The Good Society symposium on Civic Studies

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The new issue of The Good Society (vol. 22, no. 2) includes a symposium on The Summer Institute of Civic Studies at Tufts University. The symposium articles are free and open on JSTOR. They are:

  • “The Summer Institute of Civic Studies: An Introduction” by Karol Soltan and me
  • “Civic Studies: Fundamental Questions, Interdisciplinary Methods,” by Alison K. Cohen, J. Ruth Dawley-Carr, Liza Pappas, and Alison Staudinger
  • “What Should You and I Do?: Lessons for Civic Studies from Deliberative Politics in the New Deal” by Timothy J. Shaffer
  • “Living Well Together: Citizenship, Education, and Moral Formation” by Elizabeth Gish and Paul Markham
  • “Civic Studies: Bringing Theory to Practice” by Katherine Kravetz
  • “The Civic Institute Relocated: Designing a Syllabus for Undergraduate Students at a Public University” by Susan Orr; and
  • “Deliberation and Civic Studies” by Matt Chick

As Karol Soltan and I write at the beginning of our introductory essay, the Summer Institute of Civic Studies is intended as a step in the development of a new discipline, by which we mean an intellectual community (a group of thinkers who learn from each other) that is institutionalized, with an association, a journal or journals, educational institutions, a recognized place in universities, conferences, and so on.

The aim of this symposium is to introduce the Summer Institute, mostly through the work of past participants. … Every year, it draws about 20 advanced graduate students, faculty, civic practitioners, and community leaders for two weeks of intensive discussions. Individuals have come from Bhutan, Singapore, Mexico, South Africa, Germany, the Netherlands, Canada, Israel, and all corners of the United States to participate.

Like any healthy intellectual community, civic studies is a field of debate; participants do not sing in unison. But they do have common premises and purposes that, among other things, draw 20 of them to Tufts each July. Those premises could be formulated in several overlapping ways:

1. The goal of civic studies is to develop ideas and ways of thinking helpful to citizens, understood as co-creators of their worlds. Note that we do not define “citizens” as official members of nation-states or other political jurisdictions. Nor does this formula invoke the word “democracy.” One can be a co-creator in many settings, ranging from loose social networks and religious congregations, to the globe. Not all of these venues are, or could be, democracies.

2. Civic studies asks Shaffer’s question: “What should we do?” It is thus inevitably about ethics (what is right and good?), about facts (what is actually going on?) and about strategies (what would work?). Good strategies may take many forms and use many instruments, but if a strategy addresses the question “What should we do?”, then it must guide our own actions. For many of us, institutions and institution-making are crucial to this enterprise. They embody ideals and values. They can also be seen as crucial resources.

3. At the very beginning of the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton asks whether “societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are f orever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.” Civic studies suggests that we can govern by reflection and choice. But more importantly, it looks for ways to make that happen. In other words, we are not especially concerned with an assessment of how much agency we actually have as reasoning citizens; we are concerned with enhancing our political or civic agency.

4. As co-founder of the Summer Institute and retiring editor of this journal Stephen Elkin reminds us elsewhere in this issue, [the Good Society’s] motto  is Walter Lippman’s statement that “the art of governing well has to be learned.” That is another way of formulating the task of civic studies.

Civic studies is an intellectual community in the making, based on an empirical observation that there are many thinkers, networks of thinkers (some overlapping), and traditions of thinking in a number of disciplines that share the goals listed above.

Jesus was a person of color

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As everyone knows by now, Fox News host Megyn Kelly said last week, “Jesus was a white man, too. It’s like we have, he’s a historical figure. That’s a verifiable fact, as is Santa. I just want kids to know that.”

In one sense, to say that a given historical figure was white cannot be a verifiable fact, because whiteness is not biological or otherwise scientific matter–it is a social construct that people have invented, have frequently adjusted, and can change again. On the other hand, constructs have real enough presence in the world. Race, for example, is a powerful scheme that we impose on reality. Average white American subjects classify a picture of a face as black or white within 30 milliseconds of viewing it.

So we can ask how the historical Jesus would be viewed if he walked into the room today. That is different from two other questions: how people of his day would have seen him and how people today choose to depict him:

  1. Although the status of race in antiquity is debated, at least some distinguished scholars argue that the ancients did not classify people by skin color or hair, as we are powerfully conditioned to do today. Thus the historical Jesus has a race today but he did not have one while he was alive. He was then neither white nor anything else.
  2. Today, Jesus is often shown as a blond man in America, but usually as a black man in Ethiopia. For a believer, Jesus transcends race and is naturally depicted as a familiar figure, a member of one’s own community.

A third question is how the historical Jesus would be perceived racially if people saw him today. I think Kelly believes that the answer is: White. Our only source, the New Testament, tells us that he was a Jew. That names a political/religious community that had a foundation story tracing all of its members to one ancestor: Abraham. But even according to the story, Abraham had many descendents who were not Jews, and Jews of Jesus’ time had many ancestors. Luke says that Jesus’ paternal ancestor 23 generations back had been Solomon, a Jew, who “loved many strange [foreign] women, together with the daughter of Pharaoh, women of the Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Zidonians, and Hittites. … And he had seven hundred wives, princesses, and three hundred concubines” (I Kings 11).  So, according to Luke, Jesus had a lot of diversity in his family tree–as we all do.

Members of Jesus’ religious/political community lived close by and mixed with members of other communities, such as, for example, the Ammonites, Samaritans, and Nabateans. Many of these communities also spoke Jesus’ daily language, Aramaic, which is an Afroasiatic tongue related to Hausa (spoken in Nigeria), ancient Egyptian, Arabic, and Hebrew. I presume that these neighbors would have been phenotypically as well as linguistically very similar to the ancient Jews. In other words, they would have looked and sounded like ancient Jews even though they believed in different things and fell under different laws. We see a little glimpse of the multicultural milieu in the tomb inscription of the poet Meleager of Gadara (near modern Umm Qais in Jordan): “If you are Syrian, Salam [which is Aramaic]; if you are Phoenician, Naidios; if you are Greek, Xaire; and say the same yourself.”

Once the Jewish religious/political community was smashed by the Romans, many Jews went into exile in the empire, where they retained their traditions and tried to marry endogamously (i.e., within the faith). But conversion was allowed, and intermarriage would have been inevitable. One recent estimate suggests that Ashkenazi Jews have 80% non-Jewish European maternal ancestors. That means that Jesus would look less European than today’s Jews whose ancestors resided in Europe, including many (not all) modern Israelis. Furthermore, most modern Jews outside of Israel cannot speak any Afroasiatic language.

But a lot of people who lived in Jesus’ vicinity and looked and talked like him stayed there after the Roman victories in 70 and 132 CE. I assume those who remained included some Jews; it certainly included groups like the Nabateans and the Philistines. Those groups would become largely Christian by the time that Caliph Umar captured the area from the Byzantine Christian empire around 637 CE. Some still remained Christian after the conquest, while most converted to Islam, but all gradually adopted an ethno-political-linguistic identity as Arabs as a result of being incorporated into the Caliphate and its flourishing culture.

Thus someone who looked at talked like Jesus might well be seen as an Arab today, albeit one who spoke a related language (Aramaic) instead of classical or modern Arabic. That raises another question directly related to Megyn Kelly’s claim: is an Arab white?

Again, this is a meaningless question in scientific terms, but perceptions and subjective classifications are important. So the question really means: Would most people perceive any ancient person who looked and talked somewhat like a modern Arab as white? In “Not Quite White: Race Classification and the Arab American Experience,” the author traces the many different ways in which Arab immigrants to the United States have been classified. For example, under a 1978 directive from the Office of Management and the Budget, Arabs were explicitly defined as white (“persons originating in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa”), but one advocacy group now urges Arab Americans to “Check it right — you ain’t white.” In short, the question is contested, and perceptions vary.

Meanwhile, the phrase “people of color” has become much more common in the last 30 years than it was before, and one reason is its breadth. It acknowledges the advantages that come from being perceived as white in the US. By implication, everyone who is not perceived as white has some commonality of experience, despite their vast diversity. By that definition, I think Jesus would pretty clearly be a person of color.

Note …

I am not saying that Jesus was an Arab, because that word developed its current sense centuries after his death.

I am not denying he was a Jew. He was: but that places him in a religious and juridical category, not an ethnic group. The religious community of world Jewry is ethnically diverse and has changed a great deal over two thousand years.

I am not saying that you are wrong to visualize him as white–or as black. You can visualize and depict him any way you want.

I am saying that if he walked into a US airport today, he would be subject to racial profiling on the basis of his color and features, not to mention clothes and language. That is perhaps theologically apt, but it should make a Fox News anchor uncomfortable.

a technique for measuring the quality of deliberation

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(Ann Arbor, MI) I’ve proposed that we can map an individual’s thinking about moral and political issues as a set of beliefs and connections. For instance, if a person says that she favors abortion rights because she is committed to individual freedom, she is linking two nodes in a mental map. Because her overall epistemic framework is a network, it will have formal properties, such as density and centrality.

When two or more individuals interact on moral or political issues (talking and/or working together), their respective network maps will come into contact and change. The community formed by people who so interact can be viewed as a larger network of beliefs and connections that also has formal properties.

Certain network structures are better than others for deliberation and interaction. If you are a good deliberator, you enrich other people’s network maps and learn from theirs; you are not rigid. In the context of a liberal democracy, you must be able to “route around” your own faith commitments. You don’t have to drop them, but you must be able to make an argument that doesn’t depend on them. Likewise, your various ideas should be connected rather than isolated, so that you can give reasons for each of your beliefs.

We should be able to observe a moral network map evolve as one person interacts with others, and we should be able to rate individuals and conversations for moral excellence (by asking independent observers to assess them) and then see whether what we posit as the formal criteria of good moral networks are actually found in the best deliberators.

For example, Bloggingheads TV organized a discussion between columnists Bryce Covert (liberal) and Ramesh Ponnuru (conservative) on the topic of why women are paid less than men and what to do about it. I assert that this is a good discussion because I think it is, but also because in a study led by my colleague Felicia Sullivan, this video and several others were shown to representative samples of Americans. Most viewers liked this particular discussion, and they tended to move toward less ideologically consistent views after they watched it–evidence that it had complicated their opinions.

In the slide show below, I begin to diagram the discussion as two interlocked networks of ideas.

[slideonline id=6828]

I didn’t finish mapping the discussion, but I got far enough to conclude that we should be looking for:

  • The number of nodes and connections. (A higher number implies a richer discussion.)
  • The density of connections. People should tie together more, rather than fewer, of their points.
  • The overlap in the two people’s networks (They need not agree but they should address each others’ views)
  • Change in their respective networks in response to the other’s.

on snark and smarm

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(on a plane heading to Ann Arbor, MI) Tom Scocca’s article “On Smarm” is getting a lot of attention, including responses by Malcom Gladwell in the New Yorker and Ryan Kearney in The New Republic.

Scocca argues that “snark” is not our problem. It is an appropriate reaction to “smarm,” which is the serious threat. His original piece is learned and insightful in the tradition of Harry Frankfurt on bullshit or Susan Sontag on camp. I recommend it and will not attempt to summarize it. I do miss two things, however. One is a set of true definitions (with necessary and sufficient conditions), as opposed to clusters of examples. What is snark? What is smarm? The other is evidence of trends over time. Everyone in this debate seems eager to posit that our moment is dominated by snark, smarm, or both. But one can easily think of examples from the distant past. (Juvenal was snarky; Augustus was smarmy.) On what basis do we think that either vice has increased of late?

I would propose that:

Snark (presumably a portmanteau of “snide” plus “remark”) means indirect critique. Instead of rebutting the facts or the logic of an argument, snark casts doubt on the sincerity or competence of the source. It is not a full-blown ad hominem argument but a suggestion that the target is untrustworthy. It is usually humorous, although humor doesn’t seem essential.

Smarm is the evocation of positive, sentimental emotions for the purpose of preempting criticism. For instance, bringing a person with Down’s syndrome onto the stage of the 2000 Republican National Convention was smarmy because it foreclosed criticism of the nominee. The particular form of smarm that concerns Scocca is the evocation of civility or niceness to preempt debate about the dominant person or established rules in a given situation.

Both snark and smarm violate a very high standard of deliberative reason, in which one should respond to any given policy, norm, or proposal by evaluating the evidence, norms, and logic behind it. A critical reaction should explicitly challenge elements of the argument, not the speaker. And the critic should be ready to propose and defend some alternative view.

Snark misses that standard because a snarky comment neither explicitly rebuts the target’s arguments nor offers an alternative position. Smarm misses the standard because it doesn’t offer an argument at all, just a sentiment.

But snark can provoke or advance a deliberative discussion. Typically, a snarky comment provokes a reaction, and that can take the form of an explicit defensive argument that then deserves a reasonable response. Thus snark can be an opening move or invitation to deliberation. Smarm, on the other hand, succeeds if it prevents a group from deliberating.

Further, snark is a tool of the marginal and dispossessed, the peanut gallery, whereas smarm (by my definition) is employed by the person in charge, whether that is the President of the United States or just a dad in the front seat of his SUV. I am therefore with Scocca that smarm is the more serious problem, and snark can be justified as a response to it. If smarm casts a feel-good spell that prevents critical thought, snark can break the spell.

tenured and tenure-track professors are worse teachers?

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(Providence, RI) According to a new paper by David Figlio, Morton Schapiro, and Kevin Soter,* if you take a class with a non-tenure track (contingent) professor, you are more likely to choose to take another class in the same subject and you will get a higher grade on that next class than if you studied with a tenured professor or someone on the tenure track. You are especially likely to benefit from having a contingent professor if you scored relatively low on academic measures before the course.

The measures of success seem reasonably persuasive, and the method seems tight. (The authors compare first-semester students, who generally don’t pick their instructors, and they look at changes in the same students’ grades over time.) The main limitation is that the study only involves Northwestern University, which is certainly not typical of American higher education and could have quirks other than just being highly selective and well-resourced.

It’s also possible that the tenure-track and contingent faculty differ in other ways than their tenure status. I would like to see the results adjusted for the age of professor. I don’t want to be ageist, but that could be a factor, and given the ban on mandatory retirements and the demographics of the tenured professoriate today, it could just turn out that the contingent faculty are younger.

This study is not an argument against tenure, which has other benefits–notably, academic freedom. But it is a cautionary note. It certainly reminds us of the enormous skill and dedication of the many young scholars who are working as adjuncts today. Many would have easily gotten tenure 30 years ago and are now working for $3,000 a course. On the other hand, there is nothing completely new here. As Max Weber said in his lecture “Science as a Vocation” (1917):

According to German tradition, the universities shall do justice to the demands both of research and of instruction. Whether the abilities for both are found together in a man is a matter of absolute chance. Hence academic life is a mad hazard. If the young scholar asks for my advice with regard to habilitation [getting the most advanced degree], the responsibility of encouraging him can hardly be borne. If he is a Jew, of course one says lasciate ogni speranza [abandon all hope]. But one must ask every other man: Do you in all conscience believe that you can stand seeing mediocrity after mediocrity, year after year, climb beyond you, without becoming embittered and without coming to grief? Naturally, one always receives the answer: ‘Of course, I live only for my “calling.”‘ Yet, I have found that only a few men could endure this situation without coming to grief.

*See Figlio, D. N., Schapiro, M. O., & Soter, K. B. (2013). Are tenure track professors better teachers? (NBER Working Paper 19406). Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research. http://www.nber.org/papers/w19406