bridging the chasm between scholarly discourse and public opinion

(Dayton, OH) With the exception of some pure research (which I admire), scholarship deals with matters of public concern and is valuable only if it has public impact. The scholarly consensus on climate change is having no impact on public opinion and is not even recognized as a consensus by the public. Such gaps (and there are many other examples) strongly suggest that there is something wrong with the way we operate in academia. The fault is surely shared by other institutions, such as the news media. But I say: no excuses. We professors have 2,000 institutions and 3% of GDP; we should be able to do something about mistrust, misinformation, or lack of attention.

I am moderating a group of Tufts faculty who are concerned about these problems and eager to address it in different ways. These Tisch College Faculty Fellows are profiled here. The come from Arts & Sciences, Engineering, the Medical School, the Dental school, and Veterinary Medicine. Their work is very diverse but all engage public audiences or partners. I hope we will develop models and proposals that are broadly valuable.

does Occupy Wall Street need a demand?

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My thanks to Facebook friends and others who have attended Occupy Wall Street and provided independent reports. The question on my mind is the one that every academic “expert” seems impelled to ask: what do the Occupiers want?

“They have to organize around specific demands and specific targets,” [Occidental Professor Peter] Dreier suggests.”

“But if the movement is to have lasting impact, it will have to develop leaders and clear demands, said Nina Eliasoph, a professor of sociology at the University of Southern California. … ‘So there is a tension between this emotionally powerful movement,’ she said, ‘and the emptiness of the message itself so far.'”

Nathan Schneider’s FAQ page says:

What are the demands of the protesters? Ugh—the zillion-dollar question. …  In the weeks leading up to September 17, the NYC General Assembly seemed to be veering away from the language of ‘demands’ in the first place, largely because government institutions are already so shot through with corporate money that making specific demands would be pointless until the movement grew stronger politically. Instead, to begin with, they opted to make their demand the occupation itself—and the direct democracy taking place there—which in turn may or may not come up with some specific demand. When you think about it, this act is actually a pretty powerful statement against the corruption that Wall Street has come to represent. But since thinking is often too much to ask of the American mass media, the question of demands has turned into a massive PR challenge.

It is a political act to take over Wall Street and turn it into a space for free speech, where diverse views can be expressed and collective decisions made, free from coercion, money,  majority rule, or status. That is a symbolic statement in favor of civil society against both state and market.

The consequences are quite unpredictable. If the idea is to impress the American people with an alternative model of how society should be organized, I think it will fail. The model will look unattractive.

If the idea is to build a coalition or social movement that can gradually coalesce around actionable demands and develop power as voting bloc or durable protest movement, then it has potential. This process will take time and patience. Participants will have to overcome difficult coordination problems, especially since I am confident that they will reject the traditional strategy of revolutionary movements: purging most of their diversity in favor of a disciplined “vanguard.”

If the idea is to demonstrate that a substantial minority of the American people is angry because Washington’s response to the economic crisis has been too timid and overly moderate (not too radical), then I think the objective is worthy. Probably between 14% and 24% of the American people stand to the left of the Obama Administration on economic issues, and they have been largely invisible to the rest of the public. That invisibility has been a problem for the administration itself, whether the White House sees it that way or not. The only potential danger lies in misrepresenting the 14%-24%, which is very diverse and may look different (demographically and ideologically) from the people occupying Wall Street.

Tahrir Square is an inspiration, but the Egyptian protesters had a concrete demand (“Mubarak out!”), and they succeeded because the Army and the Muslim Brotherhood joined them. I think the best guess is that those two institutions will now run the country, with some tolerance for the secular “democracy” movement. That’s a major achievement but not one that looks like a model for the United States.

In Dynamics of Contention (2001), Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly analyze mechanisms, processes, and episodes as components of contentious politics. Mechanisms are specific phenomena, such as taking over a public space, clashing with the police, or obtaining media attention. Processes are concatenations of mechanisms. The Civil Rights Movement was a process encompassing many mechanisms, from bus boycotts to training programs; from famous speeches to votes in the Senate. Episodes, finally, are large historical events that result from processes: the fall of Jim Crow or the ancien regime in France.

It seems to me that what we observe on Wall Street is small collection of mechanisms. Similar mechanisms have also been observed in Madison, WI, and overseas. The question is whether they can merge into a process and achieve an historical episode. That will require: 1) collaboration with very different kinds of mechanisms, such as mainstream union organizing efforts and electoral campaigns, and 2) some degree of consensus about objectives. Both require a different set of mechanisms from the ones that have been reported so far from Wall Street–but the sequence is perfectly healthy as long as it progresses to the next stage.

what happened to the civil society debate?

Jean Bethke Elshtain spoke last Friday on the  topic of “Democracy on Trial Revisited.” The title was a reference to her 1995 book Democracy on Trial. Elshtain was one of several famous theorists and public intellectuals who wrote about the crisis of civil society in that period. She also served on prominent committees, including the National Commission on Civic Renewal, of which I was deputy director. Elshtain had her own distinctive positions and concerns, but the whole diverse conversation led directly to the creation of CIRCLE and indirectly influenced such institutions as the Tisch College of Citizenship (both founded in 2000-2001). CIRCLE and Tisch pay my salary, so I am indebted to the civil society debate of the 1990s.

On Friday, Elshtain noted that the civil society debate has faded, leaving relatively little residue. Actually, I think it left a significant legacy in the form of civic renewal work–although that work also has other inspirations and ancestries. But I agree that the national dialogue about civil society is now less prominent than it was in the 1990s. The grassroots repair work continues, as does regular academic research on civic engagement, but most celebrity intellectuals have moved on to other concerns. There is, for example, no national columnist who follows civil society or civic renewal work.

Different issues look salient at different moments. The electoral turnout of young people was one ingredient in the civil society debate of the 1990s. It had declined by about one third between 1972 and 1996, causing alarm. But if you add data from 2000-2008–and delete 1972 on the ground that it was a unique year, immediately following the lowering of the voting age —there is no decline in youth voting. The perspective of 2011 is quite different from that of 1995.

Elshtain was not especially concerned about voting. She argued in the 1990s that democracy was fraying because of incivility and certain forms of identity politics. Politics had become about who we were (our demands for recognition, rights, or redistribution, based on our identities), instead of what we thought was right. Americans were retreating into separate groups that proclaimed their differences, rather than making clams about equality, liberty, or justice for all.

Regardless of one’s value-judgment about identity politics, my sense is that the forms of identity politics that Elshtain found troubling are now quite marginal. For example, in her book, she quoted a gay rights activist who decried all forms of monogamy as heterosexual bias. We have since seen a great movement to expand monogamous legal marriage to gay Americans. I do not know what Elshtain thinks of gay marriage, but it is hardly the kind of separatist retreat into “difference” that she rejected in the 1990s.

On the other hand, some of today’s Tea Partiers strike me as purveyors of identity politics, in Elshtain’s sense. They demand recognition for who they are more than what they want. For example, Governor Perry asks for support because he is “the kind of guy who goes jogging in the morning packing a Ruger .380 with laser sights, loaded with hollow point bullets, and shoots a coyote that is threatening his daughter’s dog.” The point is that he is not an Ivy-League-educated, northern urbanite like the incumbent president.

There is nothing completely new about this kind of campaign rhetoric, but the country feels more deeply divided along such cultural lines. Identity claims loom larger and seem to drive beliefs and values, rather than the reverse. For example, you choose whether to believe in global warming because of who you are, not because of what you know.

Political discourse was central to Elshtain’s critique in the 1990s. She argued that because of identity politics, we were becoming angry, resentful, segregated, and “in danger of losing democratic civil society.” She presumed that democracy was discussion, debate, or dialogue–now being ruined by the wrong kind of assertions. In fact, the very first word of the book was “disagreement,” and Elshtain’s opening point was that we must learn to disagree well.

Indeed, talk is an important aspect of politics and democracy. But democracy is also a way of organizing the big institutions of society that promise fairly uncontroversial outcomes, such as making the union just, tranquil, and secure and promoting welfare and liberty for all. (See the Preamble of the Constitution.) To be sure, people disagree about such abstractions as liberty and welfare and how to balance them when they conflict. But there is also a lot of agreement that, for example, individuals ought to be safe walking down the street, and real incomes should rise as each generation contributes to the common welfare.

So are we angry because we have retreated into “racial, ethnic, gender, or sexually identified clans who demand to be ‘recognized’ only or exclusively as ‘different'” (as Elshtain wrote in 1995)? Or are we angry because our big institutions are not realizing the basic promises that all our leaders make? Is mutual dislike the problem, or are we just mad about poor performance?

In 1995, it was possible to view the performance of the American polity favorably (and thus focus on subtler aspects of our discourse and culture that seemed harmful). The economy was growing, we had just invented the Internet, and America felt securely at peace.

But again, to change the time frame changes one’s perspective. The performance of the American polity from 1972-2011 now looks quite poor. Before 1973, median incomes in the United States had always risen in tandem with economic growth. Since that year, annual real income growth has averaged below one percent per year, even though the economy has grown much faster. And since 2000, median families have gained nothing at all even though the overall GDP “pie” has grown.

Nobody argues that this kind of outcome is acceptable or desirable, yet it is what we get–along with two wars, terror attacks, millions of people in prison, and a decaying environment. I suspect that’s why we are cranky and distrustful. It also explains why the civil society debate has faded in favor of other concerns.

Yet it is unfortunate that prominent public intellectuals have turned away from civil society. Certain forms of civic engagement have continued to falter, even if we use the timeframe of 1972-2011. Trust in other people and in all large institutions still declines steadily. The proportion of people who report working together with others on common problems is still falling. Journalism, a key component of civil society, is in crisis with as many as one third of all paid journalists having been laid off.

Meanwhile, evidence continues to accumulate that civil society is important for precisely the kinds of large national problems that beset us today. Schools work better when parents participate, teenagers develop better when they have opportunities to serve, and civic engagement may even be a key to economic performance.

Good Society special issue on Elinor Ostrom

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The Good Society has published a special symposium issue on the work of Elinor Ostrom and the Bloomington School, which includes Lin’s husband Vincent Ostrom and their many colleagues and students. All study common property regimes, institutional design, the conditions under which voluntary collaboration occurs, and polycentric governance (governance understood as occurring at many levels and in many contexts). I contribute the first article, “Seeing Like a Citizen: The Contributions of Elinor Ostrom to ‘Civic Studies.'” My good friends Harry Boyte and Karol Soltan also have pieces in the issue (“Public Work and the Politics of the Commons” and “A Civic Science”).

morality as a network (revisited)

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(Syracuse, NY for a conference on Self among Selves: Emotion and the Common Life) Each of us holds many moral propositions. Some are abstract and general, like “Every person has equal moral worth.” Some look like rules or commands: “Do not kill human beings.” Some are more like positive or negative emotions about particular things or people, but we could translate them into propositions.

Some are intuitive. When they are very obvious, it can even seem obtuse to ask why they are valid. (“Why should you not randomly kill people for fun?” is a bad question.) But some of most important moral thoughts are rather particular, idiosyncratic, and in need of justification. For example, I sit here writing with a view of Tufts University, which is my employer. I feel some commitment to and fondness for Tufts, and I believe that my writing supports my work for Tufts (because it will ultimately find its way into an article). Those feelings could be translated into propositions. But each one requires justification and evidently connects to other propositions. To show that I am doing the right thing, I would owe a description of Tufts University and some premises about moral commitment (i.e., Why should one be committed to anything?). In the ensuing conversation, factual information might be relevant: Tufts actually does certain things. Morally evaluative terms would also arise and would need to be justified. The conversation about Tufts might well shift into related topics, such as the role of scholarship in a democracy, the value of democracy, the place of philosophy as scholarship, or the quality of my scholarly work.

We could view all the morally relevant propositions that I hold as nodes in a network. My relationship to each node may be a straightforward endorsement, but it may be more complicated than that. (See the concept of propositional attitude.) For instance, Anne Swidler finds (Talk of Love, 2001) that many middle class Americans have in their heads what they call a “Movie” ideal of love. They do not believe it. They view it with some irony. But they appeal to it in certain situations and they feel its force over them. If we translated that Hollywood ideal into propositions (e.g., Every individual has a perfect romantic match;  finding that person guarantees happiness), most Americans would both endorse and strongly deny those statements.

Many of my moral beliefs and ideas are connected to other nodes, but not necessarily in one way. Depending on what two nodes say, it can be the case that:

  • A logically entails B
  • A causes B
  • A makes B more likely
  • A is a step on a long path toward B
  • A and B are in fruitful tension: incompatible, yet both worthy of support
  • A resembles B
  • A prevents B
  • B echoes A
  • I am impressed by people who believe A, and they also tend to believe B
  • People with a given kind of experience tend to believe both A and B
  • A and B are examples of C

… and so on.

When we try to assess whether people are good, or whether what they does is right, we often ask about the separate propositions that these individuals hold. For instance, anyone who thinks that Jews are evil is worse for that reason, regardless of what else he may think or do. That is a node in his network, and we have a strong moral intuition about it.

But in many cases, we do not have confident intuitions about the separate nodes, nor should we, because they have no moral valence out of context. So a different question to ask about a network is: How is it structured?

I think that question has been addressed too narrowly (in the philosophical writing that I know). The question always seems to be whether the network is coherent and whether each component is entailed by broader, more abstract, more “foundational” premises. Kant, Mill, Rawls, and many others analyze morality that way. They presume that a moral network map should be organized as a tree, with abstract generalities at the root, and particular applications at the branches. But that is only one type of diagram. I see no reason to assume it’s the best; it is certainly vulnerable to skepticism about the premises that lie at the root. Nor is coherence evidently desirable: I admire more a person who is aware of moral tensions and inconsistencies than one who has simplified his principles to remove all conflict.

A very common goal of moral reflection (not only among professional philosophers) is to weed out the weaker aspects of a person’s network. “Critical thinking” is supposed to be a matter of getting rid of the mere prejudices and unsupported assumptions, conflicts, and fallacious connections. Professional philosophers often impose what Amartya Sen calls “informational restraints” to weed out nodes and links. They certainly disagree about which considerations to ignore: for example, Kantians reject consequences, Rawls erects a veil of ignorance to hide our place in society, and utilitarians screen out motives as primary evidence about what should be done. Most, however, will agree that anecdotes about specific individuals are subject to bias; that simple arguments from authority are fallacious; that strong emotional responses must be translatable into valid propositions; that evidence about consequences only matters to the extent that we can assess outcomes by an independent standard; that the use of precedents and comparisons requires justification; and that rules or principles that can be generalized are more reliable than those that are narrow and ad hoc.

As Bernard Williams writes in a slightly different context, theorists tend to criticize–and seek to delete–intuitive or conventional moral concepts, but “our major problem now is that we have not too many but too few, and we need to cherish as many as we can.”

Instead of seeking to delete nodes or connections that are unreliable, and instead of trying to make the whole network look like a flowchart with the summum bonum at the base, I would ask:

  • How extensive is the network?
  • How many connections does the person draw? (How dense is the network?)
  • Are the nodes that have the most connections intuitively correct?
  • Are the nodes that have the most connections intuitively weighty?
  • Have the conflicts been recognized and led to appropriate conclusions, or have they been ignored?
  • Are there free-standing nodes, and if so, are they justified in any way?

(I have  explored related ideas in posts on How to Save the Enlightenment Ideal and Moral Thinking as a Network.