Monthly Archives: January 2009

discussion and service on MLK Day

USA Service.org, the official site that promotes service activities on Martin Luther King Day, was kind enough to ask me to post a blog entry over the weekend. I reproduce it here as an appropriate offering for today:

Between now and January 19th, we’ll feature a series of guest bloggers on USAservice.org. Today we’re pleased to share a post by Peter Levine, Director of Research and Director of CIRCLE (Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement).

Just a few days before Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, he said:

“It is always a rich and rewarding experience to take a brief break from our day-to-day demands and the struggle for freedom and human dignity and discuss the issues involved in that struggle with concerned friends of goodwill all over our nation.”

We have lost Dr. King, but we must continue that discussion.

I’m Peter Levine from CIRCLE at Tufts University’s Tisch College of Citizenship & Public Service. I also represent a consortium of groups that organize nonpartisan discussions and deliberations in communities around America.

My colleagues and I believe that service is essential, and that it is best when it involves reflection and discussion. This weekend, volunteers can meet to choose their issues and plan their service. On January 19th, after completing a service activity, volunteers can reflect on what they learned and what they should do next. Such discussions can help turn thousands of MLK Day service events into powerful opportunities for learning, analyzing issues, forming human connections, and addressing serious, long-term problems.

Americans who volunteer on MLK Day may plan to conduct additional service together in the months ahead. They may decide to recruit others to join their efforts, conduct research, create public art and media to inform people about their cause, make changes in their homes, companies, and careers, advocate for policy changes, or even launch new organizations. They may reflect together on profound issues, like the ones that kept Dr. King thinking, conversing, organizing, and learning all his life.

USAservice.org has posted a great new toolkit to help Americans organize “Citizen Action Conversations” connected to service. The guide is flexible, but it has contains practical ideas for how to organize a productive conversation.

President-elect Obama has said, “I will ask for your service and your active citizenship when I am President of the United States. This will not be a call issued in one speech or one program–this will be a central cause of my presidency.” It is up to each of us to serve and to make our service as meaningful as possible. A great way to start is by combining a service event with a Citizen Action Conversation on this Martin Luther King Day.

people who flop at Oxford

Reading Ingrid Rowland’s very enjoyable and insightful biography of Giordano Bruno, a parallel occurred to me:

In 1583, in mortal danger from the Inquisition, a European exile comes to Oxford University in search of a professorship. He has wild and evocative ideas, writes brilliantly, but has not organized his thought into a consecutive or comprehensible system. He is equally adept at fiction, poetry, philosophy, and magic. He disdains the mainstream mode of philosophy (Arisoteleanism) and refuses to use the standard method of analysis (syllogistic logic). He hates the vulgar crowd but has egalitarian and libertarian theoretical ideas. English dons seem to him provincial, naive, and ill-mannered; he dispenses backhanded compliments about their distinguished academic garb while privately noting that they know more about beer than true philosophy. They find him laughable–passionate, irascible, nonsensical, and almost impossible to understand because he insists on pronouncing Latin like Italian. (Whereas they pronounce it like Elizabethan English.)

In 1934, a young philosopher comes to Oxford in search of a teaching job and a refuge from Nazi Germany. He has radical but somewhat inchoate ideas. He largely shuns the logical positivism and empiricism that are mainstream at Oxford and dabbles in phenomenology, music, sociology, and other disciplines. He writes beautifully and allusively but also elusively. He is a Marxist with very refined aesthetic principles. Oxford academics find him “a bit of a comic figure” (A.J Ayer), partly on account of his “anxiety.” He finds them naive. “It is quite impossible to convey my real philosophical interests to the English, and I have to reduce my work to a childish level.”

Giordano Bruno, Theodor Adorno: two guys who got “job talks” at Oxford that never panned out.

kids in the economic recovery plan

I’m getting lots of email from activists who’ve heard that programs they favor are in the House stimulus package. I cannot confirm any of this, but supposedly there is money for community service programs: $200 million for AmeriCorps and funds for YouthBuild and Community Service Employment for Older Americans. I’m for that. My new article entitled “The Case for Service” is online as a pdf.

I have also seen reports of very substantial increases in funds for children, including $14 billion for school construction and $13 billion for Title I education (aimed at high-poverty schools). Most interesting for those of us in the education-reform-and-innovation business: $1 billion for “21st century classrooms,” $300 million for Job Corps, and $300 million for teacher quality.

against impunity

(Tampa airport) The rule of law means that individuals may not be prosecuted unless they have violated specific laws. Of course, when they do violate such laws, they should be punished. The people who most need to be punished are those with power, above all those who wield public power secretly.

It’s important that officials in the national security apparatus react to any illegal proposal with immediate resistance. They must think, “We can’t do that–it’s against the law.” There’s a widespread view that to expect such scruples is naive. In popular fiction, presidents and CIA agents casually break laws all the time. But I actually believe that respect for the law (perhaps tinged by fear of the law) is very widespread in the intelligence and military worlds. We saw it when numerous officials balked at illegal acts in the Bush years.

Yet there is reason to believe that certain high Bush appointees violated laws. One example was the deliberate authorization of domestic wiretaps in violation of the FISA law. Regardless of whether that law is good, the president’s men had no right to ignore it. Another obvious set of cases involved torture. No court has proven that officials like Donald Rumsfeld violated US laws by authorizing torture–but that charge is believable enough to be investigated. The Senate Armed Services Committee says, for instance, that Rumsfeld directly caused detainee abuse at Guatanamo; and Susan J. Crawford has concluded that some of that abuse constituted “torture.” That amounts to a claim that Rumsfeld committed a serious crime.

All the political considerations argue against an investigation by the executive branch under President Obama. The public has never shown much concern about the mistreatment of foreign prisoners. Most people define “torture” very stringently. I think voters are mad about the war, but invading Iraq was legal under US law. I don’t think they are mad about the abuse of people like Mohammed al-Qahtani, the alleged 20th hijacker. In general, prosecuting the previous administration looks vindictive. And investigating the intelligence agencies could make them into very formidable enemies of the new president.

These political considerations should count. President Obama will have difficult tasks to accomplish in the essential interests of the nation, including deep economic reform during wartime. He cannot win many battles at once; he must choose. Not to address a given issue isn’t a failure–it can be an essential tactical choice.

On the other hand, we cannot tolerate a culture of impunity. If high officials are basically known to have broken the law, and nothing is done about it, the rule of law suffers. Impunity is common around the world. To the extent we have avoided it, that is one of our great strengths.

I think I would prefer to see investigations proceed without much connection to the new administration. Civil lawsuits would be great if they have any chance of succeeding (although I suspect they are impossible in national security cases). Congressional investigations are welcome as long as Congress manages to get its other work done as well. We might be lucky if federal attorneys chose to bring cases in their own districts. And I suppose the Obama Administration could launch a slow, deliberate, “Truth Commission”-style process that would take a couple of years to get near the senior Bush people. That way, the economic agenda would have succeeded or failed by the time there were any high-profile hearings.