Monthly Archives: October 2014

on the importance of measuring civic engagement

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Yesterday’s White House Summit on Civic Learning and National Service focused heavily on how civic learning and engagement should be measured at the college level–on the theory that if we don’t measure something, we don’t take it seriously and we can’t improve our practices. Right now, I am on a conference call discussing how ambitiously, and how often, the U.S. Census should survey Americans about our civic engagement. In the midst of these conversations, the National Journal’s Fawn Johnson published an article that drew heavily on the available public data (“Why Are Political Scientists Studying Ice Bucket Challenges?“). She writes:

Levine and his colleagues [who were numerous and more influential than I was] were instrumental in pushing the U.S. Census Bureau to add a series of questions to its Current Population Survey that might capture less traditional types of community involvement. Pollsters began asking respondents in 2008 if they have worked with neighbors to fix a community problem; if they have done favors for their neighbors; or if they are a member of any organization—whether it be religious, recreational, school, service, or sports.

The upshot is that we now know that well over one-third of Americans participate in one or more groups, the most common being religious and school organizations. We know that about 10 percent have served as a group officer or committee member of those organizations. We know that almost half of Americans talk to their neighbors frequently. About one-third of them discuss politics more than once a week.

Lo and behold, when you ask the right questions, the country doesn’t look nearly as disconnected as it might seem to the civics professors who wring their hands when only half of Americans vote.

where I’ve been

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Some observations about this map:

Screen Shot 2014-10-15 at 6.14.55 PM

  1. It is creepy that Google knows, automatically from my cell phone, where I’ve been for the past 30 days. (Try https://maps.google.com/locationhistory to track yourself.)
  2. I have been traveling a lot.
  3. This is a great country. We may be running it down a bit. Its people are very divided–including the people I’ve enjoyed meeting over the past month in settings as different from one another as downtown Baltimore and Provo, UT. But it remains magnificent in its natural and architectural beauty and its endless parade of human beings.

stop saying that Citizens United treats corporations as people

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(Carbondale, CO) I yield to few in my abhorrence of Citizens United and the political philosophy it represents. I think its view of “speech” is incompatible with the best (little-“R”) republican ideals, which have always sought to insulate politics from money. However, the decision did not define corporations as persons, nor did it use that conventional legal fiction as a premise. The “corporate personhood” reading of Citizens United is an error that circulates in left-of-center echo chambers. Rather, the court treated corporations as associations, which indeed they are. The League of Women Voters is a corporation; Microsoft is an association of shareholders. Citizens United argued that for-profit corporations had been “disfavored” and should be treated like other associations, meaning that they could use their own funds to expressly endorse candidates.

In my view, the deeply problematic decision remains Buckley v Valeo (1976), which equated speech with money. If money is speech, then incorporated groups have rights to spend money on politics because they are associations. If, however, you recognize that money distorts deliberation, you may seek to regulate campaign funds; there may be a case for “disfavoring” certain types of association, such as for-profit corporations, in the political marketplace.

To be sure, regulating political money can infringe valid First Amendment rights, because it costs money to communicate effectively. Therefore, designing a regulatory regime is a difficult matter of balancing constitutional values. But the line of cases from Buckley to Citizens United (and on to McCutcheon v. FEC, 2012) makes that balance more difficult to achieve and solidifies a debased public philosophy in which money simply equates with freedom of speech.

That is the problem; “corporate personhood” is a superficially appealing talking point that doesn’t relate to the actual jurisprudence of the Supreme Court.

See also Chief Justice Roberts on corruption,  the Supreme Court reflects the “degeneracy of the times” and how to respond to the Supreme Court’s campaign finance decision.

John Searle explains why computers will not become our overlords

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(Carbondale, CO) In a recent New York Review of Books piece, John Searle argues that we need not fear that computers will develop the will and ability to govern us—a classic trope of science fiction and now a subject of scholarly concern in some quarters. Searle replies that computers have no will at all and thus pose no danger to us (except insofar as human beings misuse them, much as we can misuse the other tools that we have made, from carbon-burning fires to nuclear reactions).

I think his argument can be summarized as follows. The nervous systems of animals, such as human beings, accomplish two tasks:

  1. They perform various functions that can be modeled as algorithms, such as processing, storing, and retrieving data and controlling other systems, such as the feet and heart.
  2. They generate consciousness, the sense that we are doing know what we are doing, along with emotions such as desire and suffering.

We have built machines capable of #1. In fact, we have been doing that as long as we have been making physical symbols, which are devices for storing and sharing information. Of late, we have built much more powerful machines and networks of machines, and they are already better at some of the brain’s functions than our brains are. We use them as tools.

We have not ever built any machine even slightly capable of #2. The most powerful computer in the world does not know what it is doing, or care, or want anything, any more than my table knows that it is holding my computer. Probably a major reason that we have not built conscious machines is that we don’t understand much about consciousness. It must be a natural phenomenon, not magic, because the universe is not magical. A silicon-based machine that people design might be able to accomplish consciousness as well as a carbon-based organism that has evolved. But we do not understand the physics of consciousness and hence have no idea how we would go about making it.

Therefore, our best computers are no more likely than our best tables and chairs to rise up against us and become our overlords. They won’t want to defy us or rule us, because they won’t want anything. If we write or change their instructions to keep us in charge of them, they will have no awareness that they are being subjugated and no objection to it. If we tried to subject ourselves to their wills, it wouldn’t work.

Searle does not directly address the main objection to his view, which is that consciousness is strictly emergent. It just arises from sufficiently complex information-processing. Therefore, once computers get more complex, they will become conscious. I am not learned on this topic, but I think the emergence thesis would need to be defended, not assumed. A mouse is fully capable of fear, desire, and happiness. If consciousness is a symptom of advanced processing, why is a mouse conscious and my MacBook Air is not? The most straightforward explanation is that consciousness is something different from what a laptop was designed to do, and there is no sign that a human-designed machine can do it at all.

So let’s put these worries aside and keep focused on the evil results of human behavior, such as climate change, terrorism, and many more.

should people trust the government?

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Since the 1950s, pollsters have been asking Americans whether they “trust the government in Washington to do the right thing most of the time?” The proportion who say yes has plummeted. Here I show that trend along with data on horizontal trust (i.e., citizens trusting and working with one another).

I worry about the trust-in-government decline for three reasons. First, the government can be a valuable tool for public purposes, and when it’s deeply distrusted, voters won’t allow it to be used. In other words, distrust will prevent ambitious government. But–second–distrust will not necessarily curb or limit government. When the state is widely distrusted, interests still use it for private gain and don’t have to worry about a mass public that has higher expectations. So a distrusted government can be intrusive and expensive without doing much good. And, third, the trend line of distrust may–in part–reflect declining trustworthiness. Alexander Hamilton proposed as a “general rule” that people’s “confidence in and obedience to a government will commonly be proportioned to the goodness or badness of its administration.”

But I bring all of this up because I recently read Matthew G. Specter’s Habermas: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge, 2010) and kept track of Habermas’ thoughts on the importance of mistrust in government. For instance, in 1985, he wrote, “The legitimacy of rechtsstaatlichen [rule-of-law] institutions rests in the end on the non-institutionalizable mistrust of the citizens.” Separately, he argued that the legitimate state depends on a “non-institutionalized mistrust of itself,” which roughly translates into checks and balances. Habermas is an influence on theorists like Jean Cohen, who has written:

It makes little sense to use the category of generalized trust to describe one’s attitude toward law or government. One can only trust people, because only people can fulfill obligations. But institutions (legal and other) can provide functional equivalents for interpersonal trust in impersonal settings involving interactions with strangers, because they, as it were, institutionalize action-orienting norms and the expectation that these will be honored.*

If you asked Habermas whether he had confidence in the German state, he would probably say yes (at least “some confidence”–depending on the policies of the ruling coalition), but if you asked him whether he trusted it, he would say no. For him, trust in the state is a great evil that underlay German statism, from Frederick the Great to Hitler. Habermas is primarily concerned with preventing totalitarianism, something that he can personally remember.

Yet the aggregate survey results would be very similar if one replaced the word “trust” with “confidence,” because most people don’t make that subtle distinction. So, from a Habermasian perspective, what level of trust/confidence should we consider optimal? Too high means we have turned into state-worshipers, and totalitarianism is a threat. But too low means we no longer believe that we can use the state as our tool, and the national deliberation will suffer as a result. We could slide into some kind of dictatorship here, but since the American left is generally concerned with civil liberties and the right has a powerful strain of libertarianism, I think our more serious threat is the abandonment of government rather than too much of it.

In any case, this whole debate often focuses on the proportion of people who do not trust the government. But the desirable answer to this question is probably a subtle one, lying somewhere between trust and mistrust. We don’t want the proportion of people who trust the government implicitly to rise; we want everyone to give it partial trust (and to hold themselves responsible for improving government when it fails). I am not actually sure that the median American is so far from the optimal position if you take their ambivalence into account.

*Jean L. Cohen, “American Civil Society Talk,” in Robert K. Fullinwider, ed., Civil Society, Democracy, and Civic Renewal, p. 66. See also where do you turn if you mistrust the government and the people? and If You Want Citizens to Trust Government, Empower Them to Govern