Monthly Archives: September 2018

nonviolent civic work under conditions of extreme violence

My Tufts colleague Anjuli N. Fahlberg, a sociologist, has done extraordinary work in Rio de Janeiro’s City of God. Despite a staggering level of violence in that neighborhood, the residents have created a wide array of impressive initiatives that offer social services, education, and culture and promote social justice. Local activists are networked with peers in other communities they have been effective at the national level in Brazil.

Anjuli helps rebut the claim that “civic engagement” is only for privileged people. She also reveals interesting patterns that may generalize to other places. For example:

CBO [community-based organization] leaders had to monitor their activities and tactics closely so as not to conflict with the political and economic interests of the drug trade. They did this in several ways. For one, they decidedly avoided local politics, which meant avoiding any contact with political or community leaders known to be working for the drug trade and declining favors from local political candidates. … Since Solange and other CBOs refused to engage in violent governance, they found power in its opposite: moral governance. Moral governance emphasized transparency, fairness, equality, justice, and the use of resources for their stated activities. Notably, nearly all CBO leaders were women and thus offered a visual, embodied distinction from violent politics, which were controlled almost entirely by men.

This is from Anjuli N. Fahlberg, “Rethinking Favela Governance: Nonviolent Politics in Rio de Janeiro’s Gang Territories,” Politics & Society, September 11, 2018. Read the whole thing. You can also watch Anjuli’s talk at last year’s Frontiers of Democracy conference, here:

churchgoing and Trump

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The Democracy Fund’s Voter Study Group has released an important new paper by Emily Ekins entitled, “Religious Trump Voters: How Faith Moderates Attitudes about Immigration, Race, and Identity.”

Ekins notes that Trump performed best in the 2016 GOP primaries among Republican voters who never attend church (getting 69% of their vote). Examining Trump voters during 2018, she finds correlations between regularity of church attendance and positive attitudes toward racial and religious minorities, acceptance of diversity, approval of immigration (and opposition to the border wall), and concern about poverty.

Here I illustrate that pattern with attitudes toward Black people as the dependent variable. The trend line controls for race, gender, income, education, and age. All the data come from Trump voters. Because the correlation between church attendance and racial attitudes among Trump voters holds with these controls, Ekins suggests that it is causal.

This might not be a case of cause-and-effect. A third factor might underlie both tolerance and church attendance. However, I posited a similar causal hypothesis early in 2017, after I’d met with a conservative Southern pastor who despised Trump’s leadership style and attitudes. This pastor blamed Trump’s support on coach-potato “Christians,” those for whom Christianity is an identity rather than an actual faith, those who get their ideas from Fox News or Breitbart, not from fellow congregants.

Some colleagues and I tried to test this hypothesis using survey data and failed to find it, which is a null result worth noting. Still, I’d like to think that Ekins is right—perhaps more so in 2018 than in 2016.

Why would this pattern hold?

First, Ekins shows that church-attending Trump supporters volunteer and trust other people much more than Trump supporters who rarely or never attend Church. It may be that people who help others and feel they can rely on others are less likely to despise and fear strangers. In turn, church-attendance may promote volunteering and trust, or it may manifest a broader form of social capital that explains both tolerance and church-attendance.

Robert Putnam introduced a distinction between “bridging” and “bonding” social capital. The bridging kind connects people who are diverse in some respects; the bonding kind may increase solidarity in opposition to outsiders. One could imagine that churches enhance bonding social capital. America is said to be most segregated on Sunday mornings, and churches distinguish insiders from outsiders. But volunteering and trusting generic others are measures of bridging, not bonding, social capital. Insofar as churches encourage volunteering, they are trying to create bridging social capital.

Another mechanism could be leadership. Real churches have leaders, both clergy and laypeople. Church leaders are expected to be responsive and responsible and to hold the group together. In contrast, Trump just says whatever comes into his mind, usually makes no effort to deliver what he promises, and is happy to divide. I have hypothesized that people who are familiar with real leadership in local voluntary associations would despise Trump’s style. Although we were unable to show that pattern using survey data, Ekins’ new results may suggest that it holds.

A third mechanism could be the content of the faith. I happen not to be religious, and I could criticize the specific content of many sermons and texts on ethical grounds. I am aware that there are mega-churches that show huge audiences jingoistic videos of American military might; there are clerics who praise Trump or cite Romans 13 to defend the administration’s policies. In my opinion, these examples are idolatrous as well as unjust, but my argument does not depend on romanticizing the content of religious expression.

I would argue, instead, that real faith is demanding. You can find passages and examples that reinforce bigotry, but you will also encounter texts that challenge you. Faith may be consistent with almost any policy position—as we can see from the enormous range of political opinions among clergy—yet participation in a deep and complex religious community is inconsistent with all simplistic attitudes about other people. Cable news and propagandistic websites reinforce what their audiences want to hear, but scripture is strange and demanding. Since religious texts are very hard to figure out by oneself, they require discussion and debate. In turn, the people in any given discussion usually turn out to have idiosyncratic and incompatible interpretations. This is why Martin Luther, despite his break with The Church, believed that we all need a church to keep us honest. Even if the content of preaching and liturgy doesn’t turn us into people who understand and care for others, the decision to attend a service may reflect a desire to become such a person.

In short, religion as a pure identity: bad. Religion as a community of people who struggle to address issues of moral and existential importance: good. Voters who actually attend church are more likely to experience the good form of religion, compared to those who identify as Christians without showing up on Sunday.

undergraduate Introduction to Civic Studies Course

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PHIL-0020-01-Intro to Civic Studies at Tufts University (Fall 2018)

Ioannis D. Evrigenis, Professor of Political Science
Erin I. Kelly, Professor of Philosophy
Peter Levine, Lincoln-Filene Professor and Academic Dean, Tisch College

Civic Studies is an interdisciplinary field of study that focuses on critical reflection, ethical thinking, and action for social change. People who think and act together to improve society must address problems of collective action (how to get members to work together) and deliberation (how to reason together about contested values). They must understand how power is organized and how it operates within and between societies. They must grapple with social conflict, violence, and other obstacles to peaceful cooperation. When tensions arise within a group, people face questions of justice and fairness, and they must confront questions about appropriate relationships to outsiders of all types. This introductory course explores ethical, political, and theological frameworks for understanding how people can and should organize themselves to improve societies. Readings are drawn from philosophy and political theory, economics, the history of social movements, and other disciplines. This course provides theoretical grounding for Civic Studies majors and for other students interested in social change.

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V.S. Naipaul’s view of culture

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I read a lot of Naipaul in my youth and see value in his work. But Ian Buruma’s obituary profile reminds me of the main way in which I disagreed with him.

Naipaul believed there were “whole cultures”: comprehensive, harmonious, indigenous, and hermetic. Examples included classical India, England, and pre-colonial West Africa. A whole culture was “wounded” when it was mixed up with foreign elements, usually as a result of conquest or deferential imitation.

Naipaul was politically incorrect in three respects. He admired the “whole cultures” of Europe, such as England, and emphasized their indigenous roots. He saw many interventions as imperialistic–not just European conquests but, for example, the Islamic influence in India or the Arab influence on non-Arab Muslims. And he mocked people in the global South who made unsophisticated efforts to imitate the imperial centers: West Indians pretending to be British, or Malays pretending to be Arabs.

On the other hand, Naipaul was in sync with certain strains of post-colonial thought: he liked indigeneity and opposed cultural appropriation.

It’s true that “cosmopolitan” was a positive word in Naipaul’s lexicon, and he claimed to be cosmopolitan himself. But he insisted that a cosmopolitan was at home in more than one culture, truly understanding and living it. Lightly borrowing some elements of other cultures didn’t count:

[Satyajit] Ray was a Bengali intellectual and artist who was as much at home in European as in Indian culture. He loved Indian art and music as much as European classical music or literature, and had a deep knowledge of all these things. The fact that most of us eat American junk food, or watch Hollywood movies, doesn’t make us necessarily more cosmopolitan. To be cosmopolitan you need to feel at home in various different cultures, as Ray did, and few people do even now. As far as the shrinking world is concerned, this is easy to exaggerate.

For what it’s worth, I believe:

There is no indigeneity. We have all migrated. Not only people but also ideas move constantly. Every group has been deeply influenced by other groups for as far back as we can see.
There are no whole cultures. A culture is an assemblage of ideas about the world (defining both “ideas” and “world” broadly). Since everyone holds at least slightly different ideas, labeling people as members of a culture just means that most of them share some important ideas. It’s a statistical generalization about the beliefs of a population. Furthermore, the ideas that we happen to hold are always badly insufficient, and we are always looking for more. Because of our profound human limitations–cognitive and imaginative–every culture is drastically incomplete.
Mixing is good. India, for example, is not a “wounded civilization” because the original Hindu whole has been rent by Muslims and Europeans. It is a fabulous quilt of diversity, and has been for three millennia. Even the Hindu aspect is massively diverse.
Imitation is good, although you have to do it with creativity, respect, and taste. Some of Naipaul’s most effective criticism was aimed at poor efforts at imitation.
Imperialism is bad. But that’s not because it disrupts indigeneity and cultural harmony or because it introduces ideas that should stay somewhere else. It’s bad because it involves forcibly seizing land and goods while usually also killing, exploiting, and (literally) raping people. The bad part is the violence and exploitation, not the mixing.

from classical liberalism to a civic perspective

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Earlier this summer, I was in the van Mises Room in the Friedrich von Hayek Program in the James Buchanan Building at George Mason University, talking about my intellectual hero, Elinor Ostrom, who learned a great deal from Hayek and Buchanan. This is a sketch of how I presented my own position. By the way, the audience was ideologically diverse, and each attendee held nuanced views; but I wanted to say something about the people for whom the space was named.

Hayek objected to thinking about “social justice” for two reasons that I endorse. First, no person or group has nearly enough cognitive or moral capacity to decide what everyone deserves across a whole society. Second, thinking about “social justice” encourages ideas about what the state should do to make the society just and to keep it just. I’ve collected quotations from a wide range of political theorists who move quickly from ideas of social justice to blueprints for states. There’s an interesting “tell” in Philip Pettit’s influential book Republicanism when he distinguishes between the objectives of “the authorities” (people who exercise power in a republican system) from what “we, as system designers” seek. He imagines his readers to be system-designers, but we are not that. We are participants in existing systems. And if we had the power to design and enact a real polity, we should be primarily concerned with humility and with placing limits on our own power to dictate to others. Hundreds of millions of people were shot or gassed in the 1900s by people who thought their job was to design polities and who had opportunities to do so.

The main question that confronts us is what should we do, not what regime should we live in. If I could choose which country I’d like mine to resemble–Denmark, Burkina Faso, or North Korea?–I would vote for Denmark. But I don’t need an elaborate theory to help me answer that question, nor do I need a theoretical rationale for my choice. Interestingly, everyone from a classical liberal to a social democrat would concur. It appears that well- designed, balanced regimes that rest on strong civic cultures optimize both freedom and equality.

I can vote on whether to make the US a little more like Denmark, and that is the way I usually choose to vote (i.e., for candidates of the left or center-left in our system). But my vote is far from the most consequential civic decision I make, and those candidates won’t redesign our regime. Like me, they are embedded in complex systems that they seek to adjust from where they are.

However, none of the above means that we should cease assessing the justice, fairness, and desirability of the situations that we observe around us. In fact, we must not only assess but try to remedy the injustices we see. That is our duty as ethical persons. We can think about social justice as members of a society, not as designers of it.

In a polycentric world, we are participants in many overlapping and nested political, economic, cultural, linguistic, and natural systems, all at once. We are immanent in these systems but we can influence them. We have moves to make in the “games” that we find ourselves in, but we can also change the rules or shift to different games. We are public entrepreneurs who can choose where and how to exercise leverage.

As such, we have much to gain from Vincent and Elinor Ostrom and the Bloomington School of Political Economy. First, we obtain the concept of polycentricity itself and a theory of ourselves as a participants in numerous interrelated systems. Second, the Institutional Analysis and Development Framework gives us a way of identifying the “action arenas,” “contexts,” “actors,” etc. that we must understand in order to be effective. Third, the list of design principles that Lin Ostrom and colleagues gleaned from experiments and observations is not only useful for practice–which it is–but it also exemplifies a process of gleaning rule-of-thumb guidelines from complex reality.

Yet the Bloomington School does not suffice. It focuses on certain problems that confront groups of people–e.g., how to encourage contributions and discourage free-riding–but not on other problems, such as how to deal with disagreements about principles or about the justice of boundaries among groups. The School offers a response to power asymmetries (basically, the classical liberal response of reducing concentrated power and encouraging people to manage their own concerns at the local level). This response is important but it doesn’t satisfy me as way of dealing with massive disparities in wealth and power or oppressive mentalities and norms.

Finally, the Bloomington School’s concrete suggestions (when abstracted from its philosophical background) are too value-neutral. The design principles, for example, would be just as useful for fascists as for democrats; just as useful for a cocaine cartel as for a community hospital.

We need to know what is right. As human beings, we lack direct access to certainties about ethics and justice. Our intuitions and are badly fallible. Most of our forebears had terrible values, and we are also subject to error for the same reasons they were. The best we can do is to listen and learn from people who have different values and interests from our own. Under the heading of “listening and learning,” I include not only discourse and deliberation but also art and narrative.

Thus we need a theory of communication, a theory that helps us to avoid propaganda and ideology, to distinguish good rhetorical moves from bad ones, and to design good formats for discussion (broadly defined). For that theory, I’d look to the Frankfurt School more than the Bloomington School, to Habermas more than the Ostroms.

And both the Frankfurt School and the Bloomington School are most helpful for relatively stable situations in which a community exists and faces problems of collective action or of disagreement. These schools are less helpful for moments when a community needs to be formed, when some people are excluded from a community that they have a right to join, or when some people want to exit a system that they find oppressive. For these situations, we need the tradition of nonviolent civil resistance represented by Gandhi and King. I come to that tradition without a fixed commitment to pacifism (I happen to think that some wars are just). Instead, I believe we can learn general principles from cases in which people forego violence yet still confront power.

The Bloomington School offers a framework: a cluster of theories, models, theses, and findings. I think we need a larger framework that encompasses the Bloomington School plus theories of deliberation and of nonviolence.