a community blog

I just realized that for the last two weeks I have been absent-mindedly

dating my blog entries in May instead of June. The blog has been up-to-date, but

it has appeared to be month old. I suppose that the people who visited during

that period will think this blog is dead and won’t come back to read this message.

Maybe it’s time for me to use some automated software …

On a less embarrassing

note, we are thinking of creating an "arts blog" for Prince George’s

County. We would recruit several residents, each with a deep interest in a different

aspect of the county’s arts scene. We would give them training and ask them to

post at least weekly with news, reviews, and commentary. This would be an interesting

experiment in blogging within a geographical community, particularly one that’s

not particularly high-tech. It would also be a small contribution to the County’s

efforts to develop as an arts center. I think these efforts are promising. The

communities closest to Washington are affordable, near a major university, and

culturally diverse—perfect for artists. We have to be careful not to gentrify

the area in a way that displaces the current residents. But if arts development

is handled right, it could bring new resources into the community while preserving

its diversity.

obesity research

Here’s my latest scheme for

local civic work, connected to the Prince

George’s Information Commons. We would train young people to rate local food

sources (both shops and restaurants) for healthiness. We would then generate an

online map of the healthiest places in the community to buy food. This map would

be our direct public service. Meanwhile, we would use the data in combination

with local health statistics to test these hypotheses:

  • It is good

    for your health to live near a source of healthy food.

  • It is bad for your

    health to live near a source of unhealthy food.

  • It is bad for your health

    to live near no food sources (because then you have to drive and don’t get exercise).

No

doubt, healthy food outlets tend to locate near healthy populations, so we’d have

to be careful before drawing the conclusion that the presence of a health-food

store explains the good health of its neighborhood. But with the appropriate

statistical controls, we might discover that the availability of various kinds

of food does matter for health—and that would be useful for planners to know.

why distinguish weapons of mass destruction?

Why distinguish between weapons of mass destruction and conventional weapons, since the latter can be much more destructive? (Compare a modern air bombing campaign with the use of sarin in the Tokyo Metro system, which killed just a handful of people). Some think that this distinction is simply a self-serving rule imposed by countries, such as the United States, that have tremendous advantages in conventional weaponry. But I think there is a good reason for the taboo on weapons of mass destruction (which has actually kept respectable nations from using them since Nagasaki). Human beings have a tendency to use dubious tactics past the point where they are justified. This happens in “arms race” situations, when each party uses its enemy’s behavior to justify doing a little bit worse in return. It also happens when one party reasons that x + 1 units of some dubious behavior are not much worse than x units, which would be OK. By this reasoning, one can gradually justify any amount of the questionable behavior.

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educational standards and deliberation

Standards

and testing are hugely important in k-12 education these days. Meanwhile,

many people who are interested in improving American democracy would like to make

it more "deliberative." In a deliberative democracy, the public would

rule on the basis of one person, one vote, but with as much informed discussion

as possible before any vote.

Educational standards can be beneficial for

deliberative democracy. They are public statements of expectations for students

and schools, issued by accountable democratic bodies, and subject to debate. Standards

can be good or bad for education (depending on what they contain), but they seem

completely compatible with public deliberation and popular sovereignty. Testing,

on the other hand, is problematic from this perspective. Tests must be designed

by small groups in private. They can’t be public documents and still function

well as assessments. The designers of tests tend to be specialists, since designing

good instruments is a difficult, technical task. Thus experts have considerable

power and are held accountable to professional or technical norms, rather than

public judgment.

The risk of tests for deliberative democracy is clearest

in the case of norm-referenced exams (such as the SAT). To design a norm-referenced

test, experts write possible test questions almost randomly and try them out on

small samples of students. For the actual test, they retain those trial questions

that statistically correlated with past questions asked on the same test (i.e.,

those questions that the high-scorers tend to answer correctly). This is a strictly

technical approach that appears to avoid any judgments about what is important

to learn. But of course such judgments are made implicitly, since any test must

assess some skills or bodies of knowledge and not others. As a result, exams like

the SAT have powerful social effects, yet the public doesn’t control, and cannot

even debate, their content.

Such tests are bad for public deliberation.

Standards are potentially good. The problem is that we often don’t know how to

enforce standards without tests, and unenforceable standards are not good

for either education or democracy.

(By the way, I have been

asked to announce: "After a mini cyber-disaster, Amitai

Etzioni Notes is back up and running.")

the printing press didn’t cause a translation revolution

Many people believe that the Church suppressed the translation

of the Bible into modern languages during the Middle Ages, but the invention

of the printing press gave people an unblockable means of access to Scripture.

This story is often cited to show that institutions are dangerous because they

try to control knowledge, but technological innovation enhances freedom.

I

am no expert on this subject, but I would suggest some grounds for caution: —The

Bible was legally translated into certain modern languages, from Slavonic to Old

English, starting before the year 1,000. (See this page;

and I saw a beautiful medieval French Bible at this

exhibition.) —To be sure, there were edicts

against translation in the 16th century and later, and the Catholic Church

developed a reputation for obscurantism in modern times because the Mass was only

said in Latin until 1962. However, the Church became reactionary after the Council

of Trent (1545-63); this attitude should not be read back onto the Middle Ages.

—The Wykliffe Bible was banned and burned, but not because it was written

in English; rather it was considered distorted by a specific heresy. —It

was very hard to translate into the vernacular until the late middle ages, because

modern languages were only gradually developing and gaining enough vocabulary

to render the Bible. There was no such thing as "Italian" or "German"

in 1250; instead there were hundreds of local dialects, each spoken in a small

area, and most lacking rich vocabularies. —No medieval Western European Christians

knew Greek or Hebrew, so they would have had to translate from the Latin translation

by St. Jerome. It took brilliant Renaissance scholarship (and an infusion of Greek

experts after Consantinople fell to the Turks) before there was a reliable original

from which to translate. People who emphasize technology as a historical factor

tend to overlook the profound linguistic and literary innovations that were required

before a first translation could be made. —The Latin Bible was not secret;

Latin was the language of literate people throughout Europe. —The Church

invested tremendous resources in popularizing the Bible through painting cycles,

stained glass windows, "picture Bibles," passion plays, and readings

in churches, including huge, broad-aisled Franciscan and Dominican churches that

were designed to hold mass audiences. (These were "communications technologies"

of great power.) —Some modern critics assume that the Church wanted to control

the original text of the scriptures because then it could withhold the radical

parts. I could be wrong, but I would guess that popular passion plays and Franciscan

sermons actually emphasized the radical messages of the original Bible.

All

of this matters because it casts doubt on some widespread modern assumptions about

power, institutions, and technology.