Monthly Archives: May 2007

transparency and the Millennial generation

Most participants at last weekend’s Mobilize conference (median age, about 25) maintained that their generation demands transparency, and this is one of their defining characteristics. In general, I support claims that the Millennials are distinctive. I’d be the last to try to rebut the idea that they are especially idealistic, for example–or especially good at collaborating in decentralized ways. There is evidence to support these assertions, and I want to reinforce a positive generational self-image.

However, I’m not sure about this generation’s commitment to transparency. First of all, Americans have been in favor of openness for a long time. According to Robert Wiebe, the Progressives of 1900-1924 believed that:

The interests thrived on secrecy, the people on information. No word carried more progressive freight than publicity: expose the backroom deals in government, scrutinize the balance sheets of corporations, attend the public hearings on city services, study the effects of low wages on family life. Mayor Tom Johnson of Cleveland held public meetings to educate its citizens. Senator Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin heaped statistics on his constituents from the back of a campaign wagon. Once the public knew, it would act; knowledge produced solutions (Weibe, Self-Rule: A Cultural History of American Democracy, Chicago, 1995, p. 163).

Justice Louis Brandeis spoke for the Progressive movement when he wrote, “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman” (Other People’s Money , New York, 1932, p. 92).

Americans didn’t forget about transparency over the next forty years, but for a generation or two it wasn’t the major theme it had been before World War I. Then came Vietnam and Watergate, and again “sunlight” was the rallying cry. The Congressional class of 1974 and their nonpartisan allies won the Freedom of Information Act, campaign finance disclosure laws, registration requirements for lobbyists, open-meeting and sunlight acts, open committee hearings, and many similar reforms–all within a space of a few years. The very names of Public Citizen and the Public Interest Research Group suggested a commitment to free information and openness that was characteristic, I would argue, of the Boomers.

If enthusiasm for openness faded slightly, perhaps it was because information, alas, is not power. People do not just need data to act effectively. They also need motivation, coordination with other people, and resources. The open government reforms of 1973-6 were good, but they did not fundamentally change politics.

As for the Millennials–I don’t know whether surveys have measured their commitment to transparency. But I do know that they are coming of age in a period when certain important interactions are less transparent, not more so. Who knows how Amazon determines what books might interest you? Back when neighborhoods had independent bookstores, if your bookseller recommended an item to you, you knew why. Not so with Amazon. Likewise, who knows how the National Assessment of Educational Progress is created? In the days when your teacher made up your tests, you at least knew who was responsible and could ask her why she had made her choices. Meanwhile, the national security apparatus has rapidly expanded after 9/11.

Perhaps the Millennials will rebel against all this opacity (the opposite of transparency); or perhaps they will be inured to it. In any case, I don’t think their commitment to transparency is one of their defining characteristics.

November Fifth Coalition: new materials

I’ve been working on the website of the November Fifth Coalition, whose purpose is to inject civic themes into the 2008 election. (By “civic,” we don’t mean civility and consensus, but concrete, active work by citizens–some of which is pretty contentious.)

We have a policy statement on “Putting Citizens Back in the Center of Education.” It describes education as not just the job of schools, but as a community-wide function whose purpose is to transmit values, culture, knowledge, and skills to the next generation.

We also have some interesting examples of civic work and a “news” page with clips and blog feeds about civic engagement.

American responsibility for the Iraqi civil war

Last week I posted what could be called a “conciliatory narrative” about Iraq (avoiding calling it either a “fiasco” or a “defeat.”) Over at Philosophy, et cetera, someone who writes as Dr. Pretorius replied:

The sentence “That conflict is morally our responsibility, because we might have been able to prevent it” [from my blog] is almost certainly false. In, say, Darfur we might have been able to prevent some of the atrocities, and we may or may not be responsible for that. In this case, though, it is morally our responsibility because we caused it, not because we failed to prevent it.

Saying this, or saying that “A civil war then broke out,” is just a cop out – the civil war didn’t just break out (as if it was a matter of bad luck). It was caused by, oh, the speedy overthrowing of a stable dictatorship without any significant planning for what to do afterwards.

I don’t want to evade or downplay US responsibility for the war in Iraq. I think it’s our fault. However, the philosophical issues are complicated. First, it’s problematic to draw a sharp distinction between sins of commission and sins of omission. As an exercise in comparing the two, consider our passivity during the Rwanda genocide versus our (alleged) killing of civilians during yesterday’s fighting in western Afghanistan. The number killed in the Rwanda genocide was much larger, and our motives were worse. Yet we directly and intentionally hurt no one in Rwanda, whereas it was American guns that fired yesterday in Herat. I think we did much worse in the Rwanda case.

Then there is the complexity of assigning moral responsibility when an event has many preconditions. Perhaps J. L. Mackie’s idea of an INUS condition applies to the Iraqi civil war. Our invasion was an insufficient condition, because the violence required not only our intervention, but also deliberate killings by various Iraqi factions. Our invasion was an unnecessary condition, because the civil war could have started another way, e.g., if Saddam had died of cancer or by an assassin’s hand. The invasion was nevertheless a necessary condition of a sufficient condition because Iraqi factions could not have killed each other without our invasion, and once Saddam was overthrown, a civil war was basically inevitable.

That means, it seems to me, that we have complete responsibility for the civil war, and yet Iraqi factions who kill one another also have complete responsibility for it. Moral responsibility is not like a pizza, such that if you get two more slices, I get two fewer. It’s more like a virus: you and I can both have it 100%. Which is about where we stand in Iraq.