community engagement and concern for democratic values

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I am interested in the Tocquevillian thesis that participating in voluntary groups enhances democratic and liberal values.

John Dewey was another major proponent of this view. Alan Ryan emphasizes Dewey’s belief that democracy, properly understood, “bubble[s] naturally upward from small-scale interactions and [is] not to be imposed from above.” (Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism, 1995, p.169).

The Democracy for All Project is a collaboration between the Charles F. Kettering Foundation and Gallup that collects representative survey data, most recently from 23,000 people surveyed from April 24 to June 10, 2026. The main report is entitled Frustration Rises, Commitment Endures.

I analyzed the raw data from Kettering/Gallup, looking for relationships between three measures of community engagement and several beliefs relevant to democracy.

The three measures of community engagement are:

  • “How often do you attend events in your community, such as festivals, town halls, arts performances, etc.”?
  • “How often do you usually attend church, synagogue, mosque, or temple?”
  • [Have you] “volunteered or actively participated in organizations or groups that are designed to improve conditions in your community”?

I chose these three because they offer a nice range of frequent forms of engagement.

I put them in regression models along with gender, age, race/ethnicity, education, and partisanship. I will report the relationships between those variables and the following questions of interest.

1. [Are you concerned are about] “People being harmed by federal agents, military, or law enforcement during peaceful protests”?

    To make my assumptions explicit, I want people to say yes to this question. The model shows that people are more likely to agree if they are younger, more highly educated, not White, and if they volunteer in their communities or attend community events. But they are less likely to agree if they attend religious services frequently. Party identification and gender are unrelated to this outcome.

    Because I used a regression model, we can reject the explanation that local engagement is related to this democratic value because the people who are locally engaged are younger or more diverse or more highly educated. The model is supposed to detect relationships that hold once everything else is held constant. So a White, less educated person who volunteers is more likely to be concerned than one who is not.

    2. [Are you concerned are about] “People who are ineligible to vote casting ballots in U.S. elections”?

      Again, to disclose my own assumptions: I am against ineligible people voting, but I think this is very rare, and being very concerned about it is problematic. So I would like people to say no.

      In the model, concern is lower for those who are Democrats, female, younger, and more educated and who volunteer. It is higher for those who attend religious services. Attending local events is unrelated.

      3. “How concerned, if at all, are you that political leaders are blaming or targeting people from certain groups for problems they see in the country?“

      Here I would want to see agreement. Positive answers go with being a Democrat, female, younger, not White, and more educated. Support also rises with volunteering and attending events, but religious attendance is negatively correlated.

      [Are you concerned are about]“Political leaders pressuring election officials to change election outcomes”?

      For the record, I am concerned. So are people who are younger, female, more highly educated, prone to volunteer, frequent attendees at local events, and not regular attendees in religious services. Party identification is not significantly related to this question in the model, meaning that it can be explained away with the other variables.

      Overall, we see some support for the Tocquevillian thesis, except that church participation is negatively related to the values that I would espouse. (This is not always the case: see “active church membership may counteract problematic religious messages” and “church attendance, religious identity, and politics” [revisited].) For some of these questions, the relationship with party identification drops out once we measure the other factors. Volunteering has a consistent relationship with the values that I would espouse. Attending local events is less consistent.

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      No, how could I believe in my poetry
      If even David Plante disbelieves in his?
      But I, too, can ask why I want to write,
      Expecting no success but enjoying
      A cool pool of words in which to slide down,
      Noises fading in the muffling depths, or
      Like rinsing mud from the side of a bucket,
      Leaving a hot pan to soak until the stain
      Softens, or trailing fingers through water
      To mark it momentarily with my mind.
      It is not what happens but how it feels
      To choose to cool a hot thought slowly down,
      To shape a portion of fluid into form.

      See also: signal (2015); a poem should (2013)

      what should be the mission of a great university?

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      The recent Report of the Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education says:

      Focus on the mission. In 2016, departing from its traditional emphasis on the creation and dissemination of knowledge, Yale expanded its mission statement to include “improving the world today,” educating “aspiring leaders worldwide,” and fostering “an ethical, interdependent, and diverse community.” These are all worthy goals. But they are not what makes a university a university. We recommend that Yale adopt a focused university-wide mission statement such as the one currently articulated in its own Faculty Handbook: “Yale University’s mission is to create, disseminate, and preserve knowledge through research and teaching.” This statement serves as the basis for the recommendations that follow in this report.

      When I led a discussion of this report with a large group of Tufts undergraduates through CEVIHE last week, some students expressed skepticism or cynicism about official mission statements. I agree. I usually view such texts as mere advertising copy–including the Tufts’ mission statement, which looks to me like outreach to prospective undergraduates.

      That said, I think the Yale faculty committee was right that any recommendations for an institution should flow from an authentic idea of that institution’s mission (whether it is stated on its website or not). Therefore, choosing a mission statement for a university is a worthy task.

      Yale’s current mission is very different from the one proposed by a faculty committee of the same university in 1828. They asked “What then is the appropriate object of a college?” Their answer: “the discipline and the furniture of the mind: expanding its powers, and storing it with knowledge.”

      In those days, Yale made no pretense of creating knowledge. It did not hire faculty to conduct research and scholarship. The teachers’ job was to transfer the knowledge that they had already acquired when they were students–particularly their knowledge of the ancient languages–to “furnish” young men’s minds.

      The mission that the recent Yale report endorses derives from Johns Hopkins’ founding goal, “to advance the arts and sciences.” In fact, the Yale report echoes the 1872 inaugural address of Hopkins’ first president, Daniel Coit Gilman, who said that universities may have many functions, but what makes them universities in the promotion of knowledge. His ideal, in turn, reflected Prussian influences.

      I think that knowledge is good, but it is certainly not all that Yale actually does. Consider that 30% of Yale’s revenues come from medical services, or that it budgets about $89 million for athletics, or that it allocates a portfolio of about $441 billion. Descriptively, one could say that Yale’s mission is to operate a hospital and an investment fund.

      But a mission statement should be aspirational, and Yale could strive to make all of its other functions serve its knowledge mission. That would be a choice, different from an ideal such as public service or developing students’ character.

      To choose a mission for any given university, it might be helpful to select a guiding analogy or model. What should the institution be like?

      1. A laboratory: This is a place where knowledge is created, preserved, and shared. People who work in a lab may disagree, and their disagreements can be valuable, but the goal is always to resolve disputes with evidence. Laboratory workers may learn and develop ethically, but scientific methods and instruments are supposed to be people-proof, so that they can generate knowledge irrespective of the scientists’ characteristics. The main outcome is the findings contained in publications.
      2. A debating society (or an op-ed page, or a high-quality talk show): This is a place where people exchange opinions. To be interesting and valuable, it must welcome–and even curate–diverse opinions. Whenever everyone seems to agree, it is time to invite someone who has a different “take.” The main outcome is the education of participants and listeners.
      3. An advanced prep school: a university like Yale (which, for full disclosure, I attended) could be analogized to a boarding school. It is a place where young people live together, develop skills and networks, and prepare for the next level. The main outcomes are the successes and contributions of the graduates.
      4. A not-for-profit, multi-purpose corporation. Yale could be seen as an entity that operates a major hospital, owns many of the prominent buildings of a mid-sized US city, serves food, attracts more tourists than any other site in Connecticut, runs a significant regional repertory theater, discovers medical advances, fields a football team, and does anything else that its trustees choose as long as the surplus revenue goes to endowment. The outcomes are diverse.
      5. A city: Cities do not have mission statements–nor should they, because their residents must be free to pursue their own goals. But the mission of a city government can be to serve its residents. In the same way, a university can offer a range of services to its members, who should be able to pursue various goals. The immediate outcomes are the well-being of students and other members of the community. (This suggestion came from a student during the CEVIHE discussion.)

      I worry that it is in bad faith to claim that a university’s mission is knowledge. If the pursuit of knowledge is supposed to determine everything a university does, then many of its actual functions should be spun off. And to interpret a $441 billion endowment as simply a means to the end of promoting knowledge is a convenient way to ignore its other outcomes. With more than $20 billion invested in private equity, Yale is the 31st largest private equity institutional investor in the world. That money has many other affects besides generating returns that can pay for laboratories and seminar rooms.

      Here is a different way of thinking about such issues. In a provocatively entitled article, “A Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice” (1972), Cohen, March and Olsen posited that any “organization is a collection of choices looking for problems, issues and feelings looking for decision situations in which they might be aired, solutions looking for issues to which they might be the answer, and decision makers looking for work. … To understand processes within organizations, one can view a choice opportunity as a garbage can into which various kinds of problems and solutions are dumped by participants as they are generated.”

      The phrase “garbage can” sounds pejorative and isn’t really necessary. The core idea is that complex organizations develop so that they have multiple functions. If that describes a modern university, then debates about its mission statement are worthwhile but will never resolve the question. Universities are opportunities for people to pursue various agendas, and they will make competing claims about “the” mission. Perhaps the best universities are those in which this ongoing debate is handled relatively wisely.

      See also: the university between a club good and the commons; universities and newsrooms as laboratories or debating societies

      translating Mind is Mind-Made

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      Few lines of text have been memorized by as many human beings over as many centuries as this one:

      manopubbangama dhamma, manosettha manomaya

      You don’t have to know the language to glean that it is verse. It consists of two pairs of eight syllables–a pattern that repeats for many subsequent lines after this one. Gama rhymes with dhamma, and three different words begin with mano.

      You can’t tell from the Latin characters alone, but this line scans in a classic rhythm called siloka in Pali, which uses “light” (short) and “heavy” (long) syllables. You could get some sense of the metrical pattern by reading aloud the following string of English words:

      Short short longer longer
      Short longer longer longer
      Short short longer longer
      Short short short longer

      These features make the line enjoyable and work as mnemonics. Regular verse is easier to memorize than prose.

      All the words are very abstract, and they mark out zones of meaning that have no equivalents in English. In fact, some translators use the Sanskrit dharma to render the Pali word dhamma in English. Dharma can mean law, duty, doctrine, righteousness, experience, phenomena, thing, or truth. A modern English-speaker may get more from that one famous Sanskrit word than from any single English word chosen to render it.

      There is no verb, because Pali, like Latin, can leave the verb “to be” implied.

      The first person who translated this line into English, F. Max Müller, wrote, “All that we are is the result of what we have thought; it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thought” (1898).

      Asked to translate it literally, ChatGPT proposes, “Phenomena have mind as their forerunner; mind is their chief; they are made by mind.” Claude says, “Mental phenomena are preceded by mind, mind-chief, mind-made.”

      Gil Fronsdal (2018) has:

      All experience is preceded by mind, 

          Led by mind, 

          Made by mind.

      His version employs the open typography and plainspoken diction of modernist verse to offer a valuable perspective on the ancient text, which is dense, formal, and abstract.

      I cannot do better than Fronsdal (or AI), but I can explore alternatives. For example, what if we tried to make the English mnemonic?

      In advance of whatever we find is mind. 
      The mind is in charge; it makes the mind.

      Or what if we expanded each Pali word into several English counterparts, to indicate its range of meanings?

      Things, or what we experience, the truth--
      What comes before and is responsible
      For all this is the conscious stream. Mind is 
      The chief and what's foremost. Mind is mind-made.

      The next verse begins with the same four Pali words as the first one, but to repeat my extended translation of them would become tiresome. So I could make that line more concise, and continue:

      Mind comes before all experience and truth:
      If the mind is serene and bright, then ease
      Follows like a shadow that will never depart.

      By the way, I am not sure I agree with this text. If you suffer pain because of an injury or violence, I don’t think it’s all in your head. Nor does a serene mind inevitably bring ease; the eternal note of sadness rolls back in.

      This verse comes with a whole metaphysical basis that is worth considering but not necessarily correct. But it could also support some sensible ordinary advice: when something seems bad, you may be able to change your reaction to it rather than altering the thing itself.

      The text is the Dhammapada (v.1). I got help from both ChatGPT and Claude. See also: the fetter; The Tangle; This is beautiful, scolds the mind; on translation as spiritual practice; Caedmon’s Hymn and modern responses; and Mani Rao’s innovative Sanskrit translations (with a mention of Anne Carson).

      what about human life is essential to preserve?

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      At the beginning of the 20th century, people could presume that we are terrestrial creatures whose habitat is Planet Earth. They could predict that we will continue to live as humans until our far-distant natural demise or an end decreed by God. They could define human beings as creatures who work (homo laborans) and make tools and who understand the tools we’ve made. They could presume that we alone speak and reason in language, unless divine beings also interact with us.

      Technology changed all those presumptions. It became clear that we could live on other planets, we could wipe out the species in a few moments, we might be able to automate all work, we might make machines that exceeded our own understanding, and we might build machines that could reason and talk, perhaps better than we do.

      Hannah Arendt mentions each of these developments in the Preface to The Human Condition, which she published in 1958. Some of the traditional assumptions about humanity had already collapsed by then, due to atomic weapons and space exploration. So far, there were no machines that could do all our work or think better than we can, but she saw that those developments were coming unless we blew ourselves to dust first. Just five years later, she worried that “electronic ‘brains,’ devised and constructed by men” will “not only do man’s brainwork incomparably better and more swiftly (this, after all, is the outstanding characteristic of all machines), but can do ‘what a human brain cannot comprehend” (Arendt 1963, 530.)

      She therefore posed the question: what is the human condition? She wanted readers to consider what is essential to us. This is what must be preserved if we love humankind. For her, love of our species was not contingent on our being excellent in some way–for example, the best thinkers on the planet. It was a fundamental ethic.

      Clearly, human life will end if we vaporize ourselves. Presumably, we can live as humans on other planets: science fiction has envisioned that situation vividly. Whether we can be human without working or once we share the world with machines that think better than us are harder questions, and the answers depend on what it is to be us.

      Later in the book, Arendt will explain that part of being human is to “act.” In her specific meaning of that verb, to act is to discuss what to do with other people who are independent and heterogeneous (Arendt’s “plurality”) and then to do or make things together.

      Because many interacting people are required to decide what to do, Arendt cannot tell us how to address developments like nuclear weapons or artificial intelligence. We must think them through together. She writes:

      To these preoccupations and perplexities, this book does not offer an answer. Such answers are given every day, and they are matters of practical politics, subject to the agreement of many; they can never lie in theoretical considerations or the opinion of one person, as though we dealt here with problems for which only one solution is possible (p. 5).

      Why should we make decisions together instead of just doing the right thing? Arendt writes:

      There may be truths beyond speech, and they may be of great relevance to man in the singular, that is, to man in so far as he is not a political being, whatever else he may be. Men in the plural, that is, men in so far as they live and move and act in this world, can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and to themselves (p. 4).

      We live in a meaningful world–a world with meaning to us–only if we create it together. The question of the moment is whether our world will remain meaningful to us if we transform it through artificial intelligence that we no longer understand.

      What are the “truths beyond speech” that Arendt mentions here? The most obvious candidates are transcendent truths, such as religious insights that a person might receive as revelations or intuit by introspecting. But there is a way in which science and technology are also “beyond speech.” Of course, scientists must communicate. However, for them, communication is a cost, a means to the end of analyzing nature. The less talk is necessary to produce knowledge, the better.

      Ideally, scientists and technologists apply impersonal methods to generate knowledge that accumulates. A technician can install a light fixture or even design a new electrical device without reading and discussing the words of Alessandro Volta and Nikola Tesla. Historical contributions are now embedded in current techniques, some of which are algorithmic. And if a library is a device for accumulating knowledge, then a Large Language Model may be a better one.

      Arendt is a solo scholar, applying her learning and methods to analyze how our thinking has developed so far. Her narrative in The Human Condition is the work of one thinker, yet she is in constant and explicit dialogue with previous writers and with her readers. Thus her contribution lies between “truths beyond speech” and “practical politics.”

      The purpose of her text is to set questions that we must answer collectively by thinking and acting:

      What I propose in the following is a reconsideration of the human condition from the vantage point of our newest experiences and our most recent fears. This, obviously, is a matter of thought, and thoughtlessness—the heedless recklessness or hopeless confusion or complacent repetition of “truths” which have become trivial and empty-seems to me among the outstanding characteristics of our time. What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing (p. 5).

      Sources: Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 1958; “Man’s Conquest of Space,” American Scholar 32, no. 4 (Autumn 1963). See also: the worlds we can lose when intelligence becomes artificial; Reading Arendt in Palo Alto; the papal encyclical on AI