I’m proud to be a member of the board of AmericaSpeaks, which organizes very large deliberative town meetings, facilitated by technology, in which groups of citizens discuss pressing social issues and reach decisions. The organization is busy with numerous projects. One of the recent ones was “CaliforniaSpeaks,” a simultaneous discussion of health care reform that involved 3,500 citizens in eight California cities. This short evaluation of the event is interesting because it is written by a tough-minded and independent scholar, Taeku Lee from Berkeley, and it appears on the World Bank’s blog for civic participation. (The very idea that the Bank has a blog, let alone a blog on democratic engagement, may shake some stereotypes.) Lee finds that participants–representative of California citizens–held highly sophisticated discussions of health reform and came to have more trust in politics and more political engagement.
Monthly Archives: July 2008
defending national and community service
Senator Obama’s national service plan got lots of attention when he re-announced it this week, in contrast to the original announcement in February, which got no press coverage at all. I guess a proposal is more interesting if a nominee offers it than if it comes from one Democratic candidate among many–although I was surprised by the complete lack of interest in Obama’s $3.5 billion plan when he introduced it last winter. The current version is very popular in my circles and has drawn interesting endorsements. (For instance, my friend John Bridgeland, formerly a senior adviser to George Bush, supports it.) But the influential liberal blogger Matthew Yglesias calls the “underlying idea … bad and illiberal.” He provides an amusing video parody of national service as a kind of softcore fascism, and gives the Obama plan a pass only because it is so “vague” as to be “harmless.”
National and community service plans have a great progressive heritage (from the Civilian Conservation Corps of the New Deal to the Lyndon Johnson’s Job Corps and VISTA), but they do require a justification. Sometimes, when I am deep into a strategy meeting in which everyone assumes that we need to increase the numbers of paid federal volunteers, I start to wonder whether this is the right goal, after all. So I welcome Yglesias’ challenge–but I believe it can be met.
Paid community service opportunities are good for those who serve. The evidence is quite strong. As a dramatic example, on entering Youth Build (a federally funded program) the new volunteers estimate their own life expectancies at something like 40 years. By the time they leave the program, they expect to live three decades longer. Having an opportunity to do something constructive is a powerful way to build skills and to enhance confidence and self-worth. For the much more academically successful citizens who enroll in competitive programs like the Peace Corps, the benefits are also powerful, but different. They learn about social problems and about working with people who are different from themselves.
It is also important that the people who are served benefit; otherwise, a service program is artificial. (No one will develop confidence and skills from “serving” if the service itself is pointless.) There have been evaluations that find strongly positive impacts on communities. But I disagree with Yglesias that “the relevant test should be effectiveness of outcomes (does TFA help kids learn, does the PeaceCorps help build the American brand).” That is an important but secondary consideration.
The national and community service programs also help to break down the wall between government and the public, or between officials and citizens, by enrolling thousands of citizens in temporary public service jobs. I think this is essential for progressivism. Citizens’ intense distrust for government reduces public support for national health care, environmental protection, and education. If citizens have some experience working on public issues in collaboration with the government, their opinions will be better informed and will probably be more favorable. (And if direct experience with the government makes them less supportive, then we obviously need to reform the state before we can expand it.)
Finally, the national and community service programs are important for Obama, because the core of his message is empowerment–we can make a difference working together. He needs to explain how we can make a difference after the election. Helping to elect him cannot be our only way to participate. Community service programs symbolize his commitment to public participation–and also underline the best parts of his own biography. For instance, Barack was a founding board member of Public Allies, an Americorps program, and Michelle directed its Chicago office.
For all these reasons, progressives should be excited about the Obama service plan and should see it as fairly central to his campaign. I am afraid that their skepticism reveals a basic lack of sympathy with Obama and the people who surround him.
PBS’ “Your America”
PBS (the public broadcasting service in the USA) has a new book and broadcast series entitled “Democracy’s Local Heroes.” It draws attention to citizens who work with others to address public problems. I have not seen the show or read the book, but I am grateful for the website. It provides good short definitions of civic activism and related concepts and a great selection of links, including a prominent one to the November Fifth Coalition.
good lives
Friends returned recently from Alaska, where they had encountered people who prefer to live alone and “off the grid,” with as little interaction with the United States as possible. I don’t think this is a great form of life. I admire people who provide more service to humanity. Also, I’m not impressed by a way of life that must be denied to most other human beings (for we simply don’t have enough space on the planet to allot each family many acres). It’s possible that some day we’ll all gain benefit from Alaskan survivalists–we may need their special knowledge. But that would make the case easy. Let’s keep it hard by presuming that they will never do any practical good for anyone other than themselves.
This example is an opportunity to try to make sense of three premises:
1. Some ways of life are better than others.
2. It takes many types of lives (each with its own prime virtue) to make a livable world; and
3. It’s a better world if it contains many different types of character and virtue, rather than a few.
I take 1 as pretty obvious. If you don’t agree with me that Alaskan survivalists lead less meritorious lives than hospice workers, you must at least concede that hospice workers are better people than Storm Troopers. It might sound pretentious to assert that some lives are lived better than others. But the alternative is to deny that it makes any difference how we live, and that makes life a joke.
I think 2 is also pretty obvious. If we didn’t have people who were committed to practical organizing work and productive labor, we’d starve. If there was no one who was concerned about security (and willing at least to threaten legitimate force on behalf of the community), we’d be in grave danger. Were it not for curious scientists, we would live shorter lives. But what follows from these examples? Not that several different kinds of lives are equally meritorious. Aristotle knew that it took many types of people, including manual laborers and soldiers, to sustain the polis. He nevertheless believed that the life of dispassionate inquiry was the single best life. He could hold these two positions together because he was no moral egalitarian. For him, it did not follow that if we need laborers and soldiers as well as philosophers, therefore all three are equally valuable. Moral egalitarianism is not self-evident or universal, although I certainly endorse it.
One can combine 1 and 2 by saying that there is a list of valuable ways of life, which includes all the necessary roles (e.g., producers, protectors, healers) plus some that have less practical advantages: for example, artists and abstract thinkers. This is a limited kind of pluralism. It supports moral distinctions but admits more than one type of goodness.
I’m inclined to go further and say that the world is better if it includes forms of life that are neither essential nor intrinsically meritorious. Our environment is simply more interesting if it contains Alaskan survivalists as well as productive farmers and cancer researchers. Thus I would propose that an individual who goes off the grid is probably not leading the best possible life for him; yet it is better that some people do this than that none do.
at Tufts
This is my first blog from the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts University in Medford, MA. Effective today, CIRCLE is part the Tisch College and I am also research director of Tisch. I am deeply absorbed in trying to get my old calendar system to sync with my new calendar, but I encourage you to explore Tisch, which is (I believe) still the only whole college devoted exclusively to civic engagement.