Monthly Archives: December 2018

against inevitability

These are examples of social theories that emphasize inevitability:

  • Classical Marxism: “[The bourgeoisie’s] fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.” — Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto
  • Rational choice theory: What defines the tragedy of the commons is the “solemnity of the relentless working of things,” “the inevitableness of destiny,” and “the futility of escape” — Garret Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons” (quoting Alfred North Whitehead about tragedy)
  • Skepticism about Great Men: “But the mysterious forces that move humanity (mysterious because the laws of their motion are unknown to us) continued to operate. Though the surface of the sea of history seemed motionless, the movement of humanity went on as unceasingly as the flow of time. Various groups of people formed and dissolved, the coming formation and dissolution of kingdoms and displacement of peoples was in course of preparation.” –Tolstoy, War and Peace
  • Progressivism: “The current has set steadily in one direction: toward democratic forms” — John Dewey, The Public and its Problems
  • A small-d democratic version: “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 (attributed)

One thing that unites the disparate authors in our canon of Civic Studies authors is a refusal to accept any of these forms of inevitability.

Elinor Ostrom was part of the rational choice tradition, but she argued that whether we succumb to collective action problems–including today’s peril of climate change–depends on how we organize ourselves. It is neither a tragedy nor a comedy but a “drama.” She found that bottom-up solutions sometimes worked, and their chances of working depending on whether the participants used smart practices.

Jürgen Habermas came out of the Frankfurt School, which had assumed that capitalism inevitably blocks free inquiry and emancipatory reason. He also read theorists like Dewey, for whom (at least in my interpretation) emancipation is inevitable. Habermas holds, instead, that how well we reason and deliberate depends on how we organize our public life, and we have a chance to improve it if we work hard and wisely.

Gandhi and Martin Luther King confronted people who were deeply skeptical of nonviolent resistance, as well as quietist religious believers who preferred to wait for providence to sort things out. Their constant refrain was that we have a chance to improve the world if we try. Social science confirms that civil resistance sometimes works–and more often than violence does–although it depends on how the resistance is organized. During the century after Gandhi’s youth, the record of civil resistance improved, as activists learned better tactics, but lately, its record has gotten worse due to the autocrats’ ability to learn from their experience.

A major 20th century debate was about the relative importance of structure versus agency. Is history driven by inevitable processes or by intentional human action? The answer to that empirical question is: Some of both. But a much better question is: How can we enhance the better forms of human agency? The role of theory is not to weigh the past impact of structure and agency but to make agency more important in the future.

See also: beyond civic pietyOstrom, Habermas, and Gandhi are all we need and Habermas, Ostrom, Gandhi (II).

Defending the Truth: An Activist’s Guide to Fighting Foreign Disinformation Warfare

(Dayton, OH) I recommend Maciej Bartkowski’s Defending the Truth: An Activist’s Guide to Fighting Foreign Disinformation Warfare from the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict. It’s free, concise, practical, and inspiring.

Some examples of advice:

Establish local networks that can be rapidly activated to verify accuracy of shared information or legitimacy of online personas that call for certain actions in the community.

Educate, drill, and practice. … Teach how to identify a deep fake and conspiracy theories and ways to react to them.

Be aware of anonymous interlocutors who attempt to draw you to causes that seemingly align with your own activism goals. Ask them to reveal their identities first before committing to anything. … Do your homework by vetting your potential partners. Perform due diligence by asking the following questions: Who are these anonymous personas asking me to join an online protest group or alive street protest? Do they know anything about my community? Who do they represent? …

Insist on a degree of self-control in community interactions. Civility does not preclude a conflict, but conflict must always be carried  out through disciplined, nonviolent means.

Declare your commitment to truth and verifiable facts, including making public and honest corrections if you inadvertently shared inaccurate information or joined actions set up by fake personas. Praise those who adhere to truth or publicly retract untruthful information that they might have previously shared.

Stress the importance of truth in community as a matter of inviolable human rights. There are no human rights without state institutions being truthful to citizens. There is no public truth without respect for human rights.

 

the justice-oriented citizen had better be personally responsible and participatory

Joel Westheimer’s and Joe Kahne’s typology of civic education programs and their intended outcomes is justly seminal in the field of civic education.* Many civics people are familiar with their distinctions among “personally responsible,” “participatory” and “justice-oriented” citizens as the goals of real-world programs and curricula. Most reflective educators favor the last type, although the first type is the most common in everyday practice.

Discussing their article in an undergraduate course in which we also read Martin Luther King, Jr’s book Stride Toward Freedom, I was struck by how perfectly the first two columns describe the people who won the struggle of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. They “volunteer[ed] to lend a hand” so that thousands of Black workers could get to and from their workplaces without using the segregated buses. They had long traditions of belonging and tithing to churches, so they could be organized in their pews to support a boycott. They “obeyed laws,” except when they broke very specific laws as part of civil disobedience campaigns, and they followed the emergent rules of their own movement. They knew “how government agencies worked”–so well that they won federal lawsuits. And they were brilliant at “strategies for accomplishing collective tasks.”

To be sure, they were also justice-oriented. That is why I cite them as an example. Justice rolled down like waters. But imagine a bunch of individuals who “critically assessed” the “structures” of white supremacy and “explored” its “root causes,” asking whether it was fundamentally based in racism, or imperialism, or capitalism, or in-group bias, or law and government, or the fallen state of Man. These people might be justice-oriented but completely ineffective–hence complicit in the maintenance of the system.

If most schools try to impart personal responsibility and evade the question of justice, then it’s important to put the debate about justice on the educational agenda. But in circles where people are eager to debate the root causes of injustice, it’s vital to study how to identify levers for change, organize individuals to contribute their time and effort, and get things done.

Source: Westheimer, Joel, and Joseph Kahne. “Educating the “good” citizen: Political choices and pedagogical goals.” PS: Political Science & Politics 37.2 (2004): 241-247. See also: against root cause analysisincreasing the odds of success for young people’s civic worksocial movements depend on social capital (but you can make your own); and the kind of sacrifice required in nonviolence

democracy is coming to the USA

Here is the racial/ethnic composition of the Democratic House caucus for the next Congress.*

I do not display this ratio to endorse the Democrats (or to ignore the people of color who are GOP House members), but simply because the Democrats will control the business of the House. Any substantial voting bloc within the Democratic caucus will have leverage. Starting in January, 42 percent of the caucus will be people of color, and roughly another quarter will be white women.

Nobody awarded these representatives their jobs; they won campaigns. And within the caucus, two of the five top leaders will be African Americans; a third leader will be Latino.

In the great sweep of history, we have seen Europeans dominate the globe: genocidally replacing whole populations, transporting millions as enslaved people, and directly colonizing or else economically exploiting most other countries.

In North America, some of them created a republic on land that their ancestors had taken by force, writing slavery into its charter. But the republic also made an appeal to equality, and the indigenous and enslaved people helped to build its physical assets and its culture from the start. Its people gradually turned this republic into more of a democracy, often against the will of a majority of the citizens of European extraction, but with key support from some of them.

And now we are seeing glimpses of a future in which the descendants of enslaved people and dispossessed people and refugees and economic migrants will hold a controlling stake in the world’s most powerful nation. For eight years, the son of a Kenyan man was the chief executive and the head of state. The governing party in the US House is still majority-white, but now just by a whisker. Nothing will pass the House without substantial support from members of color within the Democratic caucus.

The prime minister of Ireland is of Indian extraction. Many European countries score higher than the US on standard measures of equity. But nowhere in Europe will descendants of the Global South form a durable governing majority. Nor have people of color been part of their cultures all along. In the US, the backlash to equality is powerful, resistance is strong, and success is by no means inevitable. Still, if we listen hard, we can hear some of Leonard Cohen’s music beginning to play:

It’s coming to America first
The cradle of the best and of the worst
It’s here they got the range
And the machinery for change
And it’s here they got the spiritual thirst
[…]
Democracy is coming to the USA

*Data from USA Today on Nov. 12. The current tally may be slightly different, and I did not fact-check whether anyone who belongs to two minority groups was counted twice. But this is close to accurate.