life? Notes from the Field.” It’s drawn from a large project and contains numerous insights, making it hard to summarize but worth reading all the way through. The title does not do justice to its breadth.

Eliasoph starts with Michael Schudson’s four types of good citizen–ideals that Schudson finds dominant at various points in American history. The “loyalist” citizen was a dutiful member of a community, contributing to collective projects (like barn-raising) without arguing or expressing explicit self-interests. The “partisan” citizen belonged to a movement with an ideology, and loved to compete as a member of his team. The “knowledgeable” citizen of the Progressive Era formed judicious, independent judgments on matters of public policy. And the “rights-bearing” citizen of today understands that the personal is political and constantly monitors institutions (including the family) to protect his or her rights.

The problem that Eliasoph observes is our inability to combine these forms of citizenship, at least in the obvious settings. For instance, in the voluntary associations that she observes (such as PTAs), members are supposed to be consistent loyalists; disagreements and expressions of self-interest are considered inappropriate:

Volunteers assumed that the purpose of speaking in meetings was to encourage each other and other people in the community to think that regular people really can make a difference on issues that are close to home. As one volunteer put it to me, more than once:

“The way to get a volunteer is to say ‘who has a drill bit and can drill 8 holes on Saturday. Maybe you’ll get someone who’s never volunteered and maybe they’ll come again.'”

Information was considered something that people might have unequal access to, as well, so discussing something that might require too much knowledge would be elitist and therefore not good for promoting this fellow feeling

So this goal of creating solidarity meant avoiding talking about issues that might be divisive, that might require debate; and it meant avoiding exposing people’s ignorance about politics or their inability to be articulate; and it also meant avoiding noticing everyday politics.

On the other hand, in settings where self-identified “activists” operate, participants are expected to express nothing but self-interests. Opponents of a toxic incinerator privately hold complex and nuanced views. They tell Eliasoph that they don’t want to practice NIMBY politics. They care about other neighborhoods and want to find basic solutions to environmental problems. However, they are only familiar with a script for public participation in which one expresses self-interest:

Americans assume that people who speak in public contexts–demonstrations, meetings, press conferences–are, just by the very fact they that are speaking in public, acting self-interestedly. There is, in American culture, no other obvious reason for speaking in public; the public sphere is a “spoiled moral environment” (as Vaclav Havel put it, describing pre-1989 Czechoslovakia) and anyone who enters it must be, according to conventional wisdom, be doing so for immoral reasons. The implicit etiquette for public speech demands that speakers “speak for themselves” and only for themselves. Speaking in terms of self-interest is the only way to enter the public arena; and that talking in terms of rights in public was not moral–they could not figure out how to get from “rights” to “justice” (as Pitkin puts it).

Each form of citizenship is flawed on its own. “Colonial [i.e., loyalist] citizenship without the others too readily avoids discouragement and debate; partisan politics without the others becomes self-righteous and too separate from fellow citizens (and is too easily controlled by money, if citizens are not already firmly organized in opinion-forming groups or independently mindful); information is too discouraging without the other two; personalized, rights-bearing citizenship without the other three could be too isolating.” What we need is to combine the benefits of solidarity and loyalty, partisan debate and mobilization, judicious reasoning, and concern for individual interests.

Our public institutions do not encourage or even allow such combinations; nor do we learn useful habits in schools or from the media. However, Eliasoph finds partial combinations in unexpected places. For example, “In public library-sponsored story hours for pre-schoolers, parents often debate the politics and morality of the stories.” On their own email lists, librarians “endlessly” discuss whether telling stories about the Holocaust and other horrors will cause children to despair, or whether omitting such stories would be dishonest.

These debates are political and concern profound moral questions. They do not occur, as conventional political theories would predict, in the voluntary associations of “civil society,” nor in the press, nor in a legislature. Librarians are not volunteers; they are “paid by the state.” However, even though the library is a state institution, storytime is connected to the “intimate domestic sphere.”

Eliasoph asks whether it is adequate to have genuine public deliberations, but only about intimate matters such as which stories to read to small children. On the one hand, many of our problems–Eliasoph cites consumerism, workaholism, sexism, and racism–have cultural dimensions and must be addressed by the way we raise our children and interact with our peers. Deliberations among librarians, parents in playgroups, and officemates can address these issues without either disrupting solidarity or suppressing genuine differences. But, as Eliasoph notes, such discussions are not adequate for generating power, which is one of the chief virtues of political parties, unions, churches, and other conventional elements of “civil society.”

I wonder whether it would make a difference if we had better political leadership. Today’s official political debate is indeed a “spoiled moral environment.” It provides few models for public speaking that are partisan or controversial but also concerned with the common good; that acknowledge interests but also seek solidarity. RFK’s Indianapolis speech, which I described recently, was an excellent model, and so were other important speeches of that era. Barack Obama gained renown for his speech at the 2004 Democratic convention because people are hungry for such examples.

how to enjoy Venice

I love Venice. My family and I just returned from an idyllic week there and are mourning our departure. However, we noticed that a lot of the other visitors didn’t look very happy. Maybe they were having a better time than it seemed as we watched them trudge across the Piazza San Marco. I’m sure that some of them enjoy activities that I don’t happen to like (such as shopping), and that’s great. But I also know from overhearing their conversations that at least some of the hundreds of thousands of tourists who visit this small city every day are quite unhappy.

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