Monthly Archives: October 2019

new chapter on Elinor Ostrom and Civic Studies

A newly published volume: Ostrom’s Tensions: Reexamining the Political Economy and Public Policy of Elinor C. Ostrom, edited by Paul Dragos Aligica, Peter J. Boettke, and Roberta Q. Herzberg.

I contribute a chapter entitled “’What Should We Do?’ The Bloomington School and the Citizen’s Core Question.”

I argue that Elinor Ostrom’s thought offers powerful resources for people who see themselves as active members of communities (“citizens”). I discuss her emphasis on means, not ends; her vantage point as a citizen, not a state; how she deals with value questions in policy; and her work as a complement to deliberative theory and non-violent social movement theory (Habermas and Gandhi).

Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World, 1914-1948 by Ramachandra Guha

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Guha’s biography is the essential work on Gandhi: much more detailed, better researched, and more persuasive than the earlier biographies that I know of. Volume Two, focusing on India, is 1,104 pages long but moves at a brisk pace. It’s detailed but never ponderous. The story is often suspenseful, even if you know how it will turn out in broad outlines. For example, just when all seems lost, Gandhi suddenly pulls off the Salt March. And the end of his life has the inexorability of a classical tragedy.

Guha generally proceeds chronologically, but now and then he pauses for an essay on a special topic, such as “Gandhi’s personal faith, his personal morality, as expressed in his words and actions in this decade of the 1920s.” The narrative is enlivened by numerous quotations from original documents, many never printed before. Along with Gandhi’s voice, we hear an amazing range of human beings who interacted with him or commented on him in one way or another, from Black American pastors to anarchists to the advertisers who used his silhouette as a brand.

One of the larger themes that emerged for me was Gandhi as polemicist. The Mahatma relished arguments, even though some of his opponents alienated and infuriated him. You could summarize his thought by capturing his long-lived debates with a few key rivals, especially B.R. Ambedkar and Muhammad Ali Jinnah. But he also sparred with many others.

For instance, I love to think of Margaret Sanger, the sex educator and popularizer of the phrase “birth control,” staying in Gandhi’s ashram and arguing with the celibate old man about first-wave feminism:

‘both seemed to be agreed that woman should be emancipated, that woman should be the arbiter of her destiny’. But whereas Mrs Sanger believed that contraceptives were the safest route to emancipation, Gandhi argued that women should resist their husbands, while men for their part should seek to curb ‘animal passion’. (p. 585)

Sanger was just one of scores of such visitors.

Guha is even-handed, judicious, and open-minded. Only at the end, in an epilogue on contemporary interpretations of Gandhi, does he emerge as a defender of his subject. By then, Guha has explored many flaws, errors, and vices, but he insists that Gandhi was far more complex and responsive than some of his critics have been. For instance:

[Arundhati Roy] presented Gandhi as a thoroughgoing apologist for caste, further arguing that this was in line with his views on race. Gandhi, she suggested, was casteist in India because he had been racist in South Africa. Roy claimed that Gandhi ‘feared and despised Africans’; this he certainly did in his twenties, but just as certainly did not in his forties and fifties. Reading Roy, one would not know that Gandhi decisively outgrew the racism of his youth, a fact that people of colour themselves acknowledged, and appreciated. … Roy has all of Ambedkar’s polemical zeal but none of his scholarship or sociological insight. … [She seeks] —by the technique of suppressio veri, suggestio falsi so beloved of ideologues down the ages—to prove a verdict they have arrived at beforehand.” (p. 876)

In contrast, Guha situates Gandhi in his time and cultural context, appreciates the Mahatma’s critics and opponents, explores his flaws and limitations (and occasional weirdness) at length, and paints a real-life portrait–which thereby emerges as a portrait of greatness.

Guha, Ramachandra. Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World, 1914-1948. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. See also: the question of sacrifice in politics (on Gandhi and Ambedkar); Gandhi versus Jinnah on means and ends; Gandhi on the primacy of means over ends; and notes on the metaphysics of Gandhi and King

Event: The Role of Play in Human Evolution and Public Life: Work, or Play?

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Please join us for this month’s Ludics Seminar at Harvard’s Mahindra Center to explore the role of play in human evolution and public life. Details are below:

Peter Gray, Boston College

Peter Levine, Tufts University

The Role of Play in Human Evolution and Public Life: Work, or Play?

Monday, October 28, 2019 – 6:00pm

Location TBA

PANEL SYNOPSIS

The Ludics Seminar, Mahindra Humanities Center, Harvard University will kick off its 2019-2020 series of talks with a panel discussion between Professor Peter Gray, Boston College, and Professor Peter Levine, Tufts University, on play and public life. Peter Gray will speak about his recent work on play and egalitarianism in hunter and gatherer cultures. Peter Levine will speak about Harry Boyte’s notion of public work, teasing out this binary between work and play in public life. If play is a corollary to egalitarianism as Peter Gray suggests, then why is the business of contributing to public life most often associated with work?

“The Role of Play in Human Evolution”
Peter Gray, Boston College
Humans are the only primate (apparently) that can live peacefully, or at least relatively so, in multi-male, multi-female social groups. From an evolutionary point of view, how did we manage that? I will suggest here, based on research among contemporary band hunter-gatherers, that we did it at least in part by expanding upon the general mammalian capacity for play and bringing it into adult social interactions.

“Civic Engagement as Public Work, or Play?”
Peter Levine, Tufts University
Often, acts of civic engagement are defined as acts that people undertake voluntarily without being paid, such as voting, protest, or discussing issues. The very definition of “volunteer service” is any work for other people that isn’t remunerated. This distinction between work and citizenship goes back to Aristotle. Harry Boyte and other proponents of “Public Work” have criticized it, arguing that it trivializes civic life by reducing it to after-work voluntarism and marginalizes the many ways that paid, employed people contribute to public spaces and institutions. The democracy of ancient Athens was not just a discussion among gentlemen; it was also a set of physical spaces–like the Pnyx, where discussions occurred–that people had built with their hands. However, we are not just public workers and artisans in the common world; we also like to play. We are homo ludens as well as homo faber. Designing civic engagement to be more play-like or game-like has been shown to make it more attractive and productive. So how should we think about the relationship between work and play in the civic domain? And what may happen to that relationship if work disappears for many human beings while opportunities for play expand?

BIOS
Peter Gray is a research professor of psychology at Boston College who has conducted and published research in neuroendocrinology, developmental psychology, anthropology, and education. He is author of an internationally acclaimed introductory psychology textbook (Psychology, Worth Publishers, now in its 8th edition, co-authored with David Bjorklund), which views all of psychology from an evolutionary perspective. His recent research focuses on the role of play in human evolution and how children educate themselves, through play and exploration, when they are free to do so. He has expanded on these ideas in his book, Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life (Basic Books). He also authors a regular blog called Freedom to Learn, for Psychology Today magazine. He is a founding member and president of the nonprofit Alliance for Self-Directed Education (ASDE), which is aimed at creating a world in which children’s natural ways of learning are facilitated rather than suppressed. He is also a founding board director of the nonprofit Let Grow, the mission of which is to renew children’s freedom to play and explore outdoors, independently of adults. He earned his undergraduate degree at Columbia College and Ph.D. in biological sciences at the Rockefeller University many years ago. His own current play includes kayaking, long-distance bicycling, backwoods skiing, and vegetable gardening.

Peter Levine is the Academic Dean and Lincoln Filene Professor of Citizenship & Public Affairs in Tufts University’s Jonathan Tisch College of Civic Life. He has tenure in Tufts’ Political Science Department, and he also has secondary appointments in the Tufts Philosophy Department and the Tufts Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute. He directs the Civic Studies Major at Tufts. Levine graduated from Yale in 1989 with a degree in philosophy. He studied philosophy at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, receiving his doctorate in 1992. From 1991 until 1993, he was a research associate at Common Cause. From 1993-2008, he was a member of the Institute for Philosophy & Public Policy in the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy. During the late 1990s, he was also Deputy Director of the National Commission on Civic Renewal. Levine was the founding deputy director (2001-6) and then the second director (2006-15) of Tisch College’s CIRCLE, The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement.
Levine is the author of We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: The Promise of Civic Renewal in America (Oxford University Press, 2013), five other scholarly books on philosophy and politics, and a novel. He has served on the boards or steering committees of AmericaSpeaks, Street Law Inc., the Newspaper Association of America Foundation, the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools, Discovering Justice, the Kettering Foundation, the American Bar Association’s Committee for Public Education, the Paul J. Aicher Foundation, and the Deliberative Democracy Consortium.

the “America in One Room” experiment

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On the New York Times op-ed page today, James Fishkin and Larry Diamond report the results of convening 523 randomly selected registered voters for several days of deliberation. These voters were surveyed before and after the discussions. Their appraisal of democracy rose markedly. They also shifted their views in specific ways:

The most polarizing proposals, whether from the left or the right, generally lost support, and a number of more centrist proposals moved to the foreground. Crucially, proposals further to the right typically lost support from Republicans and proposals further to the left typically lost support from Democrats.

I have known Jim Fishkin and his work for 20 years and admire it a lot. These experiments are illuminating, and they open possibilities for reform. They also remind us that the politics we see around is the outcome of specific institutional arrangements that could be changed. For instance, we are not hard-wired to fall into two partisan camps; that is a feature of our electoral system. If we were randomly recruited into deliberative bodies, we would see very different results. If we can change something, we should consider changing it.

But I do have some worries:

Does the shift to moderate opinions demonstrate that deliberation is desirable? It could also be interpreted as a bias: putting people together in heterogeneous groups disadvantages the radicals and their ideas. I try to challenge myself by seriously engaging several opposing political movements with which I disagree. That is my own approach to deliberation, and it could be considered a form of moderation. But I don’t find myself shifting to centrist positions, many of which I find thin gruel and incommensurate to our problems.
What is the overall theory of change? If we like this alternative form of politics–much more deliberative, and also more moderate, than the status quo–how should we institutionalize it? The easy part is to invent policies that would make democratic deliberation mandatory. The hard part is figuring out who would fight for those policies, and why. More people are motivated by political agendas and identities than by procedural ideals, and especially procedures that favor the center.
What about people who are not invited to deliberate, or who don’t like the results of the deliberation? Do we see them as worse qualified to express themselves?
Is this experiment a form of civic education that teaches people to value interactions that are civil, professionally organized, calm, and “invited”–thereby implicitly devaluing such forms of politics as social movements, strikes, competitive elections, and litigation? If that is the lesson, is it an acceptable one?