Today is the board meeting of the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts, where I work. Immediately after that meeting, I will fly to Durham, NC, to begin chairing the external review of Duke University’s Kenan Institute for Ethics, which plays a somewhat similar role to Tisch College. It’s a day of thinking about strategic plans for scholarly/activist centers at fine universities.
I thought this was a crucial moment in the recent debate between Jonathan Chait and Ta-Nehesi Coats:
Chait: The argument is that structural conditions shape culture, and culture, in turn, can take on a life of its own independent of the forces that created it. It would be bizarre to imagine that centuries of slavery, followed by systematic terrorism, segregation, discrimination, a legacy wealth gap, and so on did not leave a cultural residue that itself became an impediment to success.
Coats: What about the idea that white supremacy necessarily “bred a cultural residue that itself became an impediment to success”? Chait believes that it’s “bizarre” to think otherwise. I think it’s bizarre that he doesn’t bother to see if his argument is actually true. Oppression might well produce a culture of failure. It might also produce a warrior spirit and a deep commitment to attaining the very things which had been so often withheld from you. There is no need for theorizing. The answers are knowable.
Indeed, here is some pertinent evidence, courtesy of Angel L. Harris.* She He analyzes a very large survey of Maryland families, black and white, to investigate the connections among race, discrimination, and commitments to education. The results are important for anyone interested in debates about the (alleged) culture of poverty, cultural determinants of success, and racial achievement gaps.
Harris finds that black parents are more likely than white parents to think that succeeding in school is crucial to their children’s success. Blacks also place more importance than whites do on academics; they report spending slightly more time on educational activities; and they are more likely to seek academic help.
African American parents are more likely to believe that they and their children are subject to racial discrimination, although some white parents also see themselves as discriminated against on the basis of their race. The more that black parents perceive that their families are subject to discrimination, the more they see educational success as crucial for their children. But the more that white parents see themselves as discriminated against, the less they believe in education.
These results support the thesis that for African Americans, a perception of ongoing discrimination is a motivation for struggle and uplift. It is evidence of Coats’ “warrior spirit” and “deep commitment to attaining the very things which had been so often withheld from you.” But for some whites, a perception that they are being treated unfairly is a reason not to focus on education. Or perhaps they are not succeeding educationally and need an excuse that blames other people.
Given those findings, you might predict that black students would be achieve more educational success than comparable white students. In fact, when white and black students of similar socioeconomic and family backgrounds are carefully compared, blacks are sometimes found to have higher graduation rates and more years of education. (The bottom line of the second cited study: “African American men and women achieve greater years of education than white men and women, respectively, raised in identical family environments.”) But there remain stark aggregate differences in high school and college graduation rates by race. If those cannot be attributed to differences in educational ambition, then the remaining explanations would seem to include: subtler disconnections between the dominant culture of schools and those of some African American families; unequal resources outside the school (including lower numbers of committed parents and other adults per child); unequal quality of schools; unequal treatment within the same schools; and discrimination in admissions and labor markets. I think all of those factors have been demonstrated.
*Angel L. Harris, “Can Members of Marginalized Groups Remain Invested in Schooling? An Assessment from the United States and the United Kingdom.” In Danielle Allen and Rob Reich (eds.), Education, Justice, and Democracy (University of Chicago Press, 2013), pp 101-132
A fundamental question for anyone who wants to improve the world is which aspects of society are (1) natural and fixed, (2) artifacts that we make, or (3) elements of an ecosystem or social fabric that holds together. This question came into view ca. 1800 and is now inescapable.
Let’s call a society “traditional” to the degree that members view it as natural, permanent, and perhaps of divine origin. For a very long time, some people have been partially non-traditional. They have seen particular aspects of society as artifacts: as things we plan, create, and can change. For instance, the very first Greek historian, Herodotus, collected the varied burial customs of his time. The Egyptians’ “fashions of mourning and of burial are these,” he wrote: “Whenever any household has lost a man who is of any regard amongst them, the whole number of women of that house forthwith plaster over their heads or even their faces with mud. Then leaving the corpse within the house they go themselves to and fro about the city and beat themselves, with their garments bound up by a girdle and their breasts exposed …” Herodotus implied that the Egyptians had somehow made these customs and could switch them for different ones. Yet for him, most aspects of a society were natural and permanent, as were the differences between civilized people (who knew how a society should be run) and barbarians (who got it wrong).
Let’s say that “modernism” is the view that most aspects of society are artifacts. In modernity, people not only understand some aspects of society as artifacts, but they posit that society is generally something we invent and construct; everything human is artifactual. They believe this not only of objects and actions (such as works of art or laws) but of their underlying principles. Perhaps we have made–not discovered–our concepts and criteria of things like beauty and justice.
Modernity, in this sense, may have arisen at several times in the past. Velcheru Narayana Rao claims that “a form of awareness that can be characterized as modern emerged naturally and organically in the Telugu- and Tamil-speaking parts of the [Indian] subcontinent toward the end of the fifteenth century.” That could well be the case. But the modernism that arose in Europe around 1800 has special significance today because it spread with European power around the world and has never receded.
Two interesting authors hold opposite perspectives on the question of modernism, and I think it’s valuable for citizens to consider both.
Roberto Mangabeira Unger is an ultra-modernist, a “modernist visionary,” as he calls himself (False Necessity: Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy, p. 9). He takes “to its ultimate conclusion” the thesis “that society is an artifact” (p. 2). All our institutions, mores, habits, and incentives are things that we imagine and make. We can change each of these things, “if not all at once, then piece by piece” (p. 4). Unger “carries to extremes the idea that everything in society is politics, mere politics”–in the sense of collective action and creation (p. 1)
Unger argues that that we have not yet taken the modernist project all the way. Even radical modernists have assumed that some things are natural although we can actually change them. Importantly, they have assumed that the relations between one domain and another are given. For instance, for Marxists, the economy is fundamental and it always determines politics. Unger thinks we can change any part of that picture. He wants to get rid of all “superstitious inhibitions.”
Unger fears that the status quo retains an arbitrary advantage. To disrupt it, he proposes a whole range of social reforms that would constantly stir things up: a steep inheritance tax that funds a social endowment, mandatory membership in independent unions that can compete for members, and a “reconstructive branch” of government that can take over institutions for short periods and reform them before leaving. These are ways of creating “a framework that is permanently more hospitable to the reconstructive freedom of the people who work within its limits” (p. 34). The task is to “combine realism, practicality, and detail with visionary fire” (p. 14)
James C. Scott is a critic of radical modernism, especially under conditions when the state is strong and civil society is weak–colonialism and war being particularly dangerous. In Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, Scott describes high-modernist ideology as “a strong, one might even say muscle-bound, version of … self-confidence about … the rational design of social order.”
The modernist’s orientation, as Scott notes, is purely toward the future: what will improve the world going forward? Since that is an intellectual question, the smartest people can basically decide. Existing structures are arbitrary and open to review. Any artifact that works in one place can and should be adopted elsewhere.
High modernism implies a truly radical break with history and tradition. …. All human practices … would have to be reexamined and redesigned. … The structures of the past were typically products of myth, superstition, and religious prejudice. … Society became an object that the state might manage and transform with an eye toward perfecting it (Scott, pp. 92-3).
High modernism forgets humility and the value of local knowledge, the wisdom embodied in traditional practices and any obligations we may owe to the past, the intrinsic limits of human reason and virtue, and the delicate ways that aspects of society interrelate. As Scott shows, high modernist schemes of social improvement can make things much worse. On the other hand, Unger rightly points to the arbitrary advantages of the status quo and our tendency to treat terrible injustice and waste as necessary even when we could change them.
Note that this debate does not map neatly onto the conventional ideological spectrum of left to right. Unger is a radical leftist because he is strongly egalitarian and enthusiastic about state power. He is also an ultra-modernist. But Margaret Thatcher was another kind of ultra-modernist, embracing the creative destruction of capitalism and denying that there was any such thing as “society.”
Meanwhile, the most avid defenders of holistic thinking, local norms, and the precautionary principle are environmentalists (generally placed on the left). European social democrats and US liberals are quick to defend traditional institutions like welfare agencies, schools, and universities against radical reforms. Unger writes (p. 275): “Anyone who accepts the established institutional framework as the horizon within which interests and ideals –including egalitarian ideals — must be pursued is not a progressive. The European social-democratic parties are not progressive.” This is a quarrel within the left. On the right, as well, there can be a debate about the degree to which aspects of a society are artifactual. You can place yourself anywhere on the spectrum from egalitarian to libertarian and separately choose any place on a spectrum from modernist to anti-modernist.
See also Roberto Unger against root causes, the visionary fire of Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Edmund Burke would vote Democratic, and what defines conservatism?
From the CIRCLE homepage today:
Young people in the United States are starkly divided in how they use their leisure time. Some exclusively pursue their artistic or athletic passions and eschew other types of activities. Others spend their time on academic clubs, perhaps “building their resume” with an eye toward applying to selective universities. Still others are mostly disengaged from extracurriculars and other organized activities, either because they are working for pay or because they would rather informally hang out with friends. This variation, and the “clusters” of like-minded students that it creates, can partially be attributed to personal preference. However, it also reflects troubling gaps based on widening social disparities.
In our most recent working paper, “Harry, Hermione, Ron and Neville– Portraits of American Teenagers’ Extracurricular Involvement, and Implications for Educational Interventions,” CIRCLE Deputy Director Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg analyzes these trends in how contemporary American teens spend their leisure time, with particular consideration to how socioeconomic class affects students’ involvement in organized activities their schools or communities.
The strongest arguments for the humanities are not about their effects. In order to decide whether any given outcome or impact is desirable, we must have a considered opinion of what is good. The humanities are the disciplines that address that question. We do not consider matters of value because doing so has good results; we do it to decide which results are good. So I have argued in a set of books and articles, the latest of which is Reforming the Humanities.
At the same time, however, the humanities are real practices and activities, taking time, costing money, and engaging people in the world. They exist in colleges and universities and also in k-12 schools and in a wide variety of community settings: book clubs, historical associations, museums, and the like. Participating in those activities and organizations will have effects, and it is worth studying them. The National Endowment for the Humanities does not conduct or support much empirical research on the humanities, and the whole topic is little studied. Yet the public humanities have reached substantial scale. As Elizabeth Lynn has written, “There are now 56 state humanities councils [that] receive more than one-third of all NEH program funds (over $40 million in FY2011) and they raise almost as many dollars in state and private funds. Each year they conduct many thousands of programs nation wide, providing what former NEH Chairman Jim Leach has called the ‘finest outreach education in the humanities in the world today.’”
As a contribution to the empirical research on the humanities, CIRCLE was very pleased to collaborate with Indiana Humanities on a study of the public humanities in the Hoosier State, as part of a national effort called “Humanities at the Crossroads.”
CIRCLE studies civic engagement, and the humanities do not overlap perfectly with civic activity. If we apply the ancient distinction between the active and the contemplative life, civic engagement is active, and sometimes the humanities are contemplative. Nevertheless, we saw a study of the humanities as relevant to our civic mission for two main reasons.
First, the public humanities give explicit attention to questions of ethics and values. That means they play an essential role in our civil society. As one participant in our study said, “I think that people appreciate the opportunity to come together and discuss pertinent topics. I do believe they see these activities as enrichment and community building opportunities.”
Second, people and organizations involved with the humanities form a network. Civil society is not just a list of separate organizations; the whole is (or should be) greater than the sum of its parts. Our study with Indiana Humanities was an opportunity to assess the whole network of public humanities organizations in one state, as a model for further research on the humanities and on other aspects of civic engagement.
Because we took a network approach, we were able to reveal practically significant findings that would have been invisible otherwise. For example, we did not detect a statewide network organized around the humanities per se. As the small graphic to the left suggests, historical associations were more prominent and central. Although history is certainly one of the humanities, the lack of a network for the humanities (as a whole) presents challenges. For example, it makes it harder to connect the community-based humanities to universities, where literature is a much larger field than history. And it means that there is no coherent public voice for the humanities when they come under threat.
On the other hand, we found a large number of people and organizations concerned with the humanities in Indiana. By surveying an original sample known to Indiana Humanities and asking respondents to name others with whom they work, we found 2,147 individuals thought to be involved in the humanities within the state. Of those, 390 gave us data on their own activities. They told us that the humanities are as popular as or even more popular than in the past and that their activities contribute to the “sense of place” that every community wants to enhance. We also found that humanities organizations in Indiana are lean and longstanding. More than 20 percent have been in existence for a century or more, but funding sources for the humanities are flat or in decline.
These and many other findings are presented in Felicia M. Sullivan, Nancy N. Conner, Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, Peter Levine and Elizabeth Lynn, “Humanities at the Crossroads: An Indiana Case Study” (CIRCLE, in collaboration with Indiana Humanities, 2014).