unhappiness and injustice are different problems

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The ancient sources do not specify which specific miseries flew out of Pandora’s box, but I would suggest they came in three groups.

Some forms of suffering happen to human beings because of the kinds of creatures we are. We can postpone death, aging, disease, pain, and fear, but they are inevitable. These are the natural woes. Our very existence requires the death of other people, or else the earth would be too crowded for the living.

Injustices are miseries for which we rightly blame our fellow human beings. What counts as an injustice (as opposed to a natural phenomenon), is a matter of dispute. I would include sins of omission, such as my own failure to help people even though I own superfluous resources. I would include both unjust actions and inequitable states of affairs. Those are controversial claims, but no one doubts that some kinds of injustice exist.

The third category, unhappiness, is a failure to flourish, thrive, enjoy, and achieve equanimity or satisfaction.

These three categories of woe are empirically related. For example, even though death is inevitable, injustice causes millions to die early. It is difficult to be happy if one is suffering from disease and pain, or if one is a victim.

Yet the connections are loose, not logical or inevitable. In a wealthy suburban subdivision where injustice is absent and natural afflictions are normally remote, people may still be miserable to the point of suicide. In a poor village under a repressive government, people may be happier.

Even if injustice does not necessitate unhappiness, it is still an evil, not to be excused. But unhappiness is evidently a separate problem.

We pay far more attention to mitigating or postponing natural afflictions than to fighting injustice–and even less to unhappiness. Also, European and American philosophy since 1800 has much more to say about injustice than about unhappiness.

A just society harnesses science to reduce suffering. Science is also beginning to give attention to positive states of mind, like flourishing and equanimity. That opens the possibility that we could develop new methods of enhancing happiness. But if freedom is also valuable, or is a component or aspect of happiness, then the idea of engineering happiness is disturbing.

Politics is a tool for mitigating natural afflictions and preventing injustice. In liberal democracies, happiness is not seen as a political objective. A government cannot make people happy and may threaten their freedom if it tries.

Some authors (Nietzsche, Emerson) have said something like this: My duty is limited to avoiding injustice. I cannot make other people happy. At best, I can contribute to the happiness of children or partners in intimate relationships. Thus I should concern myself with achieving equanimity for myself and perhaps serve as a model for others.

I can’t accept that such a high degree of self-involvement is either ethically acceptable or compatible with happiness, properly understood. So then the question becomes how to achieve happiness while helping other people to be happy without abridging their freedom.

the real Rosa Parks

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(Washington, DC) I have long known that Rosa Parks was not a tired secretary who just decided one day to sit in the front section of the bus because there were no open seats in the back. I knew that the Montgomery bus boycott was a planned and laboriously organized social action; Rosa Parks was a highly trained and experienced activist. Telling the false story has long seemed to me a form of “civic education malpractice”: we are teaching students that reform happens automatically and randomly, when the real story is about skillful, courageous, long-term organizing.

But I didn’t really know the most important story about Rosa Parks until I heard a brilliant presentation in Detroit by Professor Danielle McGuire, author of At The Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance–A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power. McGuire shows that Parks was already one of the most effective and respected civil rights leaders in the whole South by the 1950s. Specifically, she had focused for almost two decades on white men’s sexual aggression and violence against black women. One of her great battles was the Recy Taylor case. In 1944, a gang of racists had raped Taylor and dropped her in the middle of town; Parks investigated the case on behalf of the NAACP and organized a national publicity effort to get the rapists prosecuted.

Parks’ background is directly relevant to the Montgomery Bus Boycott because the most salient injustice on the buses was not the segregated seating pattern. Most of the black riders were female domestic servants traveling to White neighborhoods to work in private homes where sexual harassment was routine. The drivers, who were white men, armed and deputized as police officers, routinely sexually harassed and sometimes sexually assaulted these African American women on their way to and from work. That injustice was the impetus for the boycott, conducted and organized by female domestic workers.

Making all black people sit in the back of the bus was profoundly unjust, but it’s part of a story that now feels comfortable, which may explain why Rosa Park has become an uncontroversial national icon, featured on stamps, awarded a state funeral, used as the name of avenues and boulevards.

Imagine how difficult it would be to digest and discuss this story: White men rape or sexually humiliate black women. Rosa Parks fights that violence, drawing on militant theories about race and sex (e.g., Marcus Garvey’s black nationalism) to develop her own views. The Montgomery buses are particular sites of sexual violence. Women organize to withdraw their business from the bus system and create their own alternative transportation network. Their boycott is taken over by black male leaders who choose to downplay the sexual aspect of white supremacy so that they can attract wider support for their main agenda, which is to end de jure racial segregation.

Here are some of the uncomfortable aspects of that–real–story: Rosa Parks was angry and radical. Unjust policies changed only because she and others were organized and politically effective. Certain injustices did yield to pressure; we no longer have white sections of public buses. But other injustices remain unacknowledged and have diminished only slightly (if at all): rape is an example. The reform movement began with women working on an explicitly sexual issue. They yielded the stage to men because a different issue (racial segregation in public services) was easier to deal with. Finally, integration, or the mixing of people, is not necessarily beneficial, because the original problem was not separation but the direct exposure of black women to white men. A separate transportation system run by black women for black women–which began during the boycott–may actually have been more just than an integrated public system.

in Detroit, promoting active citizenship

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(Detroit) I am here for a conference on “Generations: Rethinking Age and Citizenship.” In my keynote, I will try to argue that civic engagement, properly understood, is a solution to our grievous, chronic, “wicked” problems, the problems that national politicians, for all their alleged polarization and heated disagreement, almost all ignore.

Detroit is an appropriate place for that discussion because its population is about half what it was in 1950, the exodus compelled by a permanent closing of factories and the service industries that once supported factory workers. Detroit’s high school dropout rate is 75%. Michigan incarcerates five times as many people as it did in 1973 and spends 20% of its state’s general fund revenue on prisons. Detroit’s traditional industry has contributed badly to global warming.

I don’t happen to know the city but would always begin a serious analysis by looking for local assets and productive projects, rather than simply listing problems. I hear that many important positive experiments are underway here; Declare Detroit is an example.

civic engagement and the incarceration crisis

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At first glance, our vast prison system (there are 2.3 million Americans behind bars) looks like a result of citizen action. Draconian sentencing laws often begin with referenda or with legislative votes that respond to popular pressure. The phrases “populist punitiveness” and “penal populism” are used to describe an international phenomenon: politicians seeking approval by posing as tough on crime and denouncing lawyers and other elites who would coddle or protect criminals.[1]

But accumulated evidence suggests that when citizens deliberate, they arrive at merciful or nuanced decisions. For instance, when judges disagree with jury verdicts, it is generally because they think the jury was too lenient.[2] Capital punishment is a popular policy in the United States, yet juries reach capital verdicts in very few cases. When a random sample of British citizens deliberated about criminal justice policy, they shifted markedly against the proposition that incarceration reduces crime and became much more protective of defendants’ rights.[3]

(The previous paragraph and much of this post is indebted to a forthcoming book by Albert Dzur entitled Punishment, Participatory Democracy, and the Jury.)

Unfortunately, public deliberation is rare within the criminal justice system. The severe and inflexible penalties required by referenda strongly encourage plea-bargaining, which is one reason that the proportion of felony cases that go to trial has dropped from one in 12 during the 1970s to just one in 40 recently.[5] Ninety-seven percent of criminal convictions in the federal system and 94 percent in the state systems result from plea-bargains and not trials.[6] The people (using the ballot box) have chosen to remove the people (convened as jurors) from criminal law.

Why would they do that? In 1964, three quarters of Americans said they generally trusted the government and 53.4 percent said they generally trusted other people. By 2010, trust in government was down to 30.4 percent, and trust in other people had fallen to 34.6 percent, both having lost ground steadily over the decades.[6] Distrust of people of color, especially young African American men, is particularly acute and directly relevant to the incarceration problem. (In fact, “distrust” is much too soft a word for public attitudes toward young Black people.)

If we trusted the government but not our fellow citizens, we might be willing to let judges set sentences. If we trusted our fellow Americans but not the government, we would be less eager to incarcerate citizens and more protective of the jury system. Trusting neither, we are tempted to require the state to put other people in jail without trials.

A minimum sentencing law is a simple, understandable rule imposed on a complex system. It is a classic example of the prevailing view of accountability as external and driven by numbers, rather than deliberative and determined by arguments. It transforms criminal cases from transparent public events, full of explicit moral rhetoric and judgment, into bargaining sessions managed behind the scenes by lawyers. That is a recipe for even lower trust, which encourages even more Draconian sentencing laws. The resulting crisis of incarceration is largely invisible because citizens do not serve on juries or even read about jury trials. Even though criminal justice is officially public business and transparent (in the sense that one has a right to obtain court records), it rarely impinges on public consciousness.

In Oklahoma in the 1990s, the League of Women Voters saw the state’s incarceration rate—the third highest in the nation—as a serious public problem. They also recognized that politicians were afraid of any reforms that could be depicted as weak on crime. So they organized a series of meetings across the state that involved nearly 1,000 citizens who held diverse views. Many participants expressed anger about the costs of incarceration and favored prevention and rehabilitation. Politicians and reporters attended these meetings and witnessed the prevailing mood, which changed their estimate of what would be popular. The League then recruited participants to advocate a bill that would reduce certain felonies to misdemeanors while devolving some authority over sentencing to “community boards with citizen representation.” The bill passed by wide margins. It reflected deliberative public opinion and it created a mechanism for the kind of sustained public engagement in criminal justice that might restore public trust.[7]

The sentencing reform legislation was later repealed after lobbying by law enforcement officials. The state chose instead to reduce costs by expanding private, for-profit prisons.[8] In 2008, companies that run such prisons spent almost $69,000 on Oklahoma state political campaigns and received almost $77 million in state funding; the state even imported prisoners from Arizona.[9]

This chapter of the Oklahoma story is a reminder—as if one were needed—that engaged citizens face formidable enemies and need political reform to prevail. Nevertheless, community sentencing boards continue to handle non-violent cases in most Oklahoma counties. The state’s Department of Corrections argues that these boards save money and reduce incarceration by using employing to prison sentences.[10]

Oklahoma’s community boards resemble other widespread initiatives in which the justice system engages lay citizens. “Problem-solving courts” specialize in particular issues, such as drugs or domestic violence. The judges work with social workers and representative of community groups to develop comprehensive solutions to local problems. In one impressive example, a housing court judge worked with a broad-based neighborhood group to fight urban blight and abandonment in Buffalo, NY. The judge used his power to fine landlords who violated the housing code, but he would also accept improvements satisfactory to the neighborhood activists. The activists would observe and report housing violations and, when properties were seized by the court, would take them over and rehabilitate them. The court and the neighborhood group chose their targets selectively to redevelop the community block by block and were able to raise the value of privately owned homes tenfold, essentially creating wealth for long-term residents.[11]

In youth courts, panels of teenagers are empowered to sentence their peers for minor offences. In restorative justice programs, violators negotiate agreements with representatives of their community to repair the harms their actions have caused.[12] Modern restorative justice was first proposed by outsiders to the legal system (Mennonite activists and others), but it has grown thanks to the support of prosecutors and corrections officials, who see substantial financial savings and much higher satisfaction among victims and other residents.[13] Like youth courts, restorative justice has shown promising effects on recidivism. These reforms also engage citizens in deliberations within the legal system.

By expanding such opportunities, we may be able to change the national conversation about crime and punishment.[14] Restorative justice tends to satisfy both victims and offenders.[15] Jurors who successfully reach verdicts in conventional trials hold more favorable views of political institutions (including the jury trial itself), trust their fellow citizens more, and are more likely to vote in regular elections compared to citizens who are not randomly selected for jury service or whose trials end without verdicts.[16] That finding suggests that by making traditional juries (or modern alternatives such as restorative justice programs) more common and more prominent in the public discourse, we could raise public trust in courts and reduce the demand for Draconian sentencing. If alienation from institutions and from our fellow citizens is a root cause of the incarceration epidemic, these strategies offer the best hope for a solution.

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restrictions on media in schools

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I am in the Media Lab at MIT. (A very cool place, at least for geeks like me, although the supremely sophisticated cappuccino maker yielded only steam, and the auto-produced music in the elevator was yucky.)

We heard a lot today about laws and policies–federal, state, and local–that seek to prevent harmful uses of new media in educational settings. These policies are aimed at cyber-bullying, sexual harassment by teachers, privacy violations, and kids watching porn in science class. Blanket prohibitions are common; for instance, [schools will say:] no online videos in classrooms, or teachers may not use social media to contact students.

I recognize the risks, but as my colleagues here have noted, policies are unbalanced. Schools get no encouragement, authorization, or pressure to include new media in education. Some online videos are harmful or inappropriate, but some are great. A teacher who uses text to contact students could possibly harass them, but he or she could also help them. So long as all the directives from above are designed to avoid risks, schools are going to be very reluctant to innovate and incorporate the new media into education.