The role of political education in social progress

Stephen Esquith has spent much of his career observing, teaching, and engaging in “conflict societies”, and trying to develop an understanding of how best to move from high-violence to low-violence societies. In particular he has spent a great deal of time in Mali in west Africa. He has come to emphasize the importance of “political education” as a critical ingredient of building an enduring and peaceful community. Here are several passages where he expresses what he means by “political education”.

To achieve everyday peace between neighboring communities at odds with each other, democratic political education must lead to a dialogue, not just a ceasefire or a peace accord. Demobilization, development, and reintegration will have to be regularly renegotiated, and to do this will require a democratic political education that addresses the emotionally charged nature of this process. I have argued that the arts and humanities can prompt such a radically poised dialogue. (240)

Radical poise can do this collectively through a process of democratic political education that prepares citizens, prospective citizens, and conditional citizens to coordinate their antipodal abilities for self-restraint, resistance, humility, political respect for dignity, and protest. (230)

When appropriately cultivated through a democratic political education in the arts and humanities, radical poise in theory and radically poised processions in practice together have the potential to limit negative political emotions such as anger, hatred, and fear and to coordinate a countervailing set of political virtues (self-restraint, resistance, political respect, humility, and protest) necessary for everyday peacebuilding. [It is] the process of making of liberal citizens. (1,3)

We might paraphrase the idea of political education as “the cultivation, formal and informal, of the attitudes, beliefs, norms, and practices of members of society as they interact with other citizens”.

Esquith has the view that these processes can be facilitated by the arts and humanities, and that the arts and humanities can contribute significantly towards the development of expectations and attitudes that facilitate more peaceful inter-group interactions and cooperation.

Esquith criticizes the tradition of liberal political thought for its tendency to present the problem of political education as one of formulating convincing “theories of justice” based on independent purposive individuals, and for a parallel tendency to reduce citizenship to a purely formal status of individuals within a system of law. The moral status of citizens is reduced to the categories of clientelism and consumerism, in place of a richer phenomenology of inter-personal emotions, obligations, and loyalties. It becomes a transactional conception of citizenship.

In place of this abstract and flat conception of the “citizen” as rational and mutually disinterested individuals, Esquith advances a new conception of democratic social practice that he formulates as radical poise. This virtue is thought to be “capable of (1) coordinating the constituent political virtues and emotions of self-restraint, resistance, humility, political respect for civic dignity, and protest to counter the political violence that fuels forced displacement and (2) constituting a more inclusive demos that embodies these coordinated political virtues and emotions in the exercise of political power with one another, not over others” (Everyday Forms, 4-5). “To be radically poised in such moments of political vertigo is to be actively and imaginatively committed to expanding a diverse demos peacefully even when it seems to be splintering further apart.” (5).

The ideal that Esquith has in mind for a transition to a more peaceful Mali or other existing conflict societies is a powerful one. The goal is to help citizens to a new way of thinking about their society and their neighbors:

That is, to imagine a form of politics that is not a zero-sum competitive contest for power over others but rather a collaborative search for power with one another to constitute a political society, a demos, appropriate in scale and more inclusive in active membership that is capable of resisting and overcoming those forms of anger, fear, and hatred that stereotype and exploit forcibly displaced persons, refugees, immigrants, and fugitives and on which further political violence feeds. (13)

Esquith describes his own strategy in these terms:

My focus is on the prior democratic political education needed to limit negative political emotions and cultivate collective political virtues and the concomitant emotions that orient citizens, prospective citizens, and conditional citizens—the emergent demos—toward alternative conceptions of power so that changes in resource availability and the opportunities to use them can be realistically imagined as part of what I call a radically poised procession. (16)

And later:

To be more effective than the procedures for peacekeeping and peacebuilding that have focused primarily but with inadequate success on liberal state-building and retribution, a process of everyday hybrid peacebuilding through political education must be able to counter negative political emotions, cultivate positive political virtues, and reorient citizens and prospective citizens toward democratic conceptions of political power with mutual trust, imagination, and realistic hope. (87)

Here I would like to extend this line of thought by suggesting a parallel with the problem of moving from a society in which there is a high degree of racism and inter-group antagonism to one in which these negative social emotions have been replaced by more tolerant and respectful ideas about members of other groups. In particular, can the cultural strands of hate and racism that persist in the United States and other liberal democracies through some of the same mechanisms of education that Esquith considers for conflict societies? In my view, the parallel is a deep one. Consider this point about political respect as a democratic virtue:

I will use the word “respect” to refer to a particular kind of respectful political attitude toward others. To treat others with political respect is to respect their rights and responsibilities as equal citizens and to recognize their role in the generation and control of power. (118)

This understanding of respect is directly supportive of a deep conception of equality, and it is flatly incompatible with racism. So when processes of political education succeed in cultivating attitudes of political respect for one’s fellow citizens, these processes are also doing the work of dissolving racist attitudes and behaviors.

Esquith uses the concept of demos throughout the book. The concept requires some explication. He is explicit that the demos is the people of a state, and it is heterogeneous in multiple ways: norms, nationalities, ethnicities, and sometimes legal status (citizen, fugitive citizen, non-citizen). As in classical Greek political philosophy, the demos is distinctly different from the concept of the polis. The polis is held together by a civic culture and shared values; whereas the demos is the people of the nation without any assumption of bonds of loyalty, civic identity, or shared values.

An emergent demos of citizens, conditional citizens, and potential citizens—whatever their formal legal status—must learn to limit the negative political emotions of fear, anger, hatred, and resentment (their own as well as those of others) that drive the cycles of political violence in rich and poor countries alike. (9)

We might say that the role of political education is to find effective institutions, arrangements, and practices through which a demos is transformed into some version of a polis — a political community in which most or all citizens regard each other with respect and value each other’s dignity and freedoms. And this begins to sound more like the vision that Martin Luther King, Jr., described in his vision of a post-racist society, a beloved community.