Peter Levine

From Harry Boyte, via email:

Your invocation of Learned Hand's "spirit of liberty" is in the important tradition of John Dewey and his conception of science as an open-ended,experimental, provisional and profoundly social process of creating knowledge. But another key line of thinking, questioning, and acting can complicate and further bridge the contrasts between deliberative, open-ended public judgment-making, on the one hand, and "instrumental," strategic, goal-oriented activism on the other: ongoing interrogation of the goal itself, and the creation of broad goals rich with cultural and value dimensions.

More closed and instrumental approaches brook little deliberation because they take goals as a given. They are a product of the technocratic, efficiency oriented modes of thought that characterize so much of our world today, asking little or nothing about the big picture of action, how particular issues and problems are interrelated. Rather activism tends strongly to focus on efficiency of means. I would argue that such instrumentalism impoverishes contemporary public policy and public goals -- a key reason for the overwhelming emphasis on economic goods, narrowly and privately defined, as the measure of wealth and well-being. Perhaps even more significantly, instrumentalism, or technocratic approaches attenuate human agency, making the point "problem solving" rather than the continuous, ongoing co-creation of our contexts and cultures. This dynamic is at the heart of the technicism that has spread across modern societies, Max Weber's "Iron Cage" of bureaucratic rationality, or Michel Foucault's disciplinary discourses.

In the world of "civic activism," there are important innovations that break open this iron cage of closed and instrumental modes of thinking. These innovations encourage deliberative processes as part of a broader mix of democratic capacity building -- skills and habits of work with a mix of people of different interests and backgrounds (what we call public work).

For instance, the best of what is called "broad based organizing" networks like the Industrial Areas Foundation have long emphasized that the most important goal is not a particular objective -- say, a low income housing project. Rather the point is a larger process of community revitalization, informed by values such as concern for the poor, participation, pluralism, and public life. Andres Sarabia, the first president of the Communities Organized for Public Service in San Antonio, a Mexican American church based organization that became a model for broad based organizing, described this realization in an interview some years ago when I asked him the key to COPS' success. As he put it, "we learned after the first year that issues are the dessert, not the main meal. The main meal is keeping in mind our larger objective -- rebuilding healthy communities." That realization allowed COPS leaders to have a strong focus on what they call "public leadership development," developing ways for people to learn the habits of listening to many points of view, and also to develop capacities for dealing with people that they had long seen as enemies, such as Anglo business interests.

I would argue that democratic "movement building" has this quality of developing broad, open-ended goals that cultivate a broad set of civic capacities, deliberation among them. Especially this is true for populist movements such as the 1930s popular front against fascism (the roots of the modern broad based organizing approach). The popular front (for all its ironies -- dictated by the Comintern) prompted an enormous shift in progressive approaches, strategies and organizing. Activists changed from narrow battles to long term alliance building, across party and other lines, on themes such as economic and social justice, defense of democracy, and culture change. For a time, this had immense impact around the world. For instance, the Freedom Charter movement in South Africa, for the first time bringing together a great diversity of cultural and ideological groups, emerged from this shift, and created the non-racial organizing approach of the subsequent anti-apartheid movement.

Today in the US, the National Wildlife Federation's new movement building culture changing mission of "instilling an ethic of conservation citizenship" is an example of a new populist approach. Many issues, campaigns, and organizing efforts will be needed -- and all can be held in tension with this very large and open ended cultural goal.