Environment and Community Ecology Remade as Part of New Community Paradigms

The previous post of this blog revisited and updated the New Community Paradigms (NCP) wiki page Community Arts. The next wiki page to be updated is Environment. Admittedly, Climate Change has not been a primary focus until recently. The focus has been more on democratic community governance. Recently though issues such as the #GreenNewDeal has clearly shown that Climate Change is a manifestation of governance.

As with most of the NCP wiki pages, Environment is a collection of resources gathered over time. It is by no means comprehensive nor is there any assertion of personal expertise in their selection. The sites selected are only a sampling of useful sites that could be applied in creating new community paradigms.

There have been a number of changes since the last time Environment was featured. In addition to the loss of some sites, there has also been a change from the Brain to Kumu as a primary systems mapping tool for NCP. A meta-oriented change made early was moving from a concept of Community Environment to Community Ecology. The word ecology being judged as providing a greater biological orientation to the concept of community than the word environment. For better comprehension, the Environment wiki page has been organized into three sections. The first of which is Community Science / Education / Systems Thinking and Practice.

The latest new resource is the Home of Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI) which seeks to improve environmental data stewardship and to promote environmental health and Environmental Justice through the analysis, through Digital Justice, of federal environmental data, websites, institutions, and policy. Towards an Environmental Data Justice Statement: Initial Thoughts - EDGI provides a good introduction of their efforts.

Public Lab, is a DIY environmental science community with a strong democratic ethos as reflected by their Public Comment section. Public Lab injects community knowledge into civic decision-making about local environmental concerns, listing scores of DIY citizen projects on its extensive community populated Wiki website. The Science of Collective Discovery provides Open Source Stories, featuring organizations like Public Lab and others on how citizens are using open hardware to make groundbreaking discoveries.

NAAEE | North American Association for Environmental Education is a force multiplier for environmental education, promoting excellence in the field and expanding the reach and impact of their collective work.

The Climate Leader Climate Interactive tool provides an introductory training series in systems thinking to help fuel the global response to climate change. En-ROADS is a fast, powerful simulation tool for understanding how we can achieve our energy transition and climate goals through changes in our energy use, consumption, and policies.

The next section us Climate Change for the Better. The Citizens' Climate Lobby is a non-profit, nonpartisan, grassroots advocacy organization focused on national policies to address climate change by taking action on climate change solutions.

The Post Carbon Institute is intent on leading the transition to a resilient world providing individuals, communities, businesses, and governments with the resources needed to understand and respond to the interrelated economic, energy, environmental, and equity crises that defines the twenty-first century by envisioning a world of resilient communities and re-localized economies thriving within ecological bounds. The closely related Homepage of Resilience provides not only a community library with space to read and think, but also a vibrant café to support building community resilience in a world of multiple emerging challenges: the decline of cheap energy, the depletion of critical resources like water, complex environmental crises like climate change and biodiversity loss, and the social and economic issues which are linked to these.

The Project Drawdown lists one hundred potential solutions to reverse global warming from retrofitting to refrigerant management. While the Solutions Project seeks to accelerate the transition to 100% clean energy by championing a movement that is more inclusive, more collaborative, and more celebratory through storytelling, grant making, and capacity building and by honoring clean energy leaders, investing in promising solutions, and building relationships between unlikely allies.

Global Green USA works in partnership with local governments and other public agencies that are ready to “do” sustainability. They help create innovative and replicable policies, programs, and procedures so that sustainable practices become standard in the planning, design, construction, and operation of the built environment.

C40 Cities Live - Blog is a network of large and engaged cities from around the world committed to implementing meaningful and sustainable climate-related actions locally that will help address climate change globally.

Taking a more business-oriented perspective is the Portland State College of Urban & Public Affairs | The Initiative on Triple Bottom Line Development. Their Triple Bottom Line Tool is unfortunately on hiatus.

The final section consists of sites seen as addressing Energy & Climate Data. Climate Change being recognized as a Wicked Problem, the data being presented can be particularly complex. This is especially true with USA Energy Data which presents an interactive map detailing America’s daily energy use by Saul Griffith, co-founder and CEO of Otherlab.

The EJSCREEN: Environmental Justice Screening and Mapping Tool is a US EPA developed environmental justice (EJ) mapping and screening tool purportedly based on nationally consistent data and an approach that combines environmental and demographic indicators in maps and reports. Unfortunately, certainty doesn't seem as possible with the current federal administration.

Taking a more expansive approach to the issue and recognize the potential contribution business and perhaps more conservative perspectives, the Carbon Tracker Initiative seeks to align the capital markets with efforts to tackle climate change. The Carbon Disclosure Project - Global climate change reporting system provides a transformative global system for thousands of companies and cities to measure, disclose, manage and share environmental information with the view that market forces can, hopefully, be seen as a major cause of change when provided with the necessary information.

The Greenhouse Gas Data Publication Tool is another EPA tool that explores Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emissions from Large Facilities. The Home for Environmental software tools for accounting, carbon footprinting & sustainability performance, although located in the United Kingdom, is intended to bring together people needing to do some form of environmental assessment (and particularly quantification) with people that have developed tools to do these assessments and calculations. Their tools vary in format, including documents, spreadsheets, websites, and other software programs.

The Challenge is research published in Nature Sustainability with the vision of, ”A Good Life For All Within Planetary Boundaries” (summarized in The Conversation) that is the first to quantify the national resource use associated with achieving a good life for over 150 countries. Recognizing that no country in the world currently meets the basic needs of its citizens at a globally sustainable level of resource use. The Climate Wizard enables technical and non-technical audiences alike to access leading climate change information and visualize the impacts anywhere on Earth.

The site Bombs in Your Backyard - ProPublica provides a full map of sites contaminated with military toxic waste and explosives some of which are located near schools, residential neighborhoods, rivers, and lakes.

Environment was placed under the Community Ecology map of the New Community Paradigms Wiki map project which can assist in both discovering and communicating unrealized connections and redefining connections. One can get from an element narrative (Environment) to the underlying map (Community Ecology) by clicking the white space of the map. One can highlight and select an element (Environment) in the Community Ecology map by selecting the text in the narrative section and mousing over and clicking or by selecting the element’s colored circle within the map. One can get back to the relevant New Community

Paradigms wiki page using the URL, e.g., newcommunityparadigms.pbworks.com/w/page/44793688/Environment in the particular narrative section of the element.

What the Kumu Community Ecology wiki map graphically reveals is that the concept consists of Sustainability and Environment, as well as Streets and Transportation, each of which can connect back to the NCP wiki map through an On Kumu Wiki Map link. Community Ecology bridges back through Planning the Urban Landscape (formerly Built Environment) to Places and then on to the concept of Livable Communities and beyond.

All of this though only provides resources not answers or solutions which must still be developed by those searching for ways of creating new community paradigms.

The Difference between Mapping Pathways and Traveling the Road

During week 5 of Active Citizen in a Digital Age, the course guided us in considering how to allocate responsibilities in addressing our shared social goal. Our team's stated mission was to reduce the economic inequality of low-income people by providing access to affordable healthcare, education with job training, and housing. How we were going to do this was a little less clear.

Our plan was to include advocacy activities such as who would volunteer, donate or seek donations to a particular association or charitable nonprofit. How would this make a difference in achieving our goal? Also, who would spend time or money or both specifically focused on policy change or political action? This could include attending public hearings or council meetings on certain topics, organizing people to vote, participating in peaceful protest activities, or donating or seeking donations.

The plan was intended to focus on the type of influence or change that was to be made in one year's time. The one-year time frame provided the potential for including all aspects including ending up with a vote through an election or action by a political body.

We were to explain how the different tactics are meant to fit together and our reasons for choosing those tactics and any tradeoffs we had to make.

When I looked at the assignment, there were a number of questions that came to my mind. My questions were pretty basic. Were we focusing on all three of our objectives in general or picking one and focusing on a particular aspect of an issue? How were we providing access? How were we making it affordable? What type of influence or change were we seeking? Specifically, what policy change or political action were we going to be focused on?

It also seemed that the theme of the first part of the assignment was concerned more with the civil sector while the second part of the assignment was concerned more with the political sector. Which were we going to focus on, the first, the second bull, or both?

If focused on the civic realm then how would our actions make a difference in achieving our goal? If focused on the political realm then at what level of government? If organizing people to vote then I presumed we were speaking of an election through a vote by a political board was also a possibility. If both, how are they then to be related together to explain how our different tactics are meant to fit together? Peaceful protests would seem to be in reaction to a political action. Seeking donations would seem to be as important as making donations (they have a course on that).The one-year time frame provided the potential for including all aspects including ending up with a vote through an election or action by a political body.

As is often my habit, I decided to create a Kumu map of the course’s state Mission and Actions, based on a self-selected choice of healthcare, to make more explicit the relationships between various factors or elements. Opening the map and mousing over the text in the left-hand column will highlight relevant parts of the map but I will also discuss here. The map consists of a Civil Sector and a Political Sector which is organized in such a way that they are seen as working together. Their limitations are made more discernible when viewed separately. The civil sector has difficulty making fundamental changes being often relegated to merely holding the line in terms of social damage. The political sector can’t access the deeper perspective of civil society.

My own potential personal path of involvement was based in part on my past experience working in city government and past and still, unfinished work exploring Effective Virtual Collaboration and its expanded perspective Community Based Virtual Collaboration.

This was fine as far as it went but I needed to include my path as one component of a Collective Action Plan with the others on the team. I had access to everybody else’s narrative as they had access to mine as well as to the basic map I created. With this information, I endeavored to map out a path for each of the team’s participants. My pathway connections' thicker widths make it possible to see where my pathways and the pathways of others overlap.

The team leader Participant 1’s Path emphasized the political sector more though hopefully growing out of an educated and enthusiastic base of support. The far more challenging undertaking though would be carrying this forward to final attainment of the goal.

Participant 2’s Path incorporated the new platform Educate Evangelize which I came to see as very important. One has to change people's mindset before they can change much else. I put Participant 2's path more on the civil side leaving the subsequently educated and enthusiastic to decide for themselves which political path to take. This doesn't preclude political action by Participant 2 but to educate truthfully about something means to my mind connecting with people in the field.

Participant 3’s Path towards change was seen as emphasizing the civil sector connections with various associations and nonprofits and by working with them to impact policy change by working hand in hand with political change. Again, this did not preclude political action by Participant 3 simply that there was an emphasis on working with groups like the American Medical Association (AMA), American Association of Retired People (AARP), American Hospital Association (AHA) and Federation of American Hospitals (FAH), American Cancer Society (ACS), National Physician Alliance (NPA) and Planned Parenthood through which one can leverage these organizations and participate in their efforts to influence elected officials.

Participant 4’s Path towards change emphasized the promotion of financial contributions expanding beyond personal giving.

Each of these paths is a different story which is not being revealed here. The map simply demonstrates how those stories could interact in creating a larger story. It was interesting to note that despite not having any input into the selection of the team members, the Paths of All Participants covered nearly all of the platforms and actions put forward by the course. The All Paths loop brought together all of the individual paths through collaboration. Besides connections related to Crowdfunding to be discussed below, only one connection was missing and that was spending money to organize people to vote which likely needs another level of organization and effort.

Week six of the Active Citizen in a Digital Age course got into the market sector of democratic advocacy including boycotts. Other advocacy support financial tools cited were Crowdfunding like IOBY (In Our Backyards), impact investing as with B corporations and Embedded Giving.

Crowdfunding which was also included in the Combined Paths map connecting the personal actions of spending money, what the course referred to as political spending and donating or seeking donations, what the course referred to as financial support of civil society efforts with the various platforms for action, working with associations or nonprofits, taking political action, working on policy change, or the added education and evangelizing.

The Crowdfunding element’s influence could then be further extended integrating other elements together. Crowdfunding obviously raises money but it could also work through the advocacy systems connector loop, integrating even further.

We created and I mapped out pathways to achieving the goals for which we were advocating. What became obvious to me is that no one path would be enough. The issue I had is that we had no specific modes of traveling those paths. As has been asserted before, "There is also still the further need to move from basically abstract ideas to connecting ideas together for strategic application, to the why, to begin overcoming what Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton called the Knowing-Doing Gap (page 7)".

Active Digital Citizens Seeking New Community Paradigms pt. 2

Continuing from the last post, the third week of  The Active Citizen in a Digital Age course dealt first with why digital matters to democracy in two parts, the first on the nature of digital data itself and the nature of networks arising from the interaction of that data. We create a tremendous amount of digital data in our every day, the vast majority having nothing to do with our ideas of democracy. Fundamentally different and in addition to other types of physical based resources we need to be concerned with in engaging as active citizens, digital is still concerned with how are we going to use our time and money? Digital data is the instructor informs us, a non-rival and non-excludable good unlike the other two. “Basically that means that lots of people can use it at once and it's hard to keep others from using it.” 

The nature of the network, exchanging digital data over networks, mobile, wireless spectrum, cable or broadband, is made up of physical structures. One important feature being the vast quantity of information that can now be stored. Every digital action gets recorded and stored and that storage keeps growing, not necessarily accessible, intentionally or not but it does keep growing. There are entities, usually market-based companies involved with maintaining this digital infrastructure making such exchanges happen from app and software developers to equipment builders, to network providers creating access to the creators of digital products we are interacting with, be it social media companies or search engines. 

All of our mutual digital transactions also involve a third party, intermediary infrastructure providers. This matters because all of the data representing the information we are exchanging (information turned into 1s and 0s) is stored on their servers. The nature of digital means that there is a difference between what gets remembered, what gets shared, and what will last when action is taken in either the digital space or the analog space.  

More information and insight on this topic is available through the Digital Impact Toolkit from the Digital Civil Society Lab at the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society which supports the ethical, safe, and effective use of digital data by civil society organizations.

The course recognizes in the second part of the lesson that the two components of the first part lead to the dangers of going digital. In part because digital democracy plays by a different set of rules than does analog democracy. How we participate in civil society is influenced, impacted, and defined based on the nature of both digital data and its network infrastructure.

The problem is that digital infrastructure is built by companies, usually for-profit and is monitored by governments. Therefore there is no individual, private space in the digital world so there is no real civil society in digital space. According to the course though, civil society needs to function as an independent space separate from markets and governments.

“Civil society is an institutional manifestation of our basic human rights to peaceable assembly, free expression and, privacy.”

Lucy Bernholz, Senior Research Scholar, Stanford University, PACS

Director, Digital Civil Society Lab (and course instructor) wrote her own perspective on this issue. She produces the Philanthropy and the Social Economy: Blueprint (2016), an annual industry forecast about the ways we use private resources for public benefit. Particular interest should be paid to pages 20 to 23. 

“Yes, we can use digital tools to expand free expression and assembly; yes, these tools can be used to expand the voices we hear and participation by many. But civil society actors - in the US specifically - are fooling themselves if they think that digital tools are innately and always democratizing.”

She points out that civil society actors - in the US this means nonprofits and foundations as well as social movements, protestors, and activists - must protect the right and capacity to organize online, to express oneself and assemble peaceably outside of government or corporate control in digital spaces, if we are to maintain that right and capacity offline.

The digital rights agenda is civil society's agenda.

The challenge then is how to reclaim and protect this loss of civil society? There are apps that are designed to protect privacy by encrypting communications for example. There still remains though the essential real world on-the-ground (analog world) steps of finding allies, working together, crafting a strategy and message which requires having a private space to come together. 

Open Society Foundations United States, an organization which works to build vibrant and tolerant societies whose governments are accountable and open to the participation of all people, video  Shrinking Civic Spaces discusses how and why governments across the world are shutting down spaces for civic engagement and how civil society can unite to prevent it.

"Solidarity between the online blogger and the gay rights activist, between the NGO that's getting shut down and the social movement that's turning out on the streets. Because although those actors might look and think that they're different from each other, what they have in common is they're all manifestations of our right to organize and mobilize..."

            

Danny Sriskandarajah, Secretary General and CEO Civicus
           (4:45-5:08 of  Shrinking Civic Spaces)

The course also provides a link to an Oxfam video on some examples of civic tech projects. The video is a rather long webinar so here is the Google Doc of the presentation (23 slides) which has the advantage of making the associated links available. 

Our assignment for the third week was to create a team list of citizen actions that were digitally dependent, discuss the list as a team and list the team's responses to each of the following three prompts:

1. How do digital tools allow us to participate more/better/at greater impact than before?
2. The downsides of using digital tools for participation are significant. In what ways do you think digital tools should not be used for engagement in civil society (certain things, in certain ways)? Why?
3.  What role do digital tools play in your team's action plan from Assignment #2?   

The team members each submitted their own lists and our team leader did a rather good job in organizing them into common themes.

• Digital tools can take over for other forms of civil participation.
• Digital tools make communication and organization faster and more possible.
• Digital tools can make us more informed and expand our thinking.
• Digital tools can spread false and misleading information very quickly and without check, as well as encourage superficial understanding of issues.
• Digital tools can take over for other forms of civil participation.
• Digital tools can lead to entrenched, narrow modes of thinking.

As far as how do digital tools allowing us to participate more/better/at greater impact than before for myself, I cited access to the digitally available resources from different organizations in the NCP wiki, for example, Healthy Cities, Project for Public Spaces and Regional Governance and Policy. I also turned to new ways of thinking featured in the wiki, such as Systems Thinking Applications or Design Thinking or Community Arts or Asset Based Community Development. Then applying these to democratic processes involved concepts such as Governance through Community.

The question of what are the significant downsides of using digital tools for participation and in what ways, (see Usman Haque) and when do you think digital tools should not be used for engagement in civil society have been dealt with before for some time?

Digital democracy requires a level of individual digital literacy or fake news storytelling which can take over the community conversation. Tools like Big Data can be a two edged sword and used against the community interest. We often use digital technology in a superficial sense not drilling down into understanding the workings of the systems we wish to transform or the unintended consequences that could arise from our actions. I am also of the view that we can put ourselves into opposition or a role of permanent underdog rather than actually transforming governance. Instead of transforming a persistent deleterious entrenched system we merely enter into a subsidiary oscillating relationship with it.

Part 3

Active Digital Citizens Seeking New Community Paradigms pt. 1

As I had mentioned before starting the Case Against the Case Against Democracy, I have now spent the last several weeks engaged in another online course, The Active Citizen in a Digital Age. As has been stated before, this is not a substitute for the course, merely a way to solidify and expand upon what was learned. The course is on how to be an active citizen in a democracy in the digital age. The form of democracy considered being a conglomeration of our own imperfect form in the US, strivings to develop from around the world, and as an ideal aspiration.  The focus starts off looking at democracy and the various means of interaction as an active citizen. 

According to the first week of the course, there are three sectors of a democracy, the political process of voting and its related components, elections, campaigns, petitions, etc., then the marketplace, the economic and financial processes involving businesses, their suppliers, employees and customers and finally and most importantly civil society, the space for private actions within the public space, Boy Scouts, Salvation Army, and religious affiliations as well as actions such as protests.

In the market space, one purchases products as a private person through a private exchange. With a government to which I am paying taxes for running that government, it is a public action for a public purpose within a public space for a public benefit. 

Each sector presents different opportunities for involvement based on their differences in how they connect and how they use those connections to bring about change. So one could choose to boycott a product, write congress to have it banned or protest in front of a company. 

In civil society, one maintains one’s own private choices even if and when in disagreement with others. The course sees civil society being able to hold in abeyance all the disagreement inherent within a community by providing safe space, making it private action but with the intention of bringing others together to create something that benefits other people generating private resources for public benefit. 

“It is the place where our private actions to do things with other people with a public face comes into play.”

An essential difference is whether the action is more individualistic or solitary as opposed to being more group or collective and therefore assumedly having a greater impact. The course sees the market sector being more individualistic and the political and civil society being collective.  The latter two likely requires mobilizing other people. 

The second week switched to how we engage or what actions we can take within these three spheres cited above, political life, marketplace and civil society with more emphasis on the types of organizations and funding mechanisms making up each. 

The political sphere involves direct engagement with our governing systems, “The political bodies that surround them,” particularly those responsible for lawmaking functions and the apparatus to support elections of officials, such as political parties, funding organizations, and campaigns. We can support and vote for candidates for office, donate or help raise campaign funds, register people to vote, gather signatures on petitions,  and voice one’s opinion about laws directly at the local, regional or federal level of government. With the exception of voting, all of these actions have a public face based on the principle that, “(If) the government is intended to represent the views of the people then the people have the right to know who is influencing the government.” 

In some societies, political participation can be mandated, often as window dressing to legitimize a dictatorship but in most, it is seen more as a civil society duty, a civic duty, as “the basic obligation of democratic systems”.  Another aspect of participation in public life can include service in the military, mandatory in some democracies, voluntary in others. Finally, there is what the course claims as the never voluntary obligation of paying taxes. 

The marketplace in which we buy the necessities and the desires of life, sometimes even choosing to invest in these enterprises provides an opportunity to interact either as consumers or investors. We can choose how we align our actions in the marketplace with our social and political principles of the other two spheres. This occurs without the same degree of public scrutiny unless we choose to do so differently. 

Civil society includes nonprofit organizations, religious organizations, neighborhood associations, sports clubs, protest and advocacy organizations, and other forms of community, trade or professional associations, commonly thought of as the voluntary sector a participation is based solely on your own choice. These means one could donate money or time to organizations doing direct environment work or research to those advocating for environmental causes calling for action on climate policies through political action or protests. Participation is encouraged in many societies, and especially by most religious traditions with many privileging anonymous actions removing any obligations between giver and recipients. Again, creating a safe space. Therefore civil society actions such as charitable donations or associational choices are not considered public information.

All of the choices or actions above can involve a digital component in their realization, using online platforms to find information, give to charities or shop with cell phones, using social media to tell everyone else what we are doing so as to influence or persuade others to join us. Digital tools can give us numerous means of participation thereby changing the ways in which our participation is recorded for posterity. 

We then, having already submitted our own participation histories, looked at what others throughout the course for the many different ways other had taken in these arenas. The culminating task for the week was to come up with a mission statement to which everyone on the team could agree.

Our team's mission statement was:

“Our team wants to reduce the economic inequality of low-income people by providing access to affordable healthcare, education with job training, and housing.” 

Accompanied by a protest photo advocating for these principles held by a marcher apparently with National Nurses United. 

With this course, I again took a more subordinated role joining a team of six and following the lead of others though still putting forward my ideas. Though I pointed out that our mission statement was more general than those submitted by others in the course, I was comfortable enough to proceed if everybody else was.

Part 2

Establishing a Foundation for Democratic Belief pt 2

Continuing the response to Caleb Crain's article The Case Against Democracy as part of The Active Citizen in the Digital Age course from the last post. Again, the order of ideas here do not correspond to the order of ideas in the article.

Brennan takes a third person perspective of ill-informed voters (them) on behalf of a second person perspective of the modern, cultured intellectual New Yorker reader (you). So when he says, “You are more likely to win Powerball a few times in a row” than making your one vote count thereby making learning about politics not worth even a few minutes of time, he doesn't mean “you” the readers but the readers putting themselves in the shoes of the potentially lazy or self-sabotaging (them) but regardless still seen, for the purposes of a straw man argument, as rational actors who indulge themselves in more emotionally appealing approaches to democracy. While you reason for the general welfare, they feel for themselves. The specious claim then by Brennan, that not voting does a neighbor a good turn because “If I do not vote, your vote counts more,” is also conversely if you do not vote then my vote counts more.

Crain recognizes that gaining franchise or the right to vote has been the primary means by which historically disadvantaged groups such as blacks and women have been able to gain political leverage. The votes of blacks and women (well some women as the 2026 electoral results demonstrated) served, as he says, as the defense against the most reckless demagogue in living memory supported by white men advantaged by the current system. While the defense, this time, was not sufficient, decreasing that defense even further does not make sense to me. 

I won't deny though general voter ignorance having a shape which can be manipulated but question the "balance" derived by political scientist Scott Althaus, a mix that although calculated doesn't seem to actually exist in nature. I could also agree with Caplan that voters ignorant of economics tend to be more pessimistic, more suspicious of market competition and of rises in productivity, and more wary of foreign trade and immigration but the answer is not greater constriction of voting and ignoring the information derived from those votes. This includes the votes of those in red states.

When Brennan reports on the advantage of knowledge about politics by more educated, higher income, Republicans, he is also indirectly referring to a rigged system of campaign contribution corruption and gerrymandering that by its own rules disenfranchise blacks and women. Disenfranchisement whether intentional or not is not incidental. Widespread failure or more likely resistance to passing even a mild voter qualification exam should instead call into question the criteria for the exam and who has real access to establishing its rules.

The originating federal system feature of not paying too much attention to voters was designed by the Founding Fathers with the presumed intention to protect the people from,”the artful misrepresentations of interested men.” In modern democracies, voters usually delegate the task of policy creation and administration causing Brennan to struggle, as Crain says, to reinvent the “representative” part of “representative democracy,” if instead voters now need to know enough about policy to be able to make intelligent decisions themselves. It is when they don’t know, as with some of  California’s ballot initiatives or the recent British Brexit vote, that disaster can be especially prone to strike. The challenge is finding an optimal solution.

I can agree with Brennan who argues that voters would need to know “who the incumbent bastards are, what they did, what they could have done, what happened when the bastards did what they did, and whether the challengers are likely to be any better than the incumbent bastards,” to impose full accountability through “retrospective voting” or the simple heuristic of throwing out incumbents who have made them unhappy.  

This is not only a very limited solution but a backward solution having both no real current benefit and no real proactive future benefit unless the electorate makes a better guess about the future but then the system has four years to re-entrench itself. It is not individual politicians that propagate the system but the system that propagates individual politicians. Such a process of getting backward applied solutions under our current entrenched political systems (plural) allows canny politicians to be cavalier about campaign promises and still be long-lasting resulting in perennial voter dissatisfaction and eventual disengagement. 

Brennan and others seem rather to apply cognitive shortcuts of letting broad-brush markers like party affiliation stand in for a close study of a candidates’ qualifications and policy stances for individual voters, when it is actually networked applications among a group which can be helpful even if party stereotypes aren't well enough understood by particular individual voters to create the social bonding and community knowledge. 

If all one values about participation are the chance to influence an election’s outcome for only one’s self then Brennan is right such participation is worthless as odds are, you won’t. He is also right though as he has previously written that participation can be meaningful even when its practical effect is nil, because of the social bonding it creates. He assumes though that no comparable duty exists to take part specifically in voting, because other kinds of good actions can take the place of voting, believing that voting is only one part of what is termed a larger market in civic virtue. Those other components cannot though make up by themselves for the loss of voting from the total civic virtue or social capital created with the inclusion of voting. The overall capacity of civic virtue is diminished then for the sake of administrative efficiency.

Democracy, according to Brennan is said to separately be analogous to either farming, as part of a larger market in food or to clean air, a commons seen, in this example as an instance of market failure, dependent on government protection for its existence but if, as Crain asserts, judicious voting is like clean air then it can’t also be like farming. 

So when Brennan asserts that, “It would be bad if no one farmed but that does not imply that everyone should farm,”  it is a false equivalency. We have to ask what if any is the difference between one’s duty to vote and one’s duty to farm? Farming was a specific agency for specific personal good when farming was largely self-supporting. Most had to farm or were forced by others to farm but such a specific agency would not have been adopted for protecting only one’s farm from invasion or for building a church.  Now farming is a more specific agency for general good within the marketplace. Voting is a general agency for general good that makes possible a system for our own individual specific agency and personal specific goods. 

Brennan also compares uninformed voting to air pollution which Crain sees as a compelling analogy. I don't.  While your commute by bicycle probably isn’t going to make the city’s air any cleaner, the joint effort of creating bike lanes and other means of getting out of cars can make an empirical difference. Even if reading up on candidates for the civil-court judge on patch.com still gets crooks elected, there are other civil sector actions that can be taken between elections. These still don't, however, replace voting. 

The civic and civil society realms are not at all explored, the market realm is only by way of analogy though how well is both questionable and debatable. Saying that voting may be neither Commons nor market but instead combat, even if gentle discounts the civic and civil aspects.

The market's ability to seamlessly weave self-interested buy-and-sell decisions of individual actors into a prudent, collective and efficient allocation of resources is vastly overstated, so depending upon another “invisible hand” in politics comparable to Adam Smith's in economics is just as questionable. If there is an equation to explain how democracy works it isn't going to be tidy. It is going to be complex. This still doesn’t argue for top-down control by an elite, even a highly knowledgeable elite. 

The economist Joseph Schumpeter, a poor advocate for democracy who thought far more highly of efficient economies, didn’t think democracy could function all that well whether or not voters paid too much attention to what their representatives did between elections, regulating voters as passengers having no thought of  “political back-seat driving.” Gears in the engine would probably be a better analogy. Voters, as passengers, could at best simply choose to take another bus if taken to a destination not of their liking, again a backward solution.

The last presidential election could be seen as a result of the cost of shirking that duty being spread too widely to keep any malefactor in line (presuming Madison’s ”the artful misrepresentations of interested men”). Interpreting the conscientiousness of the enlightened few as being no match for the negligence of the many is more problematic. The designation of conscientiousness or enlightenment isn't a mantle that can be permanently applied to any one group.

So why do we vote, for personal reasons or for social duty? Does voting enable one to take an equal part in the building of one’s political habitat and how does this impact one’s economic market habitat and one’s civic society habitat? We don’t vote or participate to only define ourselves, we also vote to define our communities, be that at a local, state or national level. Voting should not be considered merely a form of pure self-expression limited to individualistic concerns expressed through multiple choice. Yes, as Brennan counseled, “If you’re upset, write a poem,” but one can write a poem to have others take action against human suffrage through different avenues including voting.  Multiple contributions are expressive.

Our current institutional system weakens the incentives for personal duty but it’s not clear that the civic duty itself is lightened. Crain states that “The whole point of democracy is that the number of people who participate in an election is proportional to the number of people who will have to live intimately with an election’s outcome.” 

I agree with Crain that what Brennan’s model omits is that sometimes democracy itself can be in danger because of an election. The combat analogy used by Crain sets the metaphorical contrast between soldiers worrying more about letting down the fellow-soldiers in their unit than about abstract allegiance against personal calculations of the cost of showing up at the front factoring in the chances of being caught and punished for desertion. Voters feel their duty most acutely toward friends and family who share their idea of where the country needs to go. It is for this that democracy should be designed to develop, encourage and protect, so for me the proper metaphor if we are going to use the idea of combat is Dunkirk, as a means of resilience through group effort by diverse individuals. 

A Case Against the Case Against Democracy pt 1

Although still struggling to put together all that was learned through the Systems Practice Course, another Stanford Online course, The Active Citizen in the Digital Age has been started. 

It should be noted before starting this response to The Case Against Democracy as part of The Active Citizen in the Digital Age course, that the article only deals with one of the three realms that are to be dealt with by the course, the political. It does not touch on civil society, an absence which is critical, and only by indirect analogy, the marketplace. This is my own interpretation and response which requires one to first read the article to verify my take and doesn't attempt to follow ideas in the same order. This discussion forms a philosophical basis for what is being attempted with new community paradigms so the response is extensive.

Caleb Crain's article first starts off appealing to the modern, cultured intellectual so that when he criticizes those who confuse the work of Marx with that of Madison they know he isn't talking about them, that others are to be blamed for failing democracy, not them. This deflects then from any notion that it was democracy or at least what was claimed to be democracy that may have failed those others. Instead, the New Yorker reader is asked to judicially question whether one shouldn't take on the entire burden because its readers will be assumedly included with the in-group. Let's keep in mind that Plato was an aristocrat. 

The basic problem is that elites, bad elites not good ones (and who were elites because they are neither poor nor immigrant), fearing the ignorance of both poor and immigrants restricted ballots to their own favor. In opposition to a more general altruistic ideal of “if a man is ignorant, he needs the ballot for his protection all the more." This lack of protection "helped racists in the South circumvent the Fifteenth Amendment and disenfranchise blacks." This is still occurring today though in a different form so the form of democracy must also evolve to adapt to maintain any criteria of fairness. 

I don't see fairness, however, being equated with randomness as in the flip of a coin as the article seems to claim, therefore, "It must be that we value democracy for tending to get things right more often than not, which democracy seems to do by making use of the information in our votes," as a  conclusion is not enough for me. Instead, for me, it is also a question of agency, and in exercising that agency we can determine to be morally proportional in allocating with our fellow citizens in our community. I don't understand the concept of a decision that is supposedly better without saying for whom but less fair without again, not stating for whom. Democracy should not be designed to be a zero sum, winner takes all game which can then invariably default to gridlock if it isn’t in an ideal representative form. 

Epistocracy or “government by the knowledgeable," defined in the article  first by Estlund's  then by Brennan versus the general notion of "democracy" only vaguely defined by suggested shortcomings, faced three valid philosophical objections in what is set as an up or down vote in which if you can't deny all three then you must then choose epistocracy. This would though only make the case why it shouldn't be rejected not preferred.

One, deny that truth is a suitable standard for measuring political judgment but to which of the two stated propositions does this apply, the administrative or the consensual? I would assert that the general proposals that, "Democratic procedures tend to make correct policy decisions," and that, “democratic procedures are fair in the eyes of reasonable observers," involve two different but paradoxically not distinctly separate systems, one of administration and one of consensus, each with multiple objectives. Mashed together like forcing repealing magnetic poles in a generator. They are necessary together in seeking to attain a desired democratic goal but do not naturally fit together. 

A demonstrably better administrative outcome resulting from decisions requires facts or empirical truth but the determination of what that outcome should be will likely necessitate debate which as Hannah Arendt pointed out “constitutes the very essence of political life,” but it should also include deliberation to purposely reach consensus as a part of civic life, an aspect of democracy absent from the article and basically from the course, taking the advantage of hindsight.

Two, deny that some citizens know more about good government than others. It is not necessary to do so though. We often defer to others in our community based on their superior knowledge but we don’t unconditionally surrender our own agency. Voting is a matter of general agency. In choosing a representative or expert, I am not necessarily giving up that specific agency as I would if others had absolute power to decide for me regardless of their own specific expertise in one area versus another area.

Three, deny that knowing more imparts greater political authority or the “You might be right, but who made you boss?” argument.  Except that we do impart authority for knowing more, just not absolute authority, political or otherwise. 

There are then supposedly only two practical arguments against Estlund’s analysis of epistocracy. First, the possibility that epistocracy’s method of screening voters might be biased in a way that couldn’t readily be identified and therefore couldn’t be corrected for. Wait, what method of screening voters? Who screens them? Even Crain admits that “Without more details, it’s difficult to assess Brennan’s (epistocratic) proposal.” It is not like we have absolutely no criteria now for whom should be allowed to vote but it isn’t determined by an elite or at least when it was we decided over time to change that. Historically, we have had a greater sense of suffering more from and therefore have moved away from rule by the elites rather than extolling their efficiencies. 

Second, let's turn to Brennan's argument that it’s entirely justifiable to limit the political power that the irrational, the ignorant, and the incompetent have over others as it would be to disqualify jurors who are morally or cognitively incompetent. Is this a valid practical equivalency though, could one actually be found incompetent to serve on a jury but competent to vote, considering a major supply for the jury pools are from the voter rolls? We then return to the first practical argument.

Brennan’s answer to demographic bias also seems weak to me. While empirical research may show that people rarely vote for their individual narrow self-interest, they are more likely to vote with their group or class. The division on Social Security may not be based on age, more likely it is income but Brennan cannot assure us that it isn't based on the unknown means of selecting the epistocracy. Brennan also seems to assume that it is the bottom 80 percent of white voters who are oppressing blacks and the enlightened perspective of the top 20 percent of elites (historically also white) would apply crime and policing policies undoubtedly more favorable to poor blacks but leadership in Washington D.C. makes me seriously doubt that. 

Feeling more unjust in giving the knowledgeable power over the ignorant than in giving those in the majority power over those in the minority is an overly abstract and conceptual notion rather than an empirical realization of universal suffrage. As is Brennan’s assertion that the public’s welfare, considered by the epistocratic elite, is more important than any other one's theoretical or imagined individual's hurt feelings without consideration of the actual populace making up the community or of the actual individuals of which it is comprised.

Suffrage is not a matter so much of knowledge over ignorance which we actually do, teachers over students, doctors over patients, nor is it simply a matter of majority versus minority.  It is a matter of power over the powerless. Knowledge is a weapon for the powerful and ignorance is a prison for the powerless. South African apartheid provided the minority knowledge and power over the majority which had to be overcome by struggle.  This was a more heartfelt defense of democracy by those who were colonized as opposed to that made by those that did the colonizing.

So would a polity ruled by superiorly educated voters perform better than a more standard democracy, and if not could some of the resulting inequities then be remedied after the fact? First, our current democracy is not absent of educated voters so it would be only selected educated voters who became responsible for remedying those inequities or at least some of the inequities based on an assumed utilitarian noble oblige. Who then determines who makes the grade and then the choices? Underrepresentation is usually based first on group then is remedied through selected individuals deemed worthy by the group who already has an abundance of representation. How many votes is the majority represented group going to be willing to give? How beholding will those being bequeathed those votes be to those who gave them? 

A group can also deliberate, something we hope for from among our representatives but that seems lost these days and something that is not really made apparent with epistocracy. Both Brennan and Estlund instead seem to be restricting democracy to an individualistic competition between political opponents on a debate field aggregated to the group or in this case a select group. Intellectuals galled by the ignorance of the many should remember that democracy is supposed to be with other people. Limiting faith in democracy to only the “ennobling power of political debate” is no more reasonable a proposition than the supposition that college fraternities are the only aspect of college that builds character.

I don't agree with the article's author's view that democracy is fundamentally combat, albeit gentle. It needs to be far more and it can be. Epistocracy seems a top down means of defining community that could be contrasted with bottom up approaches more akin to Charles Leadbeater's Pro-Am Revolution applied to the civic space. We may not respect corpse-eating any longer but many still strive to emulate sacrifice of body and blood for others. So we first must determine what signifies human dignity to us then determine if voting rights fulfills that in a way we find meaningful. 

Part 2