reforming the humanities

Last week, I submitted the copy-edited version of my next book for layout and production. It is entitled Reforming the Humanities: Literature and Ethics from Dante Through Modern Times, and it will be published by Palgrave Macmillan this year. The first paragraph says:

    This is a book about ethics and stories. Ethics (or morality) encompasses what is right or good, what we ought to do, and how laws and institutions should be organized. I argue that a good way to make ethical judgments and decisions is to describe reality in the form of a true narrative. Fictional stories also support moral conclusions that can translate into real life. I argue that when the moral judgments supported by a good story conflict with general principles, we ought to follow the story and amend or suspend our principles, rather than the reverse. What makes a story “good” for this purpose is not its conformity to correct moral principles, but its merits as a narrative–for instance, its perceptiveness and coherence and its avoidance of cliché, sentimentality, and euphemism.

tactics, wonkery, values

Back in 2004, I wrote a long post on this blog, arguing that the problem for the left was not bad tactics, nor a lack of resources, but a lack of positive vision. This was part of the argument:

    In 2004, the most exciting new participants in the political debate have been independent bloggers. But the major bloggers on the Left—people like Josh Marshall, Calpundit’s Kevin Drum, and Markos Moulitsas Zúniga of the Daily Kos—strike me as strictly tactical thinkers. That is, they assume that the goal is to defeat George W. Bush, and they look for ways to score points against him. He is hypocritical one day, misguided the next. I thoroughly agree, yet I don’t see any basis for a new direction in American politics. Their strategy is to make the president look bad, elect a replacement, and hope that he comes up with new ideas. If there are more creative leftish thinkers in the “blogosphere,” I don’t know who they are. This void suggests to me that the Left is weak today because of a lack of tough and creative thinking, not because good “progressive” ideas are being suppressed by the mass media.

My post triggered thoughtful rebuttals by Mark Schmitt, Matthew Yglesias, and others.

I remembered this exchange recently when it occurred to me that Yglesias and other skillful left-of-center bloggers have become policy wonks. I spent 15 years in a school of public policy, yet occasionally even my eyes glaze over when I read Yglesias on transportation or Ezra Klein on health care. No one could rightly say that these people lack ideas about what should be done. They are as substantive as can be–as well as talented writers.

So perhaps when the Democrats were “out,” bloggers on their side of the aisle were focused on getting them back “in”; and once Democrats won elections, the bloggers turned to policy. That would be a happy story and would make me apologize for my implication that the left blogosphere was superficial in 2004.

Except for one thing: I don’t divide politics into tactics and policy. There is a crucial third element, which is the creation of some kind of moving storyline that embodies core values. I think that’s much more important than getting one’s policy proposals right, and it was a conspicuous failure in ’04. An argument about values and a narrative arc are what Barack Obama contributed to the left in ’08. The particular positions that he took could be wrong, but in any case, they do not seem to attract much attention or support in the liberal blogosphere. For instance:

    Government cannot solve our problems; citizens must do that through their own work.

    Our relationships are broken because of excessive confrontation and distrust, and we need to work together across differences.

    We must take more moral responsibility for ourselves and our children.

deliberation and the California budget mess

A concrete proposal for a deliberative public forum made it to today’s Times op-ed page. Chris Elmendorf and Ethan J. Leib call for a “citizens assembly” that would meet when the legislature deadlocks on a budget. The California legislature needs a two-thirds vote to pass a budget and labors under many constraints created by initiatives. It has a chronic problem of failing to pass decent, reasonable budgets on time, a problem that reached a critical stage this year when the largest American state issued IOUs in lieu of real checks.

Other activists are causing for a constitutional convention–which could be called the “nuclear option” of public deliberation, because it would enlist a deliberative group in blowing up the whole constitution and starting over. The Elmendorf and Lieb proposal is much more modest. In fact, it might cause elected officials to propose moderate budgets in order to avoid a deadlock and then a loss of power to the citizen’s assembly.

I presume citizen participants would be randomly selected and paid for their time. They would consider various alternative budgets, hear from experts, talk (a lot), and decide. As a populist reform, it beats the initiative and referendum on two grounds. First, it’s deliberative–people exchange ideas and evidence before they vote. Second, the subject of deliberation is the whole budget, not an individual yes-or-no proposition like capping taxes or reducing class sizes. You’re really not acting responsibly as a participant in self-government unless you are willing to make tradeoffs.

Whatever one thinks of this particular proposal, I would argue that California’s problems are civic, not economic. Legislators could balance the budget by raising taxes and/or cutting spending; they don’t need aid from outside, which would only encourage them to continue their irresponsibility. Their civic problems lie partly in the rules of the formal political system, but another cause is a relatively weak civil society. The newspapers that cover state and metropolitan issues are inadequate, for example. Californians have plenty of civic assets, as well, but they need to mobilize them much better.

starfish stories

(Madison, WI) The original starfish story, very popular among proponents of service:

    Once a man was walking along a beach. The sun was shining and it was a beautiful day. Off in the distance he could see a person going back and forth between the surf’s edge and and the beach. Back and forth this person went. As the man approached he could see that there were hundreds of starfish stranded on the sand as the result of the natural action of the tide.

    The man was stuck by the the apparent futility of the task. There were far too many starfish. Many of them were sure to perish. As he approached the person continued the task of picking up starfish one by one and throwing them into the surf.

    As he came up to the person he said, “You must be crazy. There are thousands of miles of beach covered with starfish. You can’t possibly make a difference.” The person looked at the man. He then stooped down and pick up one more starfish and threw it back into the ocean. He turned back to the man and said, “It sure made a difference to that one!”

Some variants:

    1. Once a man was walking along the beach, where he saw hundreds of stranded starfish. He said, “Starfish, what are you going to do to get yourselves off this beach?” The starfish replied, “There is nothing we can do. The natural action of the waves has deposited us here. It has always been thus, and thus shall it always be.” The man said, “You are the ones you have been waiting for. Organize yourselves into a chain, pull yourselves back into the water, and then figure out a way to prevent this debacle from recurring.” The starfish felt empowered, studied engineering, organized themselves into an effective construction crew, built a breakwater, and nothing as bad ever happened again.

    2. Once on a beautiful day a man was walking along the beach when he saw another man going back and forth throwing simple echinoderms back into the ocean to save them. Over the course of a several hours, he saved about 3 percent of these brainless organisms, 47 percent of which were destined to die anyway due to their long exposure on the sand. Seagulls watched as this man reduced their main food source. Meanwhile, off in the distance, huge condos were being constructed on the fragile ecosystem thanks to lax environmental regulation. The first man, a developer, chuckled. It occurred to him that a good name for the massive casino he planned for this spot might be “The Starfish.”

    3. A man was walking down the beach, where he noticed a whole bunch of stranded starfish. He had read that starfish have market value, so he reached down to harvest one for his own profit. “Hands off, exploitative human,” said a voice, which came from the very starfish he had touched. “We are not your property and we don’t need your help getting back to the sea. We have second stomachs that can expand to engulf prey such as yourself when we are threatened. Come on, fellow asterazoa, let’s use our hydraulic vascular systems to propel ourselves back into the watery global commons whence we came.” The man watched slack-jawed as the starfish marched into the surf chanting, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, greedy humans have to go.”

    4. A big mean shark was swimming close to the shore, eating starfish. The little creatures decided to go up onto the beach for awhile, because they can lie in the sun for a few hours without drying out, and the shark would swim away. Then a manic do-gooder started throwing them back in, one by one. Each starfish that he threw in was immediately gulped down by the ravenous leviathan. Finally, a brave little starfish reached out a foot and tripped the man, who fell face down in the surf and was immediately swallowed whole by the shark. Sated at last, it swam away to sea.

assessing the Obama civic agenda after 6 months

We had a panel discussion today at the Tisch College of Citizenship that was taped by C-SPAN for broadcast sometime in August. Our “text” was then-candidate Barack Obama’s statement in 2007: “I will ask for your service and your active citizenship when I am President of the United States. This will not be a call issued in one speech or program; this will be a central cause of my presidency.” Our questions were: What did this statement mean? What should it mean? How is the administration doing so far? What has to happen next? What should we do from outside?

The panelists were Alan D. Solomont, Chair of the Corporation for National and Community Service; Harry Boyte, Center for Democracy and Citizenship (videconferenced from Johannesburg); Archon Fung, Harvard University; Marshall Ganz, Harvard; Carolyn J. Lukensmeyer, AmericaSpeaks; Xolela Mangcu, University of Johannesburg; and Carmen Sirianni, Brandeis University.

The discussion was rich, diverse, and spirited–in fact, passionate. Any summary is a bit presumptuous (and I didn’t take notes, since I was moderating). But I think I detect something like a consensus that the Administration has moved far in some respects, and hardly at all–as yet–in others. The service agenda has moved very far, with the potential tripling of AmeriCorps. If that expansion is implemented well, it will generate not just philanthropic service, but also opportunities for diverse people to work on crucial public problems and learn skills. The transparency agenda has also moved along; we will have better access to more information about the government than ever before. (But we may not have more information about big private corporations; and the information about government may only be used for “gotcha” games.) Finally, the president has used his global podium to speak profoundly about active citizenship, from Los Angeles to Ghana.

But little has been done (or even proposed) to reform the administrative apparatus of the federal government or the legislative process to promote constructive civic engagement, to create conversations that bridge differences, or to invest in the development of civic skills.

This public panel was the final episode in our Summer Institute of Civic Studies, which was otherwise an intense graduate seminar. I did not think that the appearance in our seminar room of television cameras, lights, and a live audience reduced the candor or authenticity of the discussion at all. I thought it was a fitting conclusion to the 54 hours of private discussion that had preceded it.