Monthly Archives: June 2009

open source politics

(heading back to Boston from the Midwest) I’ve been thinking about when it’s a good idea to develop knowledge in an open way–by inviting anyone to contribute to a common pool. Wikipedia is a remarkable resource that has been built by volunteers who not only write, but also edit others’ work. Google often leads you quickly to the best information, even though nobody sits at Google’s HQ writing websites or picking the best ones. Google’s search results are driven by choices that millions of other people have made.

Yet the White House’s recent open discussion of “transparency” was quickly dominated by people who wanted Barack Obama’s “real” birth certificate to be released. Their comments couldn’t be deleted as irrelevant, because they did have a concern about transparency. I think their concern was simply embarrassing (to them), but I don’t get to decide what’s valuable or ridiculous in an open forum. The whole discussion was mostly unhelpful, in my opinion, because they dominated.

I recently visited Project Vote Smart, which employs hundreds of college students every year to collect and code candidates’ position papers, speeches, and votes. This is a labor-intensive model that is threatened by automated systems that promise equally good results without human labor. Yet I suspect that the careful work of Project Vote Smart is indispensable. I doubt that we can rely on a wiki or a search engine to provide reliable information about local candidates.

Reflecting on these examples, I would propose three general principles for deciding when to use an open process:

1. It works best when value-conflicts are minor or absent and information is the main issue. That means that an open process works better in science and technology than in politics or religion.

2. It works best when millions of people participate, because they can swamp small groups of cranks. But in American politics, below the presidential level, millions of people do not participate actively. An open forum about a candidate for state legislature, for instance, is likely to draw just a handful of actual contributors.

3. It works best when stakes are relatively low. If I organized a public discussion of transparency on this website, there would be few participants, but their comments would probably be well-intentioned and thoughtful. There would be no motivation to disrupt a discussion on my personal website, because my site has little or no political importance. But if the White House organizes a discussion, all of its political opponents have motives to disrupt it. The White House is powerful, and it has enemies. When power and conflict are involved, many of the old rules of politics reassert themselves–even online.

ethics from nature (on Philip Selznick)

(en route to the Midwest for a service-learning meeting.) Here is a fairly comprehensive ethical position. It is my summary of Philip Selznick’s The Moral Commonwealth, chapter 1, which is presented as an interpretation of Dewey’s naturalistic ethics. I have not investigated whether Selznick gets Dewey right–that doesn’t matter much, because Selznick is a major thinker himself. His position has just a few key ingredients:

1. “The first principle of a naturalist ethic is that genuine values emerge from experience; they are discovered, not imposed” (Selznick, p. 19). So we shouldn’t expect to ground ethics in a truth that is outside of experience, as Kant advised.

2. Experience is the understanding of nature, broadly defined. Such experience has moral implications. There is “support in nature for secure and fruitful guides to moral reflection and prescription” (p. 27). Yet “humanity is in the business of amending nature, not following it blindly” (p. 18).

3. The study of nature that we need for ethics is more like “natural history” than “theoretical science.” In other words, it looks for generalities and patterns, but it doesn’t assume that true knowledge is highly abstract and universal. “For modern theoretical scientists, nature is not known directly and concretely but indirectly and selectively. Ideally embodied in mathematical propositions, nature becomes rarified and remote. In contrast, students of natural history–naturalists–are interested in the situated wholeness of objects and organisms. They perceive a world of glaciered canyons, burnt prairies, migrating geese.” They exhibit “love for the world” (p. 26).

4. Certain facts about human beings (not to be sharply separated from other natural species) emerge from such empirical observation and are ethically important. For instance, human beings have a potential for growth or development in interaction with community, and such growth gives us well-being. “When interaction is free and undistorted–when it stimulates reflection and experiment–powers are enhanced, horizons expanded, connections deepened, meanings enriched. Growth depends on shared experience, which in turn requires genuine, open communication” (pp. 27-8).

Dewey/Selznick begin with observable facts about us as a natural species, identify growth as a “normative idea” (p. 28), and are soon on their way to strong ethical conclusions. For instance, Dewey claimed that democracy is the best system of government because it permits free collective learning; but a democracy is desirable to the extent that discussion and experimentation prevail (rather than the mere tabulation of votes).

This approach suggests that it’s better to “benchmark” than to set ideals. That is, it’s better to assess where we are as a species, or as a community, or as an individual, and then try to enhance the aspects that seem best, rather than decide what a good society or a good character should be like in principle. Dorf and Sabel have tried to work out a whole political theory based on this distinction. (Link opens a Word doc.)

I find Selznick’s view attractive, but I have two major methodological concerns. First, I’m not sure that the selection of natural features is as straightforward as Selznick and Dewey presume. We are naturally capable of learning together in cooperative groups, thereby developing our own competence and enriching our experience. We are also capable of exploitation, cruelty, faction, brutality, and waste. These all seem equally “natural.” I suspect the pragmatist’s preference for “growth” is closer to a classical philosophical premise than a naturalist observation. In fact, it sounds a lot like Kant’s requirement that we develop ourselves and others.

We could read Dewey’s conclusions as simply a contribution to public debate. He likes “growth”; others can discuss his preference. If we reach consensus within our community, we have all the ethical certainty we need. If we disagree, our task is to discuss.

That’s all very well as long as we recognize that consensus is highly unlikely. (This is my second objection.) Imagine Dewey in a debate with an Iranian Ayatollah. The latter would reject Dewey’s method, since revelation should trump experience; Dewey’s understanding of natural history, since the world began with creation and will end apocalyptically; and Dewey’s goals, since salvation after death is much more valuable than growth here on earth. No experience can directly settle this debate, because we only find out what happens after death after we die. And until the Mahdi actually returns, it’s possible that he is waiting.

But here’s an argument in favor of Dewey’s method. The debate is not just about abstract principles and unfalsifiable predictions. It’s also about how principles play out in real, evolving institutions. So we should compare not just the metaphysics of a Shiite Ayatollah and an American pragmatist, but also the institutions that each one endorses: contemporary Iran versus a Deweyan model, such as a laboratory school or a settlement house. It seems to me that contemporary Iran is not doing very well, and Dewey has a “naturalist” explanation of why not. The fundamental principles of the Iranian revolution are not in sync with nature. That’s not going to persuade a diehard revolutionary, because he will expect everything to improve as soon as the Mahdi returns. But it is an observation that a devout Shiite can accept and use as an argument for reform. Thus there is a meaningful debate between reformers like Khatami and diehards like Ahmadinejad. If Khatami ultimately wins, score one for Dewey and Selznick, because Iran will have turned out to be governed by natural laws of growth and reflection.

a theory of familiarity

Let’s say that a place is perfectly familiar to you if you hardly notice you’re there. You can walk from one room of your house to another without using any mental resources to find your way, and if things haven’t changed, you hardly register the environment. I became so familiar with my Metro commute to College Park, MD–45 minutes each way for 15 years–that I often didn’t even notice changing trains at Fort Totten. I would have to look up to see if I had already shifted from the Green to the Red Line. Even accounting for some eccentricity on my part, I think this is a general phenomenon: We save our attention for what is new and requires thought.

I’m interested in when we reach a stage of familiarity. It doesn’t seem to take all that many hours. For instance, I would guess I spend an average of 2-3 hours per week on airplanes. Each plane is different. Yet that’s enough time to make the situation familiar once I settle into my seat. The context pretty much disappears and I can be fully absorbed in reading, thinking, or talking. So I think familiarity increases on a steep curve.

But then it matters how much time passes between experiences. My mother-in-law’s house in Georgia feels extremely familiar to me. I’ve spent no more than two percent of my time there since the mid-1990s, but our visits have been spaced fairly evenly over the years. Returning for a couple of days every 3-6 months seems to be sufficient to retain a sense of familiarity. In contrast, if we had spent three months there in 1996 and never returned, I’m pretty sure it would feel unfamiliar.

There is surely some individual variation in how we experience familiarity. I am not sure how I’d like to be in this respect. Attaining familiarity seems desirable, insofar as it reduces stress and distraction and lets us focus on our choice of tasks. At the same time, it seems bad when it makes us careless or inattentive to the world or when it makes time pass too quickly.

talk to the White House about civic learning

As I’ve discussed before, the White House Office of Public Engagement has organized an elaborate online discussion to provide guidance on how to enhance transparency, participation, and collaboration in the federal government. More than 2,000 ideas were submitted and discussed in the first round. Of these, the Office has selected a few for further discussion online.

One cluster of ideas that they have selected involves civic education, which is the topic of the day today. It would be helpful if people who care about civic education weighed in, especially since some previous discussions have gone off on tangents. Here’s where you go to comment.

This is the original announcement from the White House (issued yesterday):

    On Thursday, June 11th, we’ll turn from talking about how government can create better opportunities for participation to address how to promote the civic literacy needed to participate effectively in government. On Promoting Civic Education, you said:

  • Provide a toolkit, including neutral discussion guides, to facilitate community discussions and a website for groups to share conclusions.
  • Invest in educating Americans (e.g. through town halls) to analyze complex information.
  • Train neighborhood facilitators to use proven dialogue methods that engage a group in 3 hours or less.
  • Establish listening and personal story sharing skills workshops in homes & schools.
  • Create and sponsor teen model governments to seek solutions.
  • Combine deliberation and service on Martin Luther King Day and other holidays.

I like these ideas–in fact, I originally proposed at least one of them–but there’s a need to think bigger and to focus more on schools (which is where the kids are!). Furthermore, the actual White House post highlights civic education less than yesterday’s announcement suggested it would. That’s not a big deal, but I would like to see the discussion shift toward school-based civic education. To that end, I have posted the following; other perspectives would be welcome as well:

    Young people can learn to be very effective and helpful participants in public dialogs. Moderated discussions of current events in school, high-quality community service projects with a dimension of research and planning, youth production of news media, and youth service on boards and committees have all been shown to teach relevant skills, knowledge, and values.

    Unfortunately, such opportunities are distributed very unequally. Poor children, children in stressed schools, and children who are academically “at risk” rarely receive civic opportunities that are common in high-performing suburban schools. Unless we address this problem, we will miss the voice of low-income kids in any public process.

    The federal government invests very modestly in civic education. We estimate that federal spending on all the relevant programs (in the Department of Education, Corporation for National and Community Service, HUD, and the National Endowment for the Humanities) totals about $2 per student per year. But that small investment could be much more valuable:

    1. It should be an investment in innovation. Money should be allocated in open competitions, and grantees should have to evaluate impact rigorously so that the field can learn.

    2. It should be coordinated. There should be more integration, especially between the civic education programs of the Department of Education and NEH and the service-learning programs of the Corporation for National and Community Service and HUD.

    3. It should be connected to the kind of work that the White House Office of Public Engagement is doing. When the government seeks public involvement in policymaking, students should be included, and they should have opportunities to learn civic and deliberative skills.

beyond civic piety

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” –Margaret Mead

This is one of the most popular quotations in my world. I can’t count how many times I’ve seen it printed out and hung on office walls. I think I understand the motivations that led Mead to say it. She was exhorting us to work together and make the world better.

But what she said isn’t literally true. Technological changes, institutional inertia, markets, clashes of social classes and other demographic groups, disciplined organizations, violence, tyranny, and sheer accidents also “change the world.” For instance, a big flood recently changed New Orleans a whole lot. It changed the city for the worse, and that brings up a separate problem with Margaret Mead’s quotation. Changing the world is morally ambiguous–it can be good or bad. The World War I veterans who gathered around Mussolini and Hitler were “small group[s] of … committed citizens,” and they made the world a lot worse. I deleted the word “thoughtful” in describing them, but they did think a lot about social issues and strategies. They just thought in a bad way.

I don’t mean to take cheap shots at Margaret Mead, but rather to emphasize that we need a really serious investigation of these questions:

  • When can “a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens” change the world?
  • How can they be most effective?
  • What are good means and good ends for these groups?

Of course, there is great writing on these topics, of which we selected some favorite texts for our Summer Institute’s syllabus. But I believe there is much less scholarship than you would expect, for these reasons:

1. Addressing these questions requires a mix of facts and ethics, “is” and “ought” (or, in academic jargon, empirical and normative discourse); and that mix is rare. The social sciences are still heavily positivist and unable to deal openly with normative questions. Political philosophy is too abstract and not informed enough by practical experience.

2. Paying attention to the effects of small-group politics seems naive, since big, impersonal social forces probably have more impact on outcomes. Academic “realism” marginalizes human agency. But small-group politics is morally important–it’s what we should do. It’s also more significant than the “realists” believe, although less powerful than Margaret Mead implied.

3. Human agency takes place at a moderate scale. It’s not just “micro”–a matter of individual choices such as whether to lie, or to vote, or to use birth control. It’s also not just “macro,” involving the basic structure of a whole society. We human beings cannot directly change basic structures, but we can do more than make individual choices. We can work in political groups. Somehow, political theory and philosophy ignore the moderate scale in favor of the micro and the macro. (A exception, just to illustrate what we need more of, is this paper by Archon Fung.)