Archive for category: The Notion of Politics

If you’d like to comment on the December discussion as a whole, please do so below.

Jim Skillen’s second essay moves the conversation forward. I appreciate his questions about what I mean by “citizen” and his probing the sufficiency of “technocracy” to diagnose civic erosion. In the following I elaborate the meaning of citizen in the public work framework — the idea of citizens as co-creators — giving a short genealogy. I also point to common ground: We need to dethrone the default positivism – the culture of detachment from a common civic life — which has taken hold in professional systems and institutions across all modern societies. “Civic science,” a concept based on citizens (including scientists understanding themselves as citizens) as co-creators, is a workable alternative.

An ancient idea of the citizen

“When men know they are working on what belongs to them, they work with far greater eagerness and diligence. They learn to love the land cultivated by their own hands.”                                                 

                                   Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, 1891

What do I mean by “citizen”? This is an important question which merits an extended answer.

As I described in the second essay, America’s political culture took shape before the birth of the nation, growing from productive labors of settlers who built congregations, schools, colleges, bridges and many other common resources including government bodies themselves. This generated a sense of citizens as co-creators of a common life as well as politics as the everyday work with others of different views and interests to make such a life, conveyed by the idea of “productive citizenship.” The everyday, co-creative politics of communities was noted by the French observer Alexis de Tocqueville in his travels across America. I learned this history while working to develop the concept of citizen as co-creator.  Here I describe three other influences.

The freedom movement

As mentioned before, when I was a young man I was schooled by citizenship schools in the freedom movement. These prepared people to fight for “first class citizenship” across the South. They also gave people skills to build local communities, civic construction, and conveyed the nonviolent philosophy of seeing often hidden potentials even in one’s enemies, what can be called public love.  People debated what citizen meant. A rough consensus usually emerged: citizenship wasn’t mainly legal status, though all agreed on the importance of full civil and voting rights for black people. The citizen is someone who solves problems, takes responsibility for building better communities, and spreads democracy as a way of life. This is conveyed in the song, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”

The idea had old roots in democratic movements which claimed people’s right to full participation on the basis of “building America.”  Since the New Deal emphasis for those concerned about social justice has shifted from respect for work and workers to pity for the marginalized and redistributive justice through the state. A “mass politics” that creates a much more state-centered view with citizens as voters and consumers is the result. 

Early on in the youth civic education and empowerment initiative Public Achievement we found it important to conceive young people as “citizens today,” who can help to build their schools and neighborhoods, not simply “citizens in preparation” to vote. We summarized this with the idea of citizens as co-creators, different than voters and volunteers. This view turned out to be powerfully motivating not only in the US but around the world. Two other ways of thinking about “citizens as co-creators” also emerged.

Religious thought

The main incubator of Public Achievement was St. Bernard’s Elementary School in St. Paul, Minnesota. I soon realized that the Catholic social teachings contributed a great deal to the school’s vitality. The opening quote from Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical, Rerum Novarum, makes the point: what one owns and works one also loves.

Pope Francis elaborated. “Tilling the garden of the world refers to cultivating, ploughing and working.” In his Latin American trip in July 2015, Pope Francis in a speech to the Pontifical Catholic University of Ecuador expanded on this point. He stressed the intricate tie between care for the world and co-creation of the world. “God does not only give us life,” he said. God also “gives human beings a task . . . to be a part of [God’s] creative work. . . . ‘Cultivate it! I am giving you seeds, soil, water, and sun. I am giving you your hands and those of your brothers and sisters . . . the space that God gives us to build up with one another, to build a ‘we.’” The work creates a relationship. “As Genesis recounts, after the word ‘cultivate,’ another word immediately follows: ‘care.’ Each explains the other. They go hand in hand. Those who do not cultivate do not care; those who do not care do not cultivate.”

There are parallel insights in Lutheran theology. Isak Tranvik, a theologically-minded young political theorist has explained how Martin Luther’s concept of vocation suggests the public work of civic co-creation. “Luther didn’t use the term ‘citizen.’ He was writing years prior to the democratic revolutions that would later sweep the western world…This meant that Luther was forced to think hard about what it meant to live a public life…Luther had to conceptualize politics beyond government and citizenship without voting.”

Luther’s concept of vocation, Tranvik argues, challenges modern categories. “It recognizes but moves beyond ethics, salvation, and the philosophical concept of the self. For Luther, one’s vocation is a call to live in the world…part of rather than partner with the public…The public’s needs are the Christian’s needs. Conversely, the Christian’s needs are the public needs. There is no call other than a public one; there is no work other than ‘public work.’ One can (co)create with the ‘neighbor,’ to use Luther’s language, instead of performing her faith for the neighbor…one can be a neighbor instead of serving the neighbor.”

It’s useful to note that other religious traditions have parallel insights. I described the concepts of wilderness and Nehemiah politics in the Torah in the last essay. Last year in India I was taken with the depth of Hindu philosophy about the meaning of work. Gandhi called this “the Gospel of work.” It played a central role in the struggle for Indian independence.

Such perspectives complement the transdisciplinary field called “civic studies.”

Civic studies

A movement in political theory forms the background for civic studies. William Galston described the emergence of the alternative movement, which he calls political realism, in an article in European Journal of Political Theory. “During the decades-long reign of what some have called ‘high liberalism,’” he argues, “a countermovement has slowly been taking shape [united by] the belief that high liberalism represents a desire to evade, displace, or escape from politics.”  He cites Bonnie Honig’s argument. “Those writing from diverse positions – republican, liberal, and communitarian – converge in their assumptions that…the task…is to resolve institutional questions, to get politics right, over and done with, to free modern subjects and their sets of arrangements [from] political conflict and instability.” Realist political theorists insist on politics, practical approaches to making change through negotiation, bargaining, and accommodation of diverse interests. Stephen Elkin, often located in the realist camp, puts it, “There is no substitute for politics…the various ways in which we arrive at collective, authoritative decisions in a world in which people legitimately hold different views…” 

Elkin was the founder of the journal The Good Society. On the founding board was Elinor Ostrom, awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics for her work on citizen-centered governance of common pool resources like fisheries and forests.  Over the years The Good Society became A Journal of Civic Studies.  

Elkin brought together a group of us to organize what became the civic studies field in 2007. It is now well-established as a “next stage” of civic engagement in Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University. The civic studies group also organizes two institutes each year (in Boston and the Ukraine) and helps to organize a high profile conference, “Frontiers of democracy.” Its aim is to provide intellectual resources for people, including academics and other professionals, acting as citizens. It asks, “what should we (as citizens) do?” as Peter Levine, another co-founder, puts it. 

Common pool resource theory, one contributing stream, counters pessimism about the fate of the commons and offers a way to think beyond “pro” and “anti” government approaches. Researchers examined shared-resource cases around the world such as fisheries, forests, irrigation systems, the internet. They discovered that the widespread pessimism about the fate of common resources is misplaced because of several wrong assumptions: the commons is by definition “open to all,” rather than a managed collective resource; little or no communication exists among users; users act only in their immediate and narrow self-interests failing to take into account long term collective benefits; there are only two possible outcomes for the commons—privatization or government control.  They found that it is possible to avoid destruction of the commons through self-organized governance with high civic participation nested in larger governance structures, what Ostrom called “polycentric governance systems…where citizens are able to organize not just one but multiple governing authorities at different scales.”

Civic studies also is informed by the concept of citizenship as public work developed by the Center for Democracy and Citizenship and our partners through participatory action research in many settings. The forthcoming Pedagogy of the Empowered: Enacting Democracy through Public Work (Boyte et al, Vanderbilt University Press, 2018) details many examples. 

Public work highlights citizens as builders of a common world, not simply voters, deliberators, or consumers who take the common world as a given. Public work can be defined as self-organized efforts by a mix of people who create things, material or cultural, of lasting public value, determined by deliberation. 

The concept has roots in communal labor practices in virtually every society (described in my Political Theory piece on public work) that create and sustain “the commons,” self-organizing, egalitarian, and cooperative effort across divisions; practical concerns for creating shared collective resources; adaptability; and incentives based on appeal to immediate interests combined with cultivation of concern for long term community well-being. 

The public work frame sees citizens as co-creators of a democratic society in which citizens are the foundational agents. Public work highlights the civic possibilities of work and also citizen-centered politics, moving away from the view of politics as a highly ideological battle over scarce resources centered on the state.

These perspectives led to civic science.

Civic science beyond technocracy

Jim asks whether “technocracy” is sufficient explanation for the erosion of citizenship. I agree that the problem is bigger, “the new faith that honors autonomous individuals in their quest for freedom by way of the mastery of the nature.” 

To draw again on Laudato Si’,  “the technocratic paradigm” involves “a Promethean vision of mastery of the world… [producing] the tendency, at times unconscious, to make the method and aims of science and technology an epistemological paradigm which shapes the lives of individuals and the workings of society.”

Positivism was highly contested until the recent past. The Council of Christian Colleges and Universities, for instance, represents what Kenneth Wheeler has described as an “educational world in which productive, manual labor was valued [and] egalitarian co-education was emphasized,” in Cultivating Regionalism.  He describes the proliferation of small colleges founded by religious denominations that were “more egalitarian, practical, anti-elitist,” he says (Augsburg University, founded in 1869, is an example). “Their gender ideals didn’t emphasize separate spheres or same-sex education.” They combined work and learning, substituting labor for the gymnastics which characterized Eastern education and the military drill of the South. They had values which emphasized the dignity and intrinsic worth of workers and “evinced a ‘deep disquiet with an economic system that valued even humans in monetary terms.” They were seedbeds of abolitionism and women’s suffrage. 

Land grant colleges constituted a parallel tradition with democratic understandings of knowledge-making. In Science, Democracy, and the American University: From the Civil War to the Cold War Andrew Jewett describes “scientific democrats” in this vein. “Many …understood the term ‘science’ to include the social forces that shaped the application – and perhaps even the production – of scientific knowledge.” In such a “dynamic concept of science,” said Charles Kellogg, a leading soil scientist, “the relevancy of fact is as important to truth as fact itself.” “so what?” questions need always to be added to the question “Is it so?”   Science included cultural practices like cooperative effort and experimental inquiry seen as vital to the democratic way of life.

Science, as it developed in the last 60 years, has shriveled to the view that it produces  “the answers” to complex public problems through Big Data. This view is embodied in an ad for Colorado State in the Denver airport: Community Problems, University Solutions. This shriveling grows from a shift to the concept of science as value-free techniques. “The scientists who powerfully shaped the national discourse on science in the middle years of the twentieth century drew a sharp line between science and society,” says Jewett. “They portrayed science as a space untouchable by both the state and the horizontal communication between citizens.”  

Donna Shalala, then-chancellor of the University of Wisconsin, embodied this view in“Mandate for a New Century,” calling for the revival of the fabled “Wisconsin Ideal.” She redefined the ideal in unabashedly technocratic ways: “The ideal [is] a disinterested technocratic elite… society’s best and brightest in service to its most needy [dedicated to] delivering the miracles of social science [on society’s problems] just as doctors cured juvenile rickets in the past.”  Her vision was progressive. She named many problems, from environmental degradation, homophobia, and racism to school reform and intergroup violence. But it is important to look at her view’s profound inadequacies.

Civic science challenges it, developing in several stages.

In 1997 the Kellogg Foundation asked the Center for Democracy and Citizenship to make an assessment of possibilities for revitalizing the land grand mission of the University of Minnesota.  Edwin Fogelman, chair of the Political Science Department, and I interviewed several dozen senior professors across colleges and disciplines. We asked if they went into their fields with any desire for public impact. The question surfaced hidden discontents with the norms of detachment which hold “value neutrality” to be constitutive of scholarly excellence. Many leaders in their fields told me that they would not be able even to discuss their discontents given the university biases against public engagement.

Working with the provost, Robert Bruininks, we created a university-wide task force on revitalizing the land grant mission through strengthening public dimensions of scholarship, teaching, and community engagement.  There are many lessons. Here I want to highlight a public work approach to public scholarship.

Aware of the politics of knowledge in higher education we asked a senior scientist, Vic Bloomfield, to chair the public scholarship committee. Using a public work approach, instead of advancing models of what public scholarship look likes, the committee asked scholars questions such as “What would it mean to make your scholarship and research more public? What incentive structures could support scholarship in your discipline as public work?”  These questions generated enormous energy.

Such questions highlight other flaws in one-way knowledge.  For instance, Philip Nyden, co-chair of the American Sociological Association’s Task Force on Public Sociology made the case in our first volume, Civic Studies, published by AAC&U, about the missing action dimension in conventional academic life. As he puts it, every sociology department has a course called “social problems” but he hasn’t found one with “social solutions.” He says, “Academics may be well trained in methodology and theory, but they are not always trained or experienced in…the political process of bringing about change…[their] ‘problem-oriented’ approach– which assumes that the community has a deficit – obscures that fact that academic researchers themselves may have a deficit that needs to be corrected by experienced community leaders and activists.”

A group of public work intellectuals and organizers began working in 2005 with colleagues and students of the late Esther Thelen, a leading scientist who brought dynamic systems theory into child development science. The Delta Center, founded by John Spencer, a scientist of infant brain development and systems theory, was a key partner.  

Civic science constructively addresses the knowledge wars by stressing the need for multiple kinds of knowledge to meet the large challenges facing our nation and the world —climate, energy security, health care, a sustainable and just food system, income inequality, to mention a few. Civic science stresses the work of scientists as potentially democratic public work, with scientists as citizens. We involved health scientists, family social scientists, climate scientists, agricultural scientists and others, organizing a workshop with the National Science Foundation in 2014.

Civic science stresses that today’s disagreements about the role of science emerge not only around values and goals, but also over what “facts” mean and what methods generate reliable information. 

It holds promise to overcome the misunderstanding between scientists and the general public. Scientists believe that their work is not valued by citizens who may have last encountered science in high school. Lay citizens often feel that scientists’ approaches invalidate their experiences, condescend to their intelligence, and neglect skills of relational action.

Civic science is a framework for transcending knowledge wars while producing knowledge that enhances collective capacities for effective action, what we call civic agency.  There are two defining features: One is the idea that integrating different kinds of knowledge and knowledge practices through a pluralist politics increases civic muscle. The other is the way public work develops the citizen identities of all participants regardless of formal credentials. People act in their capacity as citizens, prioritizing deliberative and collaborative work, learning respect for others’ talents. 

Civic science embodies Jane Lubchenco’s famous 1998 call in Science, “Entering the century of the environment: a new social contract for science,” for wisdom and humility on the part of scientists.

It is akin to the Colossian Forum, with its project of reawakening the democratic and civic purposes of Christian colleges and universities.

These efforts have never been more important.

In his essay, “Overlooking the polity, Idealizing the nation,” Jim Skillen identifies a core problem in our politics: the liberal framework which holds individual freedom to be ultimate goal of politics.  To address this problem he explores the relationship between citizens and government; biblical narratives; and the role of Christianity in public life. I agree with Jim about the problem and we have disagreements about the solutions.

His essay raises questions: Who are the foundational agents of politics? What are the nature and aims of politics? What is the role of the church? In my response, I elaborate citizen politics as “wilderness politics,” identify culture, not formal governance, as the main source of political dysfunction, and sketch churches as sites for civic culture building, education, and empowerment.  For the latter, I draw on the concept of “civic ecclesiology” developed by the public theologian and African democracy educator Marie Ström.

Citizens and government

Jim Skillen speaks in the accents of James Madison, leading architect of the American constitution. Jim calls for “conversion of the nation as a governed polity” and argues that “politics should always be thought of in relation to public governance.”

In today’s context, Madison has a contemporary ring. In Federalist Paper 10, Madison wrote that “a zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government and many other points…an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power…have divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate.” Madison, like other founders, didn’t ignore civic virtue. The security of liberty, he wrote in Federalist Paper 84, “altogether depend on public opinion and on the general spirit of the people…” But Madison’s view of civic education, like Skillen’s, was only normative. He believed that elected officials, not the general citizenry, were the best guides for the nation, contrasting a “republic,” which he championed, with a “democracy,” which he thought both inferior and unworkable in a large society. In a republic “a small number of citizens [are] elected by the rest,” he said in Federalist 10. The effect “is to refine and enlarge the public views by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations.”

Jim Skillen also recognizes civic virtue, “a civic commitment to the work of building a just republic,” but in his view this is not about citizens’ agency. In fact, he sees the constitutional defect as its excessive decentralization of power. “There is, for all practical purposes, no common legislative, executive, or judicial focus of attention on the wellbeing and justice of the national polity as a whole,” he writes. He proposes “a system of proportional representation for the House of Representatives that would…build disciplined national parties and subordinate interest groups to the parties so they can no longer fund candidates and directly lobby members of Congress.”

My different view comes from the tradition of political thought which sees government as the instrument of “the people.” The people, as Thomas Jefferson famously put it to William Jarvis in 1820, are the only “safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society.” Jefferson was not naïve about the people. Like Madison, he saw people as usually narrowly self-interested. But he was convinced that if the people are “not enlightened enough to exercise their control with wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion.”

Jefferson saw civic education as the task of formal schooling (thus he founded the University of Virginia). But education for democracy in American history has involved many settings in addition to schools and colleges, from settlement houses to women’s reading groups, from labour study circles to the citizenship schools of the freedom movement. All aimed at “informing the discretion” of the people. The leaders and organizers who shaped me also saw the freedom movement and citizenship schools as part of an ancient struggle. As Vincent Harding, friend and speechwriter for Martin Luther King, put it in Hope and History, “The civil rights movement was in fact a powerful outcropping of the continuing struggle for the expansion of democracy in the United States…it demonstrates…the deep yearning for a democratic experience that is far more than periodic voting.”

The concept of “the people” was the foundation of a democratic society with a republican form of government. Unlike monarchies emerging from the mists of the past or aristocracies ruled by landed nobility, the United States was a nation founded by “we the people,” agents and architects of the new country. The revolutionary generation of the 1770s drew on decades of experiences in which settlers built congregations, schools, towns and local governments. This lent immense authority to their aspirations. As the philosopher Danielle Allen has argued in Our Declaration, the Declaration of Independence “makes a cogent philosophical case for political equality…that democratic citizens desperately need to understand [today].”  Such equality involves citizens protecting themselves from domination but “political equality is not…merely freedom from domination. The best way to avoid being dominated is to help build the world…to help, like an architect, determine its pattern and structure. The point of political equality is not merely to secure spaces free from domination but also to engage all members of a community equally in the work of creating and constantly recreating that community.”  In the Constitutional Convention a decade later, the Preamble’s declaration that “We the people” create government as an instrument of collective action preserves this sense.

Madisonians were skeptics.  As the late political philosopher Sheldon Wolin observed in the New York Review of Books, they immediately sought to redefine the people as the voters. “This meant that only on infrequent occasions was the citizen encouraged to think of himself [or herself] as a member of a…body politic.”

Yet America continued to be the setting of robust self-organising activities, from churches and synagogues, to voluntary associations, common schools, libraries, parks, and colleges. In the first half of the 19^th century, the Second Great Awakening created a seedbed for movements such as abolition, labour organising, and women’s suffrage which sought to create “a more perfect union.”

Such civic ferment also created a citizen politics different than electoral politics. Reflecting on his travels across the country in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville compared European nations in which the citizenry relied on government or great leaders with the self-organizing efforts of citizens in America. “In democratic peoples, associations must take the place of the powerful particular persons,” he wrote in his classic, Democracy in America. “In democratic countries the science of association is the mother science; the progress of all the others depends on the progress of that one.”   As Wolin put it in Tocqueville Between Two Worlds, “The Americans, in Tocqueville’s account began with a political culture rather than a state… [They] introduced a…conception of democracy as rooted in, and corresponding to, the democracy of daily life.”

I agree with Jim Skillen that we need a revitalized sense of “civic community,” but am convinced that this requires devolving authority and developing citizens’ agency, not mainly cultivating support for a “sound and stable polity whose aim is to equitably balance multiple needs and demands for the sake of the republic’s common good,” as he puts it. Today people of every group feel hopeless about redressing our mounting problems and reversing civic unravelling. Many feel devalued and victimized. Politicians and government are not going to fix this problem.

Another Biblical narrative: The work of the people

I agree with Skillen that the Exodus narrative has played an important role in Americans’ self-understanding and that there are two contending variants. Co-existing with the concept of a nation shaped by WASP assumptions, which he calls “an Americanized derivation of Israel’s exodus story originating from New England Puritans,” the other Exodus story involves “the African American ideal of a free, equal and inclusive nation,” linked to a strong federal government. The latter Exodus narrative was an important thread of the freedom movement and I know its merits.

But there are also limits in the Exodus narrative and its politics which lead people to look to “powerful particular persons” for rescue. As Marie Ström (full disclosure: my wife, as well as a public theologian) puts it, “The ‘struggle against oppression’ paradigm forms the basis of many Christian efforts to promote justice.  It conveys the belief that salvation is not only about individual religious experience, but affects every aspect of life, including socio-political issues.” This narrative holds the danger of conceptualizing other problems in Manichean terms, “as a fight of the innocent and the forces of good against the evil-doers.”  It also relies on rescue by outside powers whether divine or human saviors like Moses..

 There is another political narrative in the Bible. It can be called the public work story. The Nehemiah story, about the Jewish leader who led the Israeli people in the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem, is a striking example. Nehemiah held together a motley crew – 40 different groups are named, including merchants, priests, governors, members of the perfume and goldsmiths’ guilds, and women. Nehemiah participated in the work himself. At one point he organised a great assembly to call to account nobles making excessive profit from the poor. As the Jewish people rebuilt their walls, they renewed their purpose and identity. The Nehemiah story has been an inspiration in recent decades for many minority, low income and working class communities seeking to revitalize their spirit of community as they “rebuild the walls.”

The wilderness narrative that comes after the Exodus is also a remarkable example, as Marie Ström detailed in her paper on the Pentateuch at Luther Seminary. As she put it, “Gradually the Israelites are formed into a people, with new institutions such as a decentralized system of governance and new systems of sacrifice and worship that demand the full participation of everyone.” The process is full of ambiguities and setbacks.  “During the wilderness journey, the Israelites oscillate between moments of obedience and constructive activity, and moments of disobedience and apostasy.” But the wilderness story is also full of great examples of public work projects, like building of the tabernacle. Men and women “whose hearts made them willing” (Exod 35: 29) – the text places special emphasis on the contributions of women – contributed their skills and resources for the construction of God’s dwelling place and their own place of worship.   Bezalel, the organizer of the work, was filled “with the divine spirit, with skill, intelligence, and knowledge in every kind of craft” (Exod 35:31).  

Marie Ström found in Africa that using the concept of democracy as the public work of the people in building communities and a democratic society transforms people’s sense of themselves from victims to agents of change. “The tremendous energy that animates these [Biblical] narratives is exactly the same energy I saw in often the poorest of the poor, dehumanized by apartheid in South Africa, brutalized by civil war in Burundi and Mozambique, disillusioned by the failures of democracy in Zambia and Malawi, as they developed the skills, confidence and power to unleash their own innate capacities, access resources within their communities and beyond, and work collaboratively with fellow citizens, government departments and other institutional partners.”

The public work paradigm points to a new role for the church amidst the crisis in civic culture.

The primacy of the cultural crisis and Civic Ecclesiology

Jim Skillen’s primary goal for the church is to strengthen public governance: “There are, of course, many things citizens can do in organized ways to promote a more healthy and just republic. In my estimation, however, all such actions will remain sideshows with diminishing influence if fundamental changes are not made.” Central to improving governmental machinery is rewriting of the Constitution, though he is pessimistic it can occur in the current liberal climate.

I take an emerging alternative view which challenges the proposition that reform of public governance is the first priority. Former president Barack Obama’s new foundation is founded on this alternative. “The moment we’re in right now, politics is the tail and not the dog,” Obama argued in his speech to the Summit launching the foundation on November 30. “What’s wrong with our politics is a reflection of something that’s wrong with the civic culture, not just in the United States but around the world.” Conservatives like Yuval Levin and David Brooks share Obama’s primary focus on culture. “Naked liberals of right and left assume that if you give people freedom they will use it to care for their neighbors, to have civil conversations, to form opinions after examining the evidence,” wrote Brooks in his New York Times column November 16, “Our Elites Still Don’t Get It.” But “if you weaken family, faith, community and any sense of national obligation where is that social, emotional, and moral formation supposed to come from?”

To show how citizen politics can address the fraying of civic culture as well as questions of justice let me note several examples of empowering and educational civic centers in the life of communities.

Earlier I recalled Jane Addams’ book, Newer Ideals of Peace. She proposed the need for new community based “centers of spiritual energy” and co-founded the Hull House settlement as an example. John Dewey took Hull House as the model for democratic schooling in his famous essay in 1902, “The School as Social Centre.” Dewey proposed that educational sites free of top down control, grounded in rich community life, could create spaces for people of diverse backgrounds to learn about each other and work together. They could shore up ethical standards against the pressures of cultural degradation. They could help people learn about the “bigger picture” of changes taking place in society. They could prepare people for the radically changing world of work.  

In my John Dewey Lecture last spring, now available in the John Dewey Society journal, Education and Culture, I argue these functions are all more relevant than ever. The Dewey Society has launched a new initiative, “Democracy in Education,” to map promising networks like the Coalition for Community Schools and to catalyze a movement for civic centers.

In today’s world, religious congregations in the US and around the world can perform such functions of civic repair and others as well. For instance, the Theology of the People movement which shaped Pope Francis created something like the Hull House model in Argentina.  As John Carr, director of Georgetown University’s Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life, said on National Public Radio, Pope Francis “looks at the world from the bottom up.”  This view comes from experience.

While archbishop of Buenos Aires before he became pope, Jorge Bergoglio worked with a leaders and organizers to put Theology of the People into action, greatly increasing the number of “slum priests,” much like community and civic organizers. Slum priests turned their parishes into civic sites — centers for education, places for collective action against drug lords, corrupt business and corrupt political leaders, and sites for constructive development.  In the process the priests themselves became “citizen clergy,” with deep respect for the people and their capacities. Padre Pepe described how their experiences brought them to challenge “the misunderstood progressivism” of liberation theologians who arrived “from the outside to give lessons” and viewed the people’s culture with skepticism. The slum priests had “seen and followed the faith of the people, their way of living it, and expressing it,” and were profoundly changed by the process. “Liberation has to start with people, not an ideology and not with charity,” Pepe summarized the lesson.

Like Jane Addams a hundred years ago and Jorge Bergoglio in recent decades, in her work in grassroots African communities Marie developed a similar view as she saw villagers and township inhabitants develop remarkable capacities to change their circumstances,often involving clergy and congregations in the process. She became convinced that churches (and other faith communities) can become civic centers and developed this idea in her thesis, From Servant to Co-Creator: Toward a Civic Ecclesiology.

Her thesis makes a compelling case for the relevance of the role of congregations as centers for civic repair as well as social and economic justice in affluent societies like the US where civic unravelling is a crucial concern. “For the church and its citizens to begin to play this civic role requires a new way of thinking and acting,” she argues. “It involves congregations becoming sites of democracy education and organized citizen action [and] a new language of citizenship to describe their work of co-creation in the world, skills to do this work well, and a new habit of mind: to choose hope over victimhood and despair, shifting from an Exodus mentality [which looks for salvation from outside] to seeing themselves as people of the covenant.”

This perspective challenges conventional, one way ideas of “serving the needy” both inside and outside congregations. “For example, rather than treating pastoral care as an end in itself, from the perspective of a civic ecclesiology caring for members is a way of assisting them to play an active, transformative role in the life of the church and society…The goal is to develop an internal public sphere and a culture of agency that can be projected out into the world through hopeful work.”

Concepts and practices of public work, citizen politics and civic ecclesiology are countercultural today. Lay citizens are mostly treated as demanding consumers and needy clients by clergy and other professionals, who have been trained to “help” and to “rescue” but not to empower. But these ideas of citizens as co-creators, which such ancient roots, also have renewed relevance.

I am convinced that they are the way to overcome radical individualism, to rebuild civic culture, and to revitalize democracy in a time when it has never been more crucial. 

I welcome the questions in this Colossian Forum, “What is politics?” and “What are the aims of politics?”, just as I welcome the idea of “respectful conversations.” Such conversations across our bitter divides are a starting point, in my experience, for people developing a sense of agency and renewed hope in a world which often seems hopeless and out of control.
In this essay I argue the need to reframe politics by shifting the center of politics, from politicians and parties at the center to citizens at the center. To develop this argument requires adding several elements to the discussion.

Today people in every group feel devalued, victimized, powerless and hopeless about making broader change. Such sense of diminishment and hopelessness grows from what Pope Francis calls “the technocratic paradigm,” a way of thinking which priviledges a narrow understanding of science and scientifically trained experts as the authoritative decision makers and problem solvers.

Technocratic triumphalism has old roots. John Lukacs, a Catholic Hungarian intellectual, took refuge in the US in 1957 and observed the devaluation of people’s talents and intelligence decades ago. In his 1984 book Outgrowing Democracy, Lukacs said that he arrived believing that America overestimated the capacities of “the democratic masses.”  He found instead that in the 1950s America came to vastly underestimate people’s capacities as it shifted from a democratic order to a bureaucratic state dominated by experts. Virtually every institution – the media, schools, higher education, foundations, businesses embodied the pattern. Most people were undervalued.

Human diminishment is accelerating in the age of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence, whose promiscuous uses are justified by the efficiency principle, employed by professionals detached from the civic life of communities, aimed at reaching narrowly defined and usually unexamined goals faster and faster. The title of a cover piece in Scientific American last February by nine computer scientists documenting the replacement of humans by robots and the spread of new mechanisms of technocratic control raises the question: “Will Democracy Survive Big Data and Artificial Intelligence?”

“Citizen politics,” centered on citizens’ needs, values, aspirations, and capacities, embodying a nonviolent philosophy of “public love,” pushes back against devaluation and holds potential to transform the logic that gives primacy to efficient technological systems. My views of such politics grow from experiences first in the freedom movement of the 1960s, working for Martin Luther King’s organization, then in community organizing among poor whites in Durham, and for the last 30 years in a network of public work/citizen politics organizers and engaged intellectuals working to democratize schools, colleges, health settings, professions, and government. The forthcoming Pedagogy of the Powered (Boyte et al, Vanderbilt University Press, 2018), has many examples.  The Video, “We the (Young) People,” gives a sense of the hope young people gain in citizen politics.

Here, after treating the technocratic paradigm and its effects, I describe elements of citizen politics and compare such politics with arguments of Harold Heie and Greg Williams. I am delighted that there is opportunity to explore these themes in more detail through the month.

Human devaluation in a technocratic age

Pope Francis’ Laudato Si’, drawing on Catholic and other religious traditions and social theory, affirms humans as meaning-makers and story tellers, not reducible to the categories of the sciences. The encyclical combines an embrace of climate science with a trenchant critique of technocracy that brilliantly articulates the limits of scientific and technological modes of thought, insisting on the urgent need to embed scientific and technological ways of thinking in a larger, pluralist understanding of the purposes and practices of knowledge-making. Francis also shows the damage produced by triumphalist positivism that prioritizes informational approaches for dealing with human problems – “Big Data” – over relational and cultural approaches. “The basic problem goes even deeper” than concentrated economic and knowledge power, he argues. “It is the way that humanity has taken up . . . an undifferentiated and one-dimensional paradigm [that] exalts the concept of a subject, who, using logical and rational procedures, progressively approaches and gains control over an external object.”

Francis names the unselfconscious way of seeing across professional systems. “Many problems of today’s world stem from the tendency, at times unconscious, to make the method and aims of science and technology an epistemological paradigm which shapes the lives of individuals and the workings of society.” Technocracy works in combination with economic power. “The technocratic paradigm also tends to dominate economic and political life. The economy accepts every advance in technology with a view to profit, without concern for its potentially negative impact on human beings.”

These insights grow from in part from an Argentinian theological movement which shaped him, “Theology of the People,” described by Paul Vallely in Pope Francis: Untying the Knots.  It shares with Liberation Theology a “preferential option for the poor” but it has developed a critique of rationalist, reductionist elements in Liberation Theology. As Humberto Miguel Yáñez puts it, Theology of the People differs from “those who embraced aspects of Marxist thinking [and] saw elements like culture and religion as tools of alienation rather than liberation. . . .[In Theology of the people] both philosophically and theologically, there was a strong appreciation of culture.”

The technocratic paradigm appears in professional preparation, destruction of mediating structures, and Manichean politics.

Professional preparation. Over decades, in a process described by Thomas Bender in Intellectuals and Public Life, professional identities shifted from “civic” to “disciplinary.” For instance, in “Culture of Disengagement in Engineering Education,” published in Science, Technology and Human Values, Erin Cech reports on a study of the impact of engineering education programs, ranging from MIT to Smith College. She finds that despite strong statements of the profession that engineers are “to hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the public in the performance of their professional duties,” in fact “students’ public welfare concerns decline significantly over the course of their engineering education.” In her view, “engineering education fosters a culture of disengagement that defines public welfare concerns as tangential to what it means to practice engineering.” She traces this culture to three invisible “ideological pillars” including the idea that engineering is apolitical; that assumption that technical knowledge is far superior to “soft” skills of human interaction; and meritocratic models of success. Such pillars, with variations, can be found across all of professional education. Professionals see themselves as servicing citizens or at the most engaging citizens – not as citizens themselves.

Evisceration of mediating structures: Jane Addams, in Democracy and Social Ethics, warned about the consequence of a new class of experts who saw themselves outside the life of the people. In her view, detached expertise reinforces existing hierarchies based on wealth and power and creates new forms of hierarchical power that threaten to unravel communities. Addams’ warnings anticipated the erosion of the civic fabric as mediating structures such as religious congregations, schools, union locals, local businesses, and civic groups of all kinds turned into service operations to customers and clients.

The effects are immense. For instance, many thousands of local schools have been closed by school consolidation driven by outside experts using the efficiency principle to achieve results (like standardized test scores and cost-saving) with little attention to broad purposes of education.  A review of the research by Craig Howley, Jerry Johnson, and Jennifer Petrie for the National Education Policy Center, What the Research Shows, demonstrates the damage. “A sizable body of research investigating school size has consistently found larger size (after moving beyond the smallest schools) to be associated with reduced rates of student participation in co-curricular and extracurricular activities, more dangerous school environments, lower graduation rates, lower achievement levels for impoverished students, and larger achievement gaps related to poverty, race, and gender.” Impact on communities is often devastating. “The influence of school and district consolidations on the vitality and well-being of communities may be the most dramatic result, if the one least often discussed by politicians or education leaders,” they say. “Put simply, the loss of a school erodes a community’s social and economic base—its sense of community, identity and democracy—and the loss permanently diminishes the community itself, sometimes to the verge of abandonment.”

Manichean politics: The efficiency creed has shaped conventional understandings and practices of politics in elections and citizen activism. In 1974 Citizens for a Better Environment invented the modern canvass powered by a formula. The canvass involves staff going door to door on an issue, raising money and collecting signatures. The formula identifies an enemy and defines the issue in reductionist, good-versus-evil terms. It is efficient because hatred and anger are relatively uncomplicated emotions to manipulate. “We’ve discovered how to sell progressive politics door to door, like selling encyclopedias,” was the boast.

For years I defended the canvass and the formula which makes it efficient, co-authoring Citizen Action and the New American Populism, with Steve Max and Heather Booth, founder of the Midwest Academy, the hub for spreading the method. I remember well the urgency we felt in the face of massive mobilization by large corporate interests to roll back environmental, consumer, affirmative action, progressive tax and other legislation in the early 1970s. Veterans of the sixties movements, we saw ourselves as political realists, breaking with the rhetorical hyperbole of the new left, fighting a good fight against corporate power. We had successes even during the Reagan presidency. We estimated that canvassers reached 12 million households a year in the mid-eighties. Over the past four decades many canvass operations have developed, including environmental and consumer organizations and the Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) network on college campuses.

When I began teaching at the Humphrey Institute in 1987, I discovered many of my students had canvassed and had experienced burn out. Many were cynical and disillusioned about politics. In addition I became aware of a larger problem: the Manichean formula objectifies “the enemy,” radically erodes common citizenship, and communicates that politics is warfare.

The formula spread across the spectrum and new technologies dramatically increase its reach. It is used in robo-calls, internet mobilizations, talk radio, Michael Moore’s documentaries, and Karl Rove’s “axis of evil” after 9-11. A report by Chuck Todd and Carrie Dann, “How Big Data Broke American Politics,” details the increasingly polarized campaigns and politics over the last two decades. Donald Trump’s tweets find parallel on the left in a handbook and website called “Heroes Narrative,” used by progressive groups around the country, which describes how to frame any issue as a struggle of heroes against villains.

Citizen politics of public work

Citizen-centered politics and public work constitute a crucial alternative to Manichean politics.  Citizen politics attends to the concerns voiced by Harold Heie for humility, courage and love in a time of polarization and demonization. But it distinguishes between “private” and “public” love. I agree with Gregory Williams and Luke Bretherton that citizen politics is about negotiating a common life, a process full of tension and conflict, addressing large differences in class, race, faith, gender, and culture. Today, citizen politics must also recognize the rising dangers of authoritarianism around the world as well as “enclosure of the commons,” understood as a kind of space, as Williams argues. But “spaces” where powerless groups develop civic agency are better understood as “free spaces” than as the bourgeois public sphere which Williams excoriates or as the resistance spaces which he champions.

Free spaces are settings where people have room to self-organize, to develop intellectual life, and to learn relational and political skills. Sara Evans and I developed the concept to name our profound experiences in the freedom movement of the sixties, in places like the Methodist Student Center at Duke. The larger movement was full of frees spaces, from black churches and schools to beauty parlors. What generated their freedom was relative autonomy from the norms and power relations of segregated white society. Their democratic qualities grew from their “publicness,” the interplay of diverse views and interests beyond friends and family that grew people’s ways of thinking. Sara and I found analogous spaces for open intellectual life and civic and political learning at the heart of democratic movements throughout American history including the black freedom struggle from the time of slavery, women’s organizations that championed domestic roles in the public square, community rooted unions, and farmers cooperatives, the foundation of the populist movement, described in Free Spaces: The Sources of Democratic Change in America.

Citizen politics is citizen-centered, not state-centered. It recognizes the importance of elections and constructive roles of government, but the focus is not “governing well,” Heie’s emphasis which puts politicians at the center. Citizen politics is also not ideological. It is democratic but draws on both progressive and conservative values. In contrast, I would argue that Williams’ AntiFa slogan “Every Nation, Every Race, Punch a Nazi in the Face!” embodies the kind of Manichean politics we must transform. We need a cross-partisan politics that builds relations across the Red and Blue divide, infused with nonviolence, woven into the fabric of everyday life.

“You must be the change you wish to see in the world,” said Mahatma Gandhi. His view of nonviolence, satyagraha, “soul force,” inspired Martin Luther King and others in the freedom movement. King stressed nonviolence’s transformative power in Stride Toward Freedom. “The nonviolent approach…first does something to the hearts and souls of those committed to it,” he said. “It gives them new self-respect. It calls up resources of strength and courage they did not know they had.”

King argued for seeking to understand opponents, not to defeat or humiliate them and to separate the sin from the sinner. He insisted that nonviolence is a kind of love aiming at “a neighborly concern for others,” whether friend or enemy, recognizing their aspiration “for belonging to the best in the human family.”

Such love can be distinguished from appraisal respect, appreciation for achievements or character, or recognition respect, the intrinsic value of another human being, which Harold Heie espouses. Public love teaches a possibility respect for the immense potential of others including our enemies, for co-creative work that builds a world of shared material and cultural goods. Others have contributed to what I call public love.

In her book, Newer Ideals of Peace, Jane Addams challenged sentimental peace-making. Nonresistance “is much too feeble and inadequate,” she said. She proposed as an alternative “forming new centers of spiritual energy.” She saw their stirrings in “strenuous forces at work,” among “the huge mass” of people marginalized and invisible like immigrants flooding into Chicago, in settlements like Hull House, John Dewey’s famous model for schools as civic centers.

Another contribution comes from the religiously based Mexican-American community organization Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS) in San Antonio, Texas, described in CommonWealth: A Return to Citizen Politics. By the late 1970s, COPS leaders faced the challenge of impacting economic development and other issues beyond their neighborhoods. They developed “public relationships” with Anglo business leaders whom Mexican Americans viewed as oppressive racists. This required their inventing a new concept of public life in which the point of action is not intimacy or personal friendship. Rather, public life is an arena for creating productive working relationships across radical differences among those who may dislike each other for the sake of building a more just and flourishing community. I see this concept as a great political invention and a way to operationalize public love for disadvantaged groups and others.

Finally, nonviolent citizen politics is best expressed through the concept of public work. The overall aim in my view was put well by Septima Clark, architect of the freedom movement’s grassroots citizenship schools: “broadening the scope of democracy to include everyone and deepening the concept to include every relationship.”

in the early 1990s a network of our colleagues began to translate the citizen politics of broad-based community organizing into institutional and cultural change in schools, colleges, health institutions, and cooperative extension. One important statement of what this looks like is the splendid new book Transformative Civic Engagement Through Community Organizing, by Maria Avila, a former IAF organizer who works for democratization of higher education.

Over time public work emerged through this work as a framework which sees citizens as co-creators, not simply voters and volunteers. Power involves ideas and cultural dynamics, not only “people and money.” Public work emphasizes civic possibilities of work and workplaces. It involves efforts by citizens working across differences to solve common problems, advance justice, and create community wealth, from schools, public spaces, libraries and local businesses to art, music and healthy lifestyles – a commonwealth of public usefulness and beauty. An example is transforming special education through Public Achievement (PA).

In PA, teams of young people work on issues of their choice in real world settings. Projects are undertaken in nonviolent ways and make a public contribution. Teams are coached by adults, often college students, who help them develop achievable goals, learn to navigate local environments, develop political skills, and treat others with respect. Projects range widely, from campaigns against bullying, sexual harassment, racism, teen pregnancy, and gang violence to building playgrounds, championing healthy life styles, and making curriculum changes.

The Special Education pre-service program at Augsburg adopted PA as an answer to the critique of special education as a technocratic approach. “Special Education generally still uses a medical model, based on how to fix kids,” explains Susan O’Connor, director of Special Education. Faculty at Augsburg wanted to try something different. They partnered with a middle school in Fridley.

Over three years the results were dramatic. ”Problem students,” mostly low-income and minority, became “problem solvers” on issues like school bullying, health lifestyles, animal cruelty, and supporting terminally ill children. They got recognition in the school, in the larger community, and across the state. The process also transformed the teachers, Michael Ricci and Alissa Blood into “citizen teachers.” “My role is not to fix things for the kids but to say, ‘this is your class, your mission, how are you going to do the work?” explained Ricci.

After this experience, all preservice special education teachers at Augsburg University now coach in PA as part of their preparation. Interviews show striking increase in their understanding of special education students’ intelligence and talents, expansion of their pedagogical repertory to give students far more room for co-creative activity, and hopefulness about their own careers.  

This is a hologram for transformation of technocracy across society. It points toward what we call “civic science,” in which scientifically trained professionals see themselves as citizens and science as civic.

It intimates a democratic renaissance in which citizens are at the center.