new ejournal focused on citizenship

Leave a reply

Introducing the eJournal of Public Affairs, a free, online, peer-reviewed journal published by Missouri State University and affiliated with the American Democracy Project:

Although the title makes it sound as if this journal would cover any topic related to policy or politics, it is focused on “the following themes”:

  • Considerations of citizenship and what it means to be a citizen, including global citizenship and eCitizenship
  • Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, problem solving, and leadership related to citizenship and civic engagement
  • Assessment of civic-engagement projects
  • The relationship between social media (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) and civic engagement

The journal is accepting submissions. With many colleagues, I’m on the editorial board.

how much of a constraint is conscience?

1 Reply

I recently asked students to discuss Seamus Heaney’s poem, “A Republic of Conscience.” When the narrator departs from that republic, he is offered dual citizenship; he is authorized to speak “on [the republic’s] behalf in my own tongue”; and he is installed as an ambassador who can never be “relieved.”

The Republic of Conscience is a metaphor. But when Heaney imagines it as an actual place, he presumes that it would have a government, including customs and immigration officials, ambassadors, and “public leaders” who, “at their inauguration … / must swear to uphold unwritten law / and weep to atone for their presumption to hold office.”

Evidently, this is a minimalist state, a “frugal republic.” Its leaders are very gentle and accommodating. But it still has borders, officials, and laws. Is that the right way to think about conscience?

We might say that in a hypothetical place where everyone fully obeys his or her conscience, there would be no need for restraint or coordination. Conscience would constrain individuals’ will and opinion to the point that all our thoughts and behavior would be in full harmony. As Hamilton writes in Federalist 51, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”

A different view holds that we are irreducibly diverse in our backgrounds and perspectives. Conscience constrains us a bit, but two people of excellent conscience can still hold legitimately different and even contrary views and desires. Since citizens of the Republic of Conscience would disagree and conflict, they would need some system for decision-making and adjudication: a government.

At its deepest level, this is the question whether there is a right thing to do in each particular situation. If there is a right choice, then people of ideal conscience would know it and act accordingly. If there is not a right decision–if it’s a matter of opinion–then one can ask why doing right matters (or why right is better than wrong).

Other views are available. For example, one might argue that there is a right thing to do in each case, but we cannot know it by conscience alone; knowing what is right also requires information and prediction. Equipped with perfect conscience but imperfect reasoning ability, people in the Republic of Conscience would legitimately disagree. In short, if people were moral angels with human-sized IQs, they would need a government.

That conclusion depends on a particular definition of “conscience.” If it means good will or altruistic intent without any cognitive element, then it can accommodate deep disagreement. But that view is problematic, at least if taken to an extreme. Hannah Arendt portrayed Adolf Eichmann (the bureaucratic leader of the Holocaust) as a man compelled by a sense of duty that constrained his natural inclinations, yet a profoundly stupid man unable to see things from other people’s perspectives–to a loathsome degree. Can we say that he had a conscience, and his only defect was cognitive? I would say he was responsible for his failure of understanding, and therefore his conscience was appallingly bad even though it constrained his will. That reading pushes us in the direction of the idea that conscience requires seeing what is right, and therefore everyone with perfect conscience would act in harmony and there could be an Anarchy of Conscience.

from government to collaborative governance

2 Replies

A classic view of government presumes that its job is to make and enforce laws. If you break the law, agents of the government are allowed (with due process) to force you, if necessary at gun point, to surrender property, liberty, or even life. On this view, government is different in kind from other institutions. Further, it ought to be kept sharply distinct. Blurring the border around the government is dangerous because too much coziness between government officials and other people encourages corruption (which is the private exploitation of governmental power), and because other institutions would be distorted if they were too closely implicated with government.

This theory of government supports a range of reforms and safeguards. Separation of church and state keeps the government from remaking religion in its image. Ethics rules are often about preventing exchanges of goods and favors between government and private persons. Open meeting laws suggest that the government should not consult with members of the public except in public, where the interaction can be monitored.

An entirely different view shifts from government to governance. Here, the idea is that we govern by shaping our common world. Law is one instrument for that, but law is not sharply different from norms and incentives. Law isn’t merely executed by government; without broad and active popular support, it becomes a dead letter. Besides, government is not unitary. It comes in layers and separate offices and agencies. No part of government monopolizes any kind of power. In the end, government is a bunch of people, and they are not sharply distinguishable from other people. They usually wear several “hats” (legislator and parent, for example). Public employees appropriately act as organizers and entrepreneurs within agencies and routinely cross the line between government and non-government to get things done.

According to this view, the narrow definition of government is analytically unhelpful and encourages the wrong kind of reforms. Far from driving a wedge between government and society, we should encourage porous borders and collaboration. Public officials should learn to form partnerships and should support civic groups. AmeriCorps lets people work for a time as quasi-public employees so that they can take a private perspective into the government and vice-versa. Instead of the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) that erects barriers whenever federal agencies wish to hold a meeting, we should enact what Lisa Bingham proposes: a Collaborative Governance Act that “authorize[s] agencies to use public participation and collaboration much differently, much more, and a lot earlier in the policy process.”

Government versus governance raises significant practical, definitional, and normative issues.

traveling the world with Google Streetview

1 Reply

I probably spend 10-15 hours a week on the phone, and I like to do things that allow me to concentrate on the conversation–activities that fill enough of my brain that I am not tempted by distractions like email. My latest habit is to zoom to some exotic place on the Google world map, open the Streetview function, and go walking or driving along.

Most of the world’s poor cities don’t have Streetview, although they do have lots of “panoramio” photos, which are almost as good. It’s no surprise that you can’t go for a virtual Google tour of Tehran or Pyongyang. A few cities in the Global North, such as Athens, seem strangely missing. But cities as diverse as São Paolo, Cape Town, Sydney, and London can be fully explored. One can also meander down country roads in France or move back and forth across the US-Mexico border without slowing for immigration.

Sometimes ghostly human figures appear close up. Sometimes you follow a car or truck for a few blocks. Often streets are eerily empty. Every place is still.

The zoom function is logarithmic, I think: each step moves you ten times closer. That suggests that the world is far smaller than it really is. You can walk around Beijing for a while in Streetview, get bored of its ranks of concrete high-rises, zoom out a few notches, and plunge back down in Tokyo’s Ginza district as if the two cities were neighbors. Google Streetview also makes the world somewhat more uniform than it really is. Downtown areas of big cities in Brazil, Australia, and Europe all look fairly similar. I suspect if one could hear and smell those locations, feel the air, and see the sky, they would seem dramatically different.

the controversy over badges

Leave a reply

(Washington, DC) We have a pending proposal to create a system that will demonstrate whether students are appropriately prepared to conduct community service. Meanwhile, I am currently teaching a whole course that aims to prepare undergraduates for active citizenship. My class will help design an online module that other students will take before they may participate in civic work in the communities around Tufts University. Students who complete that module will have a kind of “badge” (not necessarily by that name) for community service.

This work is part of a general movement toward “badging” that recently attracted a good summary article in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

If I had to summarize the debate with two stylized positions (recognizing, obviously, that many other positions are also possible), here they would be:

In favor: We must find alternatives to the standard model, which is selling students “seat time” and awarding diplomas to people who pass enough tests. That model is too expensive, it alienates too many students, it fails to recognize skills that some students do acquire, and it is poorly designed to teach many important skills. To be sure, students should read and discuss Plato and write analytical or scholarly papers, graded by professors. But most undergraduates do not experience that kind of education now. And in any case, we should also teach other things, such how to work in community organizations, and allow students to demonstrate competency in those areas. Further, we must recognize that schools and colleges are not the only educators. Instead of piling more responsibilities onto students and schools (and adding new ways for them to fail), we should create opportunities for a whole range of institutions to educate and to recognize individuals’ skills.

Against: Education is “holistic” in that it’s not just the aggregate of discrete courses or other educational experiences. An entire curriculum should have a shape, so that the whole is greater than its parts. Likewise, education should combine academic work with membership in a learning community; skills with knowledge and values; theory with application and critical reflection; individual work with collaboration. One of our problems is that we try to sell education in chunks, one credit at a time, to a public that mistakes it for a divisible good. A four-year degree earned at a single residential college is the ideal, because it is coherent. Badging just contributes to the false idea that education is modular, skill-oriented, and portable.

I see both sides, but I believe we have a desperate need to experiment with alternatives, even if they present dangers, because we are very far from being able to offer a satisfactory education for most American students.