Chris Koliba's sense of needing to "create a new genre of civic
association based on entirely new lines that cross class and 'racial'
boundaries" and his suggestion of conceiving civic associations as
"learning environments" leads me to comment on some additional ways we might
cross boundaries to reconceive traditional notions of civic
associations that have preoccupied my thinking in recent months
(largely because I cannot quite figure them out!). In particular, it
seems that a tough challenge but major opportunity we face is
to reconceive our relationship to time and space. Civic associations of
the past are, for the most part, rooted in place and time. Jefferson
imagined wards of about 100 citizens who all lived and farmed in the same
locale. The occupation is not incidental as it expresses a very concrete
tie between the person and the land, or place, and hence his(her)
connection to others. Much of what Wendell Berry has to say about
community nostalgically calls upon this notion. But the problem is that
this framing is no longer available to us (at the last turn of the
century, 97% of Americans were involved directly in farming; now, fewer
than 3% are, and their relationship to farming is quite different, the
corporation having replaced the "independent farmer" of Jefferson's
world).
The reason I drag my fellow list discussants through this is
that I think we tend to continue to assume the same space and time
parameters in trying to rethink civic associations. There is something
deeply nostalgic about our project. Now while I believe daily renewals of
meaningful talk with my physical neighbors is always valuable, and will
never give up on the importance of face-to-face associations, I also
think we need to pay attention to what something like this email
discussion list is suggesting to us. Are we not a civic association? or
don't we at least have the potential to be?
The Global Brain, written by Peter Russell in 1984 is a stunning
and imaginative exploration of the notion that having physically evolved,
we are now embarking on a different kind of evolution. Russell talks
about the emerging clusters of communications networks around the
world--1984, remember--then posits a critical mass of such activity that
suddenly leaps exponentially, expressing itself as a "global brain." If
you have seen sequential maps of the history of railroads in this
country, you get the picture--a few little lines and spurs here and
there, then one longer run or two, then suddenly an entire continent
completely networked.
There are many dangers in Russell's argument, but its value lies in
his striking reorientation of our being in terms of time and space. In a
similar way, that's where globalizing markets, etc. are going to take
us: we're going to have to be able to imagine common commitments with
people we've never seen in places we've never been and conduct our civic
conversations in electronic time, which frees us from real time. The
problem, of course, is figuring out how to reorient ourselves. The
magnitude of the shift is threatening, and many of us, including me, react
conservatively. For example, it is not uncommon to be critical of global
markets and their capacity to ignore ecological health. But I wonder if
it isn't ourselves we should be fearing, more than global markets.
Global markets aren't intrinsically ecologically damaging. But our
historic rootedness in the specificity of time and place, and our
nostalgia for that rootedness may prevent our learning more rapidly to
imagine issues across locales and to honor them in places we've never
been, hence ecological damage to "other" places. It takes agency to do
damage, and I've yet to see a market that has agency (though many people
assign markets agency, calling them "free", for example). As citizens of
the world we have enormous resources for listening and learning from
each other, and I can't help thinking about this discussion list as
providing a means for us to cut our teeth into this new way of being in
the world. Just as markets aren't agents, discussion lists are not in
and of themselves civic associations, but we can make them so.
I'd like to think with you about how we might engage this
experiment. Service learning is our content focus, but what is our civic
context? Answering that question would combine an essentially inward
focus on our subject with a more outward focus on ourselves as a body in
a larger environment. This is distinct from though related to our
discussions about how our work impacts our communities, the nature of
higher ed, student learning, etc., for we have yet to conceive of
ourselves collectively as a civic association and consider what
responsibility that entails. Other questions we would face: who
participates? who else might/could? who/what is affected? what civic
role do/can we play?
Kim Johnson-Bogart