Takoma Park, MD has lowered the voting age for municipal elections to 16. Lowell, MA, is working to allow 17-year-olds to vote, and there’s a pending bill in California that would make that change statewide.

I am in favor. Strong evidence suggests that when students are explicitly taught about voting and elections in their high school classes, they are more likely to vote and to be informed voters once they reach voting age. I think schools will be more likely to teach about elections if most of their juniors are eligible to vote, and the impact of the lessons may be greater if students can put the information into practice right away.

No evidence suggests that 17-year-olds are less knowledgeable about politics or less responsible than older voters, and in fact there is the potential for current high school students to be particularly well informed because they would be studying social studies and civics around election time.

In the Washington Post, columnist Petula Dvorak has a piece entitled “Takoma Park’s new 16- and 17-year-old voters push a Cheech and Chong agenda,” in which she quotes people-on-the street saying things like, “This is the enfranchisement of Beavis and Butt-head.” Dvorak is getting lots of flack for the article and has been responding politely, so I don’t want to pile on or make her reporting the issue. But there are substantive questions here.

Like the people Dvorak interviewed, many Americans are cynical about youth as political actors. Practically every piece we publish attracts comments that mock young voters or assume a Democratic partisan agenda behind efforts to boost their engagement. Of course, if one is cynical about voters in general, that opens a worthwhile conversation. But young voters aren’t Beavis and Butt-head. Their top issues are economic. I have never seen marijuana or other behavioral issues attract significant interest as political priorities. Many (45% of the respondents in a recent Harvard poll of 18-29s) think that they lack sufficient information to vote–and they tend to disenfranchise themselves. In other words, Beavis and Butt-head will not turn out. A reform like Takoma Park’s is very unlikely to produce a mass of youth participating in local elections, but the ones who take advantage of the new right will probably be highly substantive and idealistic young people. Think of policy nerds rather than Cheech and Chong–if you have to use stereotypes at all.

In any case, it’s a worthy experiment, very well intentioned, and we will see what happens.

The post lowering the voting age to 16 appeared first on Peter Levine.

Is this a good exam question?

“What are the dangers to a democracy of a national police organization, like the FBI, which operates secretly and is unresponsive to criticism?”

In the late 1950s, applicants to the University of California had to write a 500-word essay to demonstrate their writing skills. This was one of the topics they could choose in 1959. Reviewing a book by Adam Hochschild, Seth Rosenfeld writes that the essay prompt caused FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to “issue a blizzard of orders”:

One FBI official drafted a letter of protest for the national commander of the American Legion to sign; other agents mobilized statements of outrage from the Hearst newspapers, the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles, and the International Association of Chiefs of Police. An FBI man went to see California Governor Edmund G. Brown and stood by while Brown dictated a letter ordering an inquiry into who wrote the essay question.

Hoover himself wrote to members of the university’s board of regents, who swiftly apologized. But his ire did not subside; he ordered an FBI investigation of the university as a whole, assigning an astounding thirty employees to the task. The result was a sixty-page report, covering professorial transgressions that ranged from giving birth to an illegitimate child to writing a play that “defamed Chiang Kai-shek.” The report also noted that seventy-two university faculty, students, and employees were on the bureau’s “Security Index.” This was the list Hoover kept of people who, in case of emergency, were to be arrested and placed in preventive detention, as in the good old days of the Palmer Raids.

It is amusing that Hoover was so upset to see the FBI described as “unresponsive to criticism” that he went into hyperactive response mode.

As someone who has written exam questions for the feds, editorialized about the US citizenship test, and advocated professionally for better assessment of civics at the state and national level, I would insist that testing kids is never value-neutral or “scientific.” It is always a matter of deciding what is good to know and believe (and who has a right to decide).

By the way, not testing students is also a decision. You cannot run an educational system–public or private, a kindergarten or UC Berkeley–without taking a stand on what people should know.

Of course, the University of California was not out to assess civics in 1959. The offending question was part of an English composition test. But an aspect of communicating well is being able to defend one’s own opinions about topics that are important. UC decided that the potential threat posed by the FBI was an important issue, hence a good essay prompt. Implicitly, they were saying something about citizenship. If they had deliberately avoided political controversy in their writing prompts, they would also have made a judgment about what students should be able to do–just a different judgment.

The president of the UC system, Clark Kerr, ultimately lost his job as a result of this particular choice, and his battle with Hoover seems to have helped Ronald Reagan win the governorship, without which he wouldn’t have been president. So the stakes were high. The story is a helpful reminder that controversies about citizenship, testing, and higher ed are hardly new. We must simply make the best judgments we can and defend them with public reasons.

The post the civics question that changed California appeared first on Peter Levine.

How is it that the sidewalk where tiny flip-flops flapped,
and trike wheels creaked
is still the same slab,
still cracked and pollen-streaked?
Nothing shifts in a year or two
yet once the years pile, everything’s new?

(Washington, DC)

The post the hourglass appeared first on Peter Levine.

(Washington, DC) Let’s say you’re a nonprofit or an individual with a meritorious claim and you are in conflict with a big company. You should look for a law firm to take your case pro bono. But the firm will need a waiver (and a lot of persuasion) to take you on if they also work for the big company that is giving you trouble. That means that you’re out of luck if all the law firms in town work for that company. I’m told that this is the case with major banks and other corporations of their size: they have current or recent business arrangements with all the large law firms.  I could not find a way to tell how many outside counsel are employed by a corporation like Bank of America or Microsoft, but I did find this article from The Wall Street Journal in 2010:

Law firms usually can’t sue or investigate banks that they have represented, unless the clients take the unusual step of waiving the conflict. … [But] consolidation in the banking business has made it only harder for law firms to handle lawsuits against banks. It is increasingly difficult, lawyers said, for firms to find a major bank they haven’t represented at some point.

This piece doesn’t address the question of pro bono representation. It is mainly about the rise of small, specialty firms that gain market advantage by deliberately avoiding all banks as clients–so that they can sue banks. But that doesn’t solve the problem for pro bono clients.  I wonder whether consolidation in the legal profession is the root of the issue. Could companies be intentionally hiring every law firm in town so that nobody can sue them?

The post you can’t find pro bono help if your opponent employs all the law firms appeared first on Peter Levine.

Patriotism is much in the news, with the IRS allegedly investigating groups that have the word “patriot” in their name, and various people accusing others of being unpatriotic. In reality, patriotism is rarely just a matter of loving a particular country. It is almost always a particular story of a country that emphasizes some people’s core values and excludes some of their compatriots.

Sen. Ren Paul’s recent fundraising letter says, “President Obama and his anti-gun pals believe the timing has never been better to ram through the U.N.’s global gun control crown jewel. I don’t know about you, but watching anti-American globalists plot against our Constitution makes me sick.”

Paul is not the only one who feels that way. As part of an experiment that we recently conducted, representative Americans told us about any political videos they had shared. This response was far from typical of the whole sample, but also hardly unique:

Mostly of the Obamas….Michelle Obama whispering to B.O., “all this over a flag!” I come from a military family and I am extremely offended by the both of them. I have never seen a more unamerican couple in the White House! This done at a 9/11 ceremony.and now the lack of concern for our flag and our diplomats…Obama should never have been elected…The media has a lot to do with what we are going thru as a Country…Clower and Pivens, Olinsky.. [sic] they are destroying the American way from within and those are the subject matter of most videos I share.

But the Obama administration also adopts a very strong–if different–patriotic narrative. For example, the president’s second Inauguration wove a story in which the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement were central to the great drama of American Freedom. A multiracial Brooklyn choir sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” a song about crushing the serpent of rebellion beneath the heel of the Union Army. The president had been reelected by states that fought on the Northern side, and the only Southern voice at the whole event was Sen. Lamar Alexander’s. Implicitly if not deliberately, the message was the glory of the national government that has triumphed over its enemies, domestic as well as foreign. Obama’s strongest critics fear that same government and admire armed resistance against it, at least in the form of the lost confederate cause.

My point is not that one position is more authentically patriotic than the other, although I certainly prefer the substantive values of the administration. The debate is not between patriots and anti-patriots, but among Americans whose reading of their country is strictly at odds.

The post patriotism as a rhetorical tool appeared first on Peter Levine.

(Washington, DC) After the Census Current Population Survey November Supplement data became available this week, we calculated final estimates of young people’s voting in the 2012 election. Please see this new fact sheet for detailed results. In short, the story has changed from what we believed immediately after the election. Using the best available data, we then said that youth turnout had reached the same level as in 2008–somewhat surprisingly. The CPS data suggests that there was actually a decline. This CIRCLE blog post explains the methodology.

We now estimate that approximately 14.8 million voters under 30 cast their votes for Barack Obama in 2008. But only about 12.3 million young voters chose Obama in 2012 — a drop of close to 2.5 million votes. Voter turnout in 2012 was 45% for people between the ages of 18-29, down from 51% in 2008.

The post youth voting declined in 2012 appeared first on Peter Levine.

I must admit that I have neglected gender as an issue in youth civic engagement. My organization (CIRCLE) generally focuses on common behaviors, like voting and community service, and on political knowledge and attitudes as assessed by surveys and tests. On all those measures, young women are somewhat ahead of young men, much as one might expect since young women do somewhat better in school and college. I have obviously been aware that Congress and other powerful institutions are dominated by men, but I chalked that up to campaign finance and other flaws in the political system. Our work is concerned with young people rather than systems, so I thought we could contribute little to the problem of gender inequality in politics.

But CIRCLE’s led researcher, Dr. Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, recently presented at a White House Conference on Girls’ Leadership and Civic Education. In preparing to present, she analyzed survey data and revealed troubling patterns. Basically, young women are more “civically engaged” than young men but much less confident in their own ability to hold leadership positions and less likely to pursue leadership roles. Below is just one example of a troubling result. By the time men leave college, almost one third place themselves in the top 10% for leadership, and that rate has risen since freshman year. Less than one in five women rate themselves that high, and that rate falls from freshman to senior year.

See this page for Kei’s fact sheet and links to other CIRCLE materials. We also propose some strategies for addressing the problem. If you are interested in discussing the issue with a very well-informed group, please consider attending this year’s Frontiers of Democracy conference, which will include a learning exchange on gender.

The post big gender gap in political leadership appeared first on Peter Levine.

(Concord, NH) I am here for one of a series of fairly regular meetings on civic education in New Hampshire. Justice David Souter is an engaged and thoughtful participant in the group. To get a sense of his underlying values, see his comments at a Harvard Law School event recently. He was on a panel with Justice O’Connor, Prof. Lawrence Tribe, and Kenneth Starr (in his new role as president of Baylor University). But I thought Justice Souter stole the show with an impassioned and substantive mini-speech that starts around minute 7 on the video below. His thesis: America fortunately promotes freedom and diversity, but we need some commonality to counter the “disuniting tendencies” of our time, the “wealth disparities,” the impact of money on politics, and other “atomizing and disuniting” forces.  Our common ground is a constitutional value-system that is neutral with respect to religion and culture. In order to appreciate that constitutional creed or heritage, you must understand it. That requires facts–hence, civic education.

My own remarks earlier in the same conference don’t seem to be on YouTube, but I had argued for setting a high standard and not settling for kids being able to memorize the answers to a civics test. I made a similar point in my recent CNN piece.

The post Justice Souter on civic education appeared first on Peter Levine.

In a series of posts, I have been developing the idea that anyone’s moral thinking can be modeled as a network: the nodes are beliefs, and the links are various kinds of connections (implications, generalizations, perceived similarities).

This modeling method would work for a Kantian, a Buddhist, a Marxist, a Thomist–it is morally neutral, not a substantive position. However, I have been arguing that certain formal structures are better than others. By bringing your own network more into line with those standards, you can move from your starting point toward an improved moral position.

This is fundamentally a social process because the nodes in your network are shared with other people, and a good network is one that interacts well with theirs. Thus I am implying a theory of collaborative moral learning. It is not a psychological theory about how people do learn, but a moral theory about how we should learn. I am interested in getting this theory right and avoiding philosophical errors. But my goal is to develop an actual method for moral introspection. That would be a contribution to the long tradition of moral exercises that go back to the ancient Stoics and classical Indian thinkers.

Below are some notes about the learning theory. I think it avoids several significant pitfalls. It does not make learning from experience seem automatically beneficial, because people can learn very bad ideas. It does not imply that better educated people–those who have more formal learning–are more moral, which is clearly false. And it addresses the fact that many important moral issues are “socially constructed,” yet there are real differences between good and evil.

Why morality involves continuous learning

If we want to assess the moral beliefs of an individual, a natural method is to list the important ones and decide whether each belief is good or right. For example, if anyone’s list includes racist beliefs, that is worse than if it does not. You should get rid of racism.

We might hope to be able to generate the right list of beliefs (or at least a good enough list) by means of an algorithm: a set of clear instructions. For instance, we might start with Kant’s Categorical Imperative or the principle of utility, add empirical information about the situation that confronts the individual, and derive the moral conclusions that rightly follow. Using any reasonable method of that kind, racism would not end up on one’s list, because–why should it? It is not suggested by science or any other empirical information, and it contradicts all plausible general moral principles.

If we tried to construct a computer program that would model the moral beliefs (although perhaps not the moral sentiments and motivations) of a good person, we would not have to worry about the computer ending up as a racist. The thought would not occur to it, so to speak. That is good, because I have no doubt that racism is morally wrong, any more than I doubt that it is a sunny day or that the Allies won World War II.

So far, so good. But modern Americans should not merely refrain from endorsing racism; they should actively oppose it. Their lists of moral beliefs should include anti-racist principles. The reasons that they must confront racism are historically contingent and, we hope, temporary. At some point in the future, it will no longer be necessary to hold anti-racist ideas, because other people will not feel or endorse racism any more, and its effects will not linger.

But even then, a good list of moral principles will include many historically contingent beliefs. They will be beliefs about things that have developed over time as a result of many people’s behavior and adopted complex and sometimes ambiguous forms. Examples of the “socially constructed” objects that I should form opinions about today are the United States, romantic love, the police, eating animals, and the profession of teaching in college.

In evaluating these topics, general moral principles are often relevant. When I think about whether I should really be a college professor, the principle of utility comes appropriately to mind, and I ask, “Am I having the best possible effects on the most possible people?” (The results are troubling.) If a few general principles could generate the important moral conclusions, we could learn them quickly. That is the hope behind teaching children the Golden Rule and other such algorithms. Such principles can handle certain kinds of stylized choices: May I commit murder? May I lie?

But these principles will not tell me whether to live an active or a contemplative life, whether to engage in politics, whether to spend a limited amount of energy opposing racism or boosting economic growth, whether to have children, or a whole range of significant and troubling questions. Moral principles will not tell me which objects are morally salient, troubling, promising, possible, or inevitable.¹

Nor will principles banish skepticism, because I can always doubt the principles. For example, I am very confident that racism is bad. But if I had been born a white person two centuries ago, chances are good that I would have intuited the rightness and naturalness of white superiority. I grew up intuiting that it was fine to kill and eat animals, but that may seem a barbarous assumption to my grandchildren. In the moral realm, dispositive arguments are rare; for the most part, we just have refutations of substantive views that prove internally inconsistent. How we can vindicate moral positions is not easy to say.

In the case of racism, we have begun to learn that it is wrong. When I was a young child, I first learned the very existence and salience of race from other people. Other Americans learn to recognize race in much less than a second and frequently allow it to influence their behavior; and for that reason, we must pay attention to it. I also began to learn early on that I should not associate feelings of superiority or inferiority with race—because I was told not to. The people (parents, teachers, books, and famous leaders) who told me to oppose racism had learned it from experience: their own and others’. The Civil Rights movement had taught white Americans that racism was wrong, something that its members knew from both personal and vicarious experience. Meanwhile, I was learning many other moral lessons about things that are socially constructed, from marriage to school to the Internal Revenue Service.

It is easy to see that we must learn morality, because we come into the world knowing practically nothing and have very little time to develop moral theories of the whole complex world that confronts us.  Besides, a considerable amount of the important information is historical and so not available to be perceived directly. You cannot understand racism, for example, without knowing something about institutionalized slavery, and that knowledge must be vicarious.

Alas, learning from experience is not reliably beneficial. In 1800, no one was a Nazi. By 1930, millions of people had learned to be Nazis. They had learned by listening to other people and amassing and interpreting new information—about Germany’s defeat in the Great War, the economic crises of the Western democracies, the perceived power of cosmopolitan Jews, and so on. If we define “reasoning” in a reasonably neutral fashion, it can be disastrous. Being open to new experiences and perspectives can make us worse than we were.

If we wanted to build a computer to model the process of developing a good list of moral beliefs, it would have to be interactive: harvesting and interpreting masses of data and perspectives on the data. Its results would vary depending on the historical circumstances. It would not merely do what most people suggest doing, because that could lead it in the wrong direction. It would have to be programmed to reach better, rather than worse, conclusions from what it learned. And, I have argued, we could not program it to reach adequate conclusions by building into its instructions general principles like the Golden Rule. Those rules might help, especially by preventing certain egregious mistakes. They would not suffice.

Coherence theories

So far, I have written about lists of moral beliefs, each one of which is either right or wrong. But how can we tell, in the ambiguous cases? It is helpful to think not about lists but about overall structures of beliefs, where each belief is connected to another if A implies B. Any coherence theory of moral truth looks for the quality of the overall structure of moral beliefs instead of asking whether each belief is right or wrong on its own. If a whole moral worldview hangs together well and contains many plausible but not self-evident beliefs and arguments, it is persuasive even if one can doubt each element.

But there are two problems with standard coherence theories in the realm of ethics. First, they make internal consistency the main criterion. But many different worldviews can be morally consistent, including evil ones. It is easy to avoid a moral tension between A and B by just ignoring A, but that does not make you a better person.

Second, they tend to favor systematic thinking. Every idea is supposed to be connected to a more general and abstract one, until you reach an apex in the “summum bonum, or, what is the same thing, … the foundation of morality” (J.S. Mill). Of course, not everyone shares Mill’s monism. W.D. Ross thought that there were several fundamental moral ideas that could not be reduced to a single one, and perhaps that was also true of Aristotle and Aquinas. But even Ross believed that the prima facie duties were “very few in number and very general in character.”² The tendency is quite widespread to favor ideas of broad application as a means of achieving coherence. That is all very well if we know that those ideas are true. If we doubt their truth, the whole edifice rests on shaky foundations.

But if morality is a network, then “foundationalist” theories are just examples of  structures with certain formal properties. In a foundationalist theory, all the nodes connect to all the others through one or a few nodes that represent very general beliefs. These beliefs are not really foundations (that is just a metaphor), but they are highly central nodes. It is not clear why you would want your network to look like this, unless you had very high confidence in the truth of those nodes. I would much rather spread my bets.

Instead, a network should have features that encourage learning through dialogue with other people. Those include: having lots of nodes, not relying too much on nodes that are fixed and nonnegotiable beliefs, deliberately including nodes that are shared by other people you know, and being able to connect each of your beliefs to others so that a conversation that begins with Belief A can move to Belief B, and your interlocutor can explore your views. With all due respect to Emerson, he was wrong to write in “Experience”:

All private sympathy is partial. Two human beings are like globes, which can touch only in a point, and, whilst they remain in contact, all other points of each of the spheres are inert; their turn must also come, and the longer a particular union lasts, the more energy of appetency the parts not in union acquire.

Actually, we can touch at many points–and are so much the better for it.

Why education does not guarantee moral progress

If it is better to have more beliefs rather than fewer, for all your beliefs to be connected, and for your whole moral worldview to be influenced by many other people’s ideas, then isn’t better to be highly educated? For education exposes you to a range of perspectives, requires you to develop ideas on many subjects, and encourages you to explore their connections.

Indeed, liberal education has a moral purpose, and the intention behind it should be honored. But I have not observed that people with more book-learning are better, morally. Why not?

First, there are many ways to learn from other people. I am particularly enthusiastic about learning from working together, from collaboration, which can be done by people without formal education.

Second, there may be diminishing moral returns from learning–the moral curve still climbs, but slowly after a while.

But mainly, the people who read and study the most are paid to do so (unless they are still preparing for paid employment in intellectual work). The jobs that involve reading and studying are not designed to challenge you morally or to equip you with thoughts that will enrich your moral dialog with other people. Rather, you are paid to collect information that supports or tests positions that you already hold. You read with increasingly instrumental purposes. That gives the additional reading little moral value and may actually make it counter-productive morally, unless you fight to keep your mind open.

Another interpretation is Tolstoy’s. In late works like the Death of Ivan Ilyich, Tolstoy maintained that the moral truth is simple, easily obscured by fancy culture and learning. Ilyich and all his educated friends are unable to love. Their lives are living deaths, in contrast to the simple butler Gerasim, who happily does what is right because he only has a few ideas in his head.

Tolstoy hated Shakespeare and thought that other people’s admiration for the playwright was “a great evil, as is every untruth.” That is because Shakespeare loved the world in all its variety and complexity. Keats had found in Shakespeare the quality that he called “Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Other critics have noted Shakespeare’s remarkable ability not to speak on his own behalf, from his own perspective, or in support of his own positions. Coleridge called this skill “myriad-mindedness,” and Matthew Arnold said that Shakespeare was “free from our questions.” Hazlitt said that the “striking peculiarity of [Shakespeare’s] mind was its generic quality, its power of communication with all other minds–so that it contained a universe of feeling within itself, and had no one peculiar bias, or exclusive excellence more than another. He was just like any other man, but that he was like all other men.”

In short, we have a choice about what kind of ethical network to build. Tolstoy said: a simple one, with the Truth at its heart. Keats said: a very complex one without any identifiable center. Formal education does not necessarily promote either type of network–that depends on how the education is conducted. I argue that Keats was right because there is no single Truth, even though there is an objective moral difference between a good network of beliefs and an evil one.

NOTES
¹ In a chapter entitled “How to be a Moral Realist” (1988), Richard N. Boyd writes, “Much [moral] knowledge is genuinely experimental knowledge and the relevant experiments are (“naturally” occurring) political and social experiments whose occurrence and whose interpretation depends both on “external” factors and upon the current state of our moral understanding. Thus, for example, we would not have been able to explore the dimensions of our needs for artistic expression and appreciation had not social and technological developments made possible cultures in which, for some classes at least, there was the leisure to produce and consume art. We would not have understood the role of political democracy in [advancing the] good had the conditions not arisen in which the first limited democracies developed. Only after the moral insights gained from the first democratic experiments were in hand, were we equipped to see the depth of the moral peculiarity of slavery.” (p. 205)

²W.D. Ross, The Foundations of Ethics (Oxford, 1939), p. 190.

The post toward a theory of moral learning appeared first on Peter Levine.

In lieu of a post here today, I have a piece on CNN.com entitled “Citizenship isn’t about passing a civics test.” Please read it there, but it begins:

As Congress debates immigration law, it cannot avoid debating citizenship. Who gets to be a citizen? And what should citizens know, believe, and do?

Under current law, would-be citizens must pass the U.S. Naturalization Test, which poses factual questions about civics and history such as: “What are two rights in the Declaration of Independence?” …

This test assumes that a competent citizen knows some basic information about the U.S. political system. Most American students must demonstrate similar competence. All U.S. states have standards for K-12 social studies and, typically, the teacher assesses knowledge with paper-and-pencil tests that resemble the naturalization test.

One question is whether these requirements reflect a worthy definition of citizenship. …. Another question is whether studying for short-answer tests teaches people much …

The post CNN op-ed: Citizenship isn’t about passing a civics test appeared first on Peter Levine.

Here is the new Japanese version of The Deliberative Democracy Handbook: Strategies for Effective Civic Engagement in the Twenty-First Century, edited by John Gastil and me. A cleaned-up version of the Google translation of the Japanese blurb would say:

Don’t leave it to the legislature alone! This is a practical handbook for a new form of democracy by direct participation of citizens. It describes a method of citizen participation in the political process, describing concrete case studies from other countries, mainly the United States of America. It is a useful single book for all those who are interested in civil juries, deliberative polls, town meetings, and other formats, summarizing both their strengths and weaknesses for local governments, educational institutions, and others.

Compare the Chinese and English covers, below:

The post the Deliberative Democracy Handbook in Japanese appeared first on Peter Levine.