Monthly Archives: December 2009

the Open Government Directive

The White House has released its Open Government directive (PDF), an order from the Director of the Office of Management and Budget to all federal agencies concerning “openness.” It is a step toward implementing the President’s Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government, which he signed on his first day in office. I hope it is only a first step because the President’s Memorandum was broad and inspiring, and this Directive seems narrow.

The focus of today’s order is transparency: publishing government information online and improving the quality of that information. It’s hard to argue against those goals since we citizens have a right to know what our government does. It’s also plausible that transparency reduces corruption and enhances the quality and efficient of government. (“Sunlight is the best disinfectant,” said Louis Brandeis.)

But this strategy has severe limitations. After all, we citizens already have access to enormous reams of data about the government (but much less about corporations and other powerful private actors). When the volume of data is overwhelming, interest groups and the professionals whom they employ can use the data selectively to advance their agendas. At the same time, the press can comb through the information looking for embarrassing stuff–which is helpful to the extent that their scrutiny reduces corruption, but bad if they just paint a misleading overall picture.

Consider, for example, the way that Politico chose to report the newly accessible data on Congressional office expenses. Their headline was: “Nancy Pelosi spends $2,993 on flowers.” But $300 million of spending had just been disclosed, and Politico didn’t choose to tell us how the other 99.999002% of our money was spent. Did most of it go for staff? If so, what jobs do they do? Evidently, Politico thought that itemizing Nancy Pelosi’s flower bill was the way to get readers.

Again, it’s hard to argue that we shouldn’t have access to information about Congressional office expenses. We have a right to know about Congress and about executive agencies (which are the addressees of today’s Directive). But I am unconvinced that much good will come of this disclosure.

Meanwhile, the “collaboration” and “participation” aspects of the president’s original memorandum were extremely promising. Real participation by citizens and real collaboration with nonprofits and communities would change government and enhance civic skills. But those sections of today’s Directive are very short and vague, and the concrete passages disappoint me. For instance:

  • “The Plan should include descriptions of and links to appropriate websites where the public can engage in existing participatory processes of your agency.”
  • “The Plan should include proposals to use technology platforms to improve collaboration among people within and outside your agency.”
  • “The Plan should include innovative methods, such as prizes and competitions, to obtain ideas from and to increase collaboration with those in the private sector, non-profit, and academic communities.”

I predict that organized stakeholders will dominate open online forums and will win most of the prizes and competitions, leaving most Americans with no new ways to participate. But I could certainly be wrong, and I hope I am. I also look forward to future initiatives, because I assume that the original Memorandum remains a promise that can inspire further action.

what the leaked climate change emails tell us about our politics

Imagine that you are a specialist in climate science. Like 82 percent of your colleagues, you believe that “mean global temperatures [have] risen compared to pre-1800s levels, and … human activity [has] been a significant factor in changing mean global temperatures.” You worry about the consequences, which may range from acute suffering in the world’s poorest countries and loss of natural species to global catastrophe.

You also know what science is like–it is always uncertain and provisional. Every article has a “limitations” section, every data table has margins of errors and sources of bias, and rarely do two articles precisely agree. Nevertheless, you know that to change the course we’re on will require millions of people to alter their political and consumer preferences. But people are fairly selfish and short-sighted. Besides, we have lots of other things to worry about, from our day-to-day practical struggles to spiritual concerns, plus all the alarms we receive from the mass media: serial killers, terrorist attacks, corrupt politicians, swine flu.

Given all this clutter, you, the climate scientist, decide that you’d better become much more effective at communicating a sense of alarm. You are constrained by ethical limitations (no outright lying, for instance, even to save the planet), but simplification, evasion of complexity, exaggeration of certainty–all that seems necessary.

These are the habits that one can see in the leaked private emails of climate scientists. Their messages include mentions of “tricks” in the presentation of data, data withheld from direct public inspection, and references to skeptics as “idiots.” Reactions to the emails range from George F. Will (the documents “reveal paranoia on the part of scientists … [N]ever in peacetime history has the government-media-academic complex been in such sustained propagandistic lockstep about any subject”) to Paul Krugman (“all they show is that scientists are human, but never mind”).

In my view, the emails reveal a shift from one kind of communication to another. Borrowing a distinction from the contemporary German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, I’d distinguish strategic, instrumental, means/ends communication from deliberation or dialog. When communication is strategic, you know what your goals or ends are, and you use efficient means to convince others. When communication is dialogic or deliberative, you reason with the other party about what the goals and means should be.

The leaked climate emails show scientists becoming strategic rather than dialogic. The reason is clear: modern society is so structured that strategic communication generally beats dialog, at least in the short term. It simply works better.

Yet strategic communication is unethical, insofar as it tries to manipulate the other person’s reasoning capacity. It uses him or her as a means, not an end. It is also self-destructive in the long term. Our views of matters like climate change depend fundamentally on trust. I cannot directly sense changes in the climate, let alone their causes. Neither can scientists–despite their fancy equipment. An account of how and why the climate is changing requires aggregating the research of many scientists and collaborative teams. To use the aggregated information, you must trust all the contributors. Then, to make matters even harder, people like me don’t read any of the scientific literature on climate. We read what we regard as high-quality news coverage of the scientific literature, which means that we must trust some reporters, as well as the scientists they cover. And we must trust the reliability of the relationship between them.

All of this works if we assume that scientific discourse and high-quality journalism are not strategic forms of communication. They are not supposed to pre-judge the outcome and try to convince. Rather, they are supposed to explore the truth in the company of their readers. To the extent that they communicate strategically, they are just interest groups, basically like all the others. They have goals; they may be willing to negotiate; but they cannot persuade on the basis of trust.

This analysis suggests a real dilemma. Dialogic communication won’t change mass opinion, and counting on it may put the earth at risk. But strategic communication is unethical and ultimately self-defeating. It’s the nightmarish side of modernity.

my past from the air

(In DC for the Everyday Democracy board meeting): We landed through clouds that ripped open just as we passed above the Kennedy Center, revealing Northwest DC spread out over the airplane wing. It was my seventh landing in DC this fall and probably my twentieth since we moved away from the city in July 2008. Before that, I had spent two decades there. For me, the panorama of Northwest represents the place where our children were born, I was married, unforgettable good and bad news arrived, and the ordinary rhythm of commuting and shopping played through my twenties and thirties. When I see that view disappearing on northward flights, I feel that my youth is also falling behind in a great chunk.

The view is of “DC,” the vernacular city of Metro trains, DC Public Schools, Safeways, summer evening concerts at the Zoo, and the dreaded DMV–not “Washington,” the federal city of power and glamor, nor “Washington,” the tourist destination with its museums and monuments. But the three cities intersect. If you live in bourgeois Northwest, you probably know people who know powerful and glamorous people, and you occasionally visit those museums and monuments by the Mall.

Today, while on a conference call by cell phone, I strolled through Oak Hill Cemetery, where lie Dean Acheson, Jefferson Davis’ infant son, Myrtilla Miner (an abolitionist who founded the DC Normal School for Colored Girls), dozens of congressmen, several descendants of Martha Washington, a man who was “promoted to Assistant Chief Engineer, DC Fire Department,” and a recently interred man with an Arab name and a quote from Khalil Gibran on his grave. They and many diverse others built the city that becomes one studded reliquary as you view it from the air.

civil society and social knowledge

For a forthcoming Handbook on Civil Society, I have committed to write the article on “civil society and social knowledge.” I may ask to change that title because I find, via Google, that “social knowledge” is commonly used in three ways that should not be the focus of my article for this Handbook. The phrase often means: (1) the knowledge that small children must acquire in order to be “social”; (2) the production of knowledge through social software, such as Wikipedia; or (3) the epistemological theory that knowledge is not objective but is “socially constructed” (a theory which I think is often grossly exaggerated, because facts are stubborn things).

I think the basic questions for my article should be:

  • What do most people (as individuals) need to know to make civil society work well? For instance, they might need to know their own rights, that others have rights, and which voluntary associations exist.

    The knowledge that citizens need to participate in civil society depends on (a) what we consider the proper role for civil society, and (b) what skills and dispositions are needed on a large scale to secure that kind of society. Answers to part (a) would differ greatly between libertarians and socialists, to name just two examples. Part (b) is empirical, but it depends on the preliminary question of what makes a good society.

    Political scientists and theorists who have endorsed de Tocqueville’s basic account of a good democratic system for the United States (i.e., one that is protective of individual rights and cultural diversity, decentralized, capitalistic, and moderately egalitarian) have assembled empirical evidence that certain values and skills are necessary, or at least helpful, to such a society. For example, Verba, Schlozman, and Brady (1995) identify the disposition to attend meetings where decisions are made, the skills necessary to function effectively in such meetings, and knowledge of how to convene such meetings as examples of valuable civic skills.

  • What do some people need to know (as individuals) to make civil society work well? Some people might need to know how to organize social movements or how to change policy through litigation. How many people need to know these things is a related question.
  • What should be known collectively to make a good civil society? For instance, no individual knows the whole history of a community, but it is good for the historical records and numerous narratives and interpretations of the community’s history to exist and to be accessible.
  • What knowledge does civil society generate? Much knowledge is created collectively–that is how science works, for instance. But I think the knowledge created by civil society is different, because everyone can participate in civil society by virtue of being a citizen, whereas scientists are defined by special skills, tools, and credentials.

    So what knowledge can everyone participate in creating through the associations of civil society? Michael Sandel famously wrote, “When politics goes well, we can know a good in common that we cannot know alone.” Sandel argued, and I agree, that the characteristic knowledge that we must obtain together is moral knowledge, knowledge of the good. We need others to know the good because moral judgments are heavily experiential, any individual’s perspective is biased, and there is no impartial algorithm or method that can identify the good. (Thus Sandel is a critic of utilitarianism and mainstream Kantianism, both of which propose such a method.)

at the Kettering Foundation

(Dayton, OH) I am here for a board meeting of the Kettering Foundation. I remember when I first arrived in Dayton: the summer of 1987 when I was 20. I came for a summer internship at Kettering. It was my first substantive job (apart from babysitting and cleaning a health club), my first summer with my own apartment, and my first time off the East Coast of the United States–although Dayton, an automotive city, turned out to have very much in common with my birthplace of Syracuse, NY. I was strongly reminded of that first summer because last night was Kettering’s annual holiday dinner, to which current and retired staff are invited. Most of the people I worked with in 1987 were at last night’s dinner.

The Kettering experience was formative for me. You could describe it as an experience in “deliberative democracy,” but I’d define the Foundation’s perspective differently. I would say that Kettering is fundamentally populist. There is a deep commitment to the idea that all people are fully capable of self-government. Barriers to popular self-government, including spurious claims to expertise, need to be challenged. Yet for the public to govern well, we have to do things. We have to evaluate the quality of public dialog and public work and take steps to improve it. Deliberation, in the form of the National Issues Forums that the Kettering Foundation launched, is just one means to that end.