the youth turnout story so far

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From CIRCLE’s release this morning: “An estimated 1.8 million young people participated in Super Tuesday’s primaries and caucuses, almost a million youth in the Democratic contests and around 900,000 in the Republican contests. With a number of strong showings across many states, young people continued this year’s trend of high participation that rivals the numbers from 2008, when youth turnout in some cases tripled that of previous years. Young Republican participation, especially, has increased compared to 2008, sometimes by dramatic amounts. And in both parties young people are still not rallying around the frontrunners.”

CIRCLE also has a nifty new interactive tool that allows you to compare recent presidential campaigns’ youth support. One takeaway for me: Sanders is mobilizing almost as many young voters as Obama did in ’08. (Sanders’ percentage is larger, but the actual number is a bit smaller.) The young Obama voters in ’08 were on a bus that drove all the way to the White House. The Sanders voters will not have such a smooth ride. What difference will that make to their development as citizens and activists?

register for Frontiers of Democracy 2016

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The annual Frontiers of Democracy conference will take place on June 23-25, 2016 at Tufts University’s downtown Boston campus. Please use this form to register and hold a place.

We will hear brief, inspiring “short take” talks from speakers who will include:

  • Danielle Allen, Harvard University, author of Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality (2014)
  • Laura Grattan, Wellesley College, author of Populism’s Power: Radical Grassroots Democracy in America (2016)
  • Joseph Hoereth, Director of the Institute for Policy and Civic Engagement at the University of Illinois at Chicago
  • Hélène Landemore, Yale University, author of Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many (2012)
  • Frances Moore Lappé, Small Planet Institute and author of 18 books including Democracy’s Edge: Choosing to Save Our Country by Bringing Democracy to Life,
  • Talmon J. Smith, Tufts ’16, a Huffington Post columnist on political reform
  • Victor Yang, an organizer for the SEIU
  • A panel on civic tech with Nigel Jacob (City of Boston), Jesse Littlewood (Common Cause), and Chris Wells (University of Wisconsin)

Most of the time will be spent on 90-minute, interactive sessions called “learning exchanges.” We still welcome proposals for learning exchanges. Please use this form to submit ideas.

Examples of currently approved learning exchanges include: “Unlocking the Potential of Student Voices,” with Frank LoMonte, director of the Student Press Law Center; “From Voice to Influence (Technology as Civic Practice)” with Chaebong Nam and Danielle Allen; “Growing Your Grassroots Efforts” with iCitizen.com’s Jacel Egan and Alex Shreiner; “Social Media Legitimacy: From Policy to Neighborhood Action” with James Toscano of Dots Matter and Joseph Porcelli of Nextdoor.com; and “On Building a Living Democracy Movement” with Frances Moore Lappé.

Tamsin Shaw’s critique of moral psychology

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I think that Tamsin Shaw’s article “The Psychologists Take Power” (New York Review of Books, February 25, 2016) is very important. I enjoyed an informal seminar discussion of it on Friday, but that conversation made me realize that the article is rather compressed and allusive, and its argument may not convey to readers who are unfamiliar with the research under review or with important currents in moral philosophy.

This is how I would reconstruct Shaw’s argument:

First, the psychological study of morality presents itself as a science; it claims to be value-neutral and strictly empirical. The phenomena under study are called “moral,” but the researchers purport or at least strive to be value-free.

Given that self-understanding, psychologists are attracted to three research programs: evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and game theory. Each presents itself as value-neutral. The three programs can be made highly consistent if one focuses on rapid human reactions to very basic stimuli, such as sexual desire or perceived threat. These reactions presumably arose well before cultural differentiation, they have Darwinian explanations, they would serve individuals or groups in competitive situations (e.g., while struggling for food or mates), and they light up specific parts of the brain. Findings that seem consistent with all three streams of research have special prestige because they seem particularly hard-headed and empirical. (A perfect example is the Times’ article yesterday: “What’s the Point of Moral Outrage? It may seem noble and selfless, but it’s also about improving your reputation.”)

People who think this way about morality are basically amoral. They have no independent moral compass. Yet they learn techniques that are useful for manipulating subjects, particularly in extreme situations where instinctive human impulses are most pertinent. Therefore, it is no surprise (Shaw writes) that some of them became professional advisers on torture during the first years of the Iraq occupation. Any argument against torture will seem to them arbitrary and subjective.

The last point may be a bit of an ad hominem, although it is certainly worth taking seriously as a warning. But even if all psychologists use good professional ethics, the agenda of making moral psychology strictly empirical needs to be challenged.

For one thing, you can’t study phenomena categorized as “moral” without independently deciding what constitutes morality. We have many deep, instinctive impulses. For instance, we are capable of altruism and even self-sacrificing love, but also of violence and greed. It’s plausible that many of these impulses have evolutionary roots and can be explained in game-theoretic terms. But only some of them are moral. Imagine, for instance, that I said, “Greed is a moral virtue that we developed early in our evolution as a species to motivate individuals to maximize resources.” This would not be a scientifically false statement. It would be morally false. The mistake is to call greed a “virtue.”

Jonathan Haidt likes to provoke liberals by describing “authority” and “sanctity” as moral values. They may be, but that requires a moral argument against the position that only care, fairness, liberty, and loyalty count as moral. The fact that some people see authority and sanctity as virtues does not make that opinion right. Hitler thought that racial purity was moral, and he was wrong. So moral reasoning is indispensable.

Further, when we reason morally, we are usually thinking about very complex, socially constructed phenomena that we don’t directly perceive. We certainly don’t experience them as immediate sense-data. I wrestle with my feelings about democracy, the United States, academia, capitalism modernity, etc. These things don’t appear in my visual field like violent threats or piles of yummy food. I experience such institutions through speech and text, through vicarious reports, and by accumulating experience and arguments over decades. Possibly the impulses that homo sapiens developed early in our evolution influence my judgments. For instance, I may have a deep, unconscious tendency to separate people into in-groups and out-groups, and that may affect my tendency to see the USA as my group. But I could treat another unit as my main group, I could be uninterested in (or even unaware of) the USA as an entity, or the country might not even exist. A nation is a social construction, built by people for complex reasons, that we understand in a mediated way. It would be a contentious assumption, not a hard-nosed scientific premise, that our most primitive impulses have much to say about institutions or our attitudes toward them.

See also: Jonathan Haidt’s six foundations of morality; neuroscience and morality; morality in psychotherapy; on philosophy as a way of life; is all truth scientific truth?; and right and true are deeply connected.

on the original meaning of democracy

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We call ourselves a democracy and a republic. There’s a current right-wing talking point that we are only the latter, but I’ve argued that this claim deviates from a long bipartisan consensus that the US aspires to be a democratic republic. But what do these two terms mean?

This definitional question is challenging because the words come, respectively, from Greek and Latin, and they were coined to name specific regimes that had lots of eccentric features (huge juries in Athens; a host of executive officials in Rome) that no one considers definitive. The words have subsequently been used by many writers in many languages to name a wide variety of regimes–and sometimes as terms of abuse.

For instance, a “republic” presumably must name a regime that has something in common with the original, the ancient Roman res publica. One defining feature of the Roman republic was simply that it wasn’t a monarchy. Thus people who want to remove Queen Elizabeth II as the titular monarch of Australia (or Britain) call themselves “republicans.” Their proposal would change virtually nothing about the power structure; it would be almost entirely symbolic. But they have precedent for calling a regime without a monarch a “republic.”

In a very different vein, Jefferson defined a republic “purely and simply” as “government by its citizens in mass, acting directly and personally, according to rules established by the majority; and … every other government is more or less republican, in proportion as it has in its composition more or less of this ingredient of the direct action of the citizens.” For Jefferson, a “republic” is what others would call a direct and participatory democracy. Yet the original Roman republic was composed of legislative bodies and officers who represented various classes and interests. Some were elected and others were appointed. All were limited by various laws (albeit unstably so). Thus, for some, a republic is a government that avoids direct and participatory democratic elements.

Still other writers have noticed the ancient Roman penchant for civic duty and public service and have used the word “republic” for a regime that demands a great deal from its citizens and that encourages public engagement as a positive good. It is an alternative to the kind of liberalism that favors individual rights. Meanwhile, another tradition takes seriously the etymology–“res publica” means “public thing [or good]”–and translates the phrase as “commonwealth.” A “commonwealth,” in turn, could mean all the things that are commonly owned by the people. And if the people’s wealth extends to the land, then a certain kind of agrarian socialism emerges as the definition of republicanism.

That’s all about “republic,” but I’d like to address the term “democracy,” relying on a fascinating article by Josiah Ober.* Ober notes that if the Greeks had wanted a word that meant rule of the many (or the common people), they would have used pollo- as the suffix prefix. To name a regime in which all rule, they could have used “panocracy.” If they had wanted to emphasize the equality of all, they would have used iso-. For instance, isegoria meant an equal right to participate in deliberations in the agora. But they chose demo-, which refers to the whole people as one, without sociological distinctions.

Meanwhile, if they had wanted to specify who governed, in the sense of casting votes or holding offices, they would have used the suffix -archy. A monarchy has one ruler, an oligarchy has a few, and anarchies have none. The suffix -kratia is different. It does not imply an office or action but rather power, in the sense of capacity or an ability to make things happen.

Thus, in its original form, a democracy is a regime in which the whole population has the power to make things together. By the way, this definition comes close to uses of the word “republic” that emphasize the public’s role in making the res publica. So perhaps “democracy” means “republic” after all.

*Josiah Ober, “The Original Meaning of ‘Democacy’: Capacity to Do Things, Not Majority Rule,” Constellations, vol. 15, no. 1 (2008)

humanities work related to incarceration

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All are welcome to 2016’s second Tisch Talk in the Humanities, “Stages of Detention,” on March 4 at 2:00 pm in the Rabb Room, Lincoln Filene Hall, Tufts University’s Medford campus.

Increasingly, scholars in the arts and humanities are working in and around prisons. On March 2, we will hear from two distinguished practitioners and will have the opportunity to discuss their work.

Noe Montez is Assistant Professor of Drama and Dance at Tufts. Professor Montez’s project explores guided tours of Southern Cone detention sites that have recently been converted into spaces of memory in order to explore how trauma and commemoration are performed as part of an ongoing process of transitional justice. His work includes research on sites in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. He has also completed a monograph that explores a Buenos Aires theatre’s collaboration with human rights activists in Argentina’s post-dictatorship.

Amy Remensnyder is Professor of History and a Public Humanities Fellow at Brown. Since 2010, Professor Remensnyder has been teaching history to men incarcerated in Rhode Island’s medium security prison. She is the founder and director of the Brown History Education Prison Project. Her increasing interest in issues of incarceration spurred her to design a course on the global history of prison and captivity, which she has taught both at Brown and at the prison. She is beginning work on a book about the global history of captivity.

The moderator and organizer is the Tisch Senior Fellow for the Humanities, Diane O’Donoghue.