Search Results

This chapter discusses the shortcomings of the term “civic engagement” and argues that it must be reconceptualized as its constituent parts: political, social, and moral engagement—concepts that are better equipped to clarify and enhance our discourse about making democracy work. It shows how and why the term “civic engagement” quickly rose to prominence, illustrating its meteoric rise and the confusion that accompanies its widespread use. It contends that civic engagement has remained popular, influential, and ultimately misleading, in part due to the word “engagement,” which entails a combination of activity and attention, an investment of energy and a consciousness of purpose. The chapter also distinguishes among political engagement, social engagement, and moral engagement—distinctions that tend to be neglected in civic engagement scholarship—and provides examples of each type. Finally, it differentiates among engagement undertaken at the local, national, and international level, each of which involves unique challenges, commitments, and rewards.

This book has argued that civic engagement is a hopelessly confusing term and therefore should give way to political, social, and moral engagement. It has also critiqued idealistic conceptions of participatory democracy for aiming for the Full Monty: high and widespread political engagement among all citizens, all (or much) of the time, in spite of citizens' long-standing inclinations toward the opposite. Some idealistic theories of democracy, the Full Monty versions, have asked too much of citizens' tastes, attention, and energy. This concluding chapter proposes three approaches to improving democracy that conform to Alexis de Tocqueville's premises and insights: changing our approach to politics and political mobilization, changing ourselves, and changing our institutions.

This chapter examines Hannah Arendt's views on the intrinsic value of political engagement as well as her attitude toward moral engagement. It begins with a discussion of Arendt's visionary political theory: her ideals of a free political realm, the politically engaged life, and the associated rewards of public freedom, public happiness, earthly immortality, and glory. It then considers Arendt's cautionary political theory: her warnings against the rampant materialism and deadly totalitarianism that threaten her ideals. It also explores Arendt's association of the social, marginalization, enslavement, and totalitarian domination with the concepts and metaphors of isolation, darkness, invisibility, bodily needs, and the eternal nothingness of oblivion. Finally, it points out some logical inconsistencies in Arendt's defense of political engagement as intrinsic good while acknowledging her many other insights on politics.

This chapter observes the structure of one large urban school and the community in which it is located with the aim to have a better understanding on the influence of perceived school culture on Latino adolescents' motivation. Moral engagement, a term used in this chapter, uses an interdisciplinary concept of culture to ground a discussion of a unique form of school engagement. The chapter examines the significance of moral engagement in the context of the school by examining adolescent views about what constitutes an ideal school, aspirations, and academic activities. Through comparisons between various sociocultural contexts of school, students' cultural belief systems, and students' individual systems of meaning, the chapter is able to define the connection between school culture and student motivation as well as draw conclusions on ways the school culture can be adjusted to improve Latino students' motivation.

This chapter examines four consoling fictions which make it easier for people of moral sensibility to accept the awful business of crime and punishment. The first of these seeks to soften the idea of punishment and make it easier to evade what is really going on. Then there is the consoling ideal of punishment that fits the crime, a perfect match that comforts us by ensuring that justice is done. Third is the difficulty of cases in which what seems wrong now quite understandably seemed right at the time, and the fiction the law must employ in order to punish what is morally innocent. Finally, there is the dilemma of sympathetic or even empathetic engagement with those who commit a crime and the antidote to such moral engagements provided by the notion of evil.

Chapter 4 delves into entanglements of ecopiety and consumopiety in the narratives of “green capitalism” as found in the world of mobile-device “carbon sin–tracking” software applications, reality TV programs, and popular fashion manuals. Each of these products models and markets an ideal of a depoliticized, individualized, privatized, stylish, consumer-based environmental practice that reinscribes the virtues of capitalist consumption as an effective solution to pressing environmental problems. This individualized ecopiety either explicitly eschews or more subtly obscures collective solutions to environmental crisis that might entail broad policy initiatives, increased government regulation, and public funding to address environmental problems. To absorb fully the contested multiplicities of popular moral engagement in environmental issues and their functions variously as both obstacles and catalysts to social transformation, this chapter argues that, at a time of environmental crisis, functionality and utility of theoretical tools to get critical work “done,” even when placed in unconventional combination, outweigh hereditary loyalties to particular schools or ideological “silos.”

The topic of this chapter is the social practice of art that is created to energize and give expression to protest against social injustice. The chapter opens with a discussion and critique of Elaine Scarry’s claim that it is inherent to beauty that it assists us in the struggle against injustice. The chapter then goes on to identify five phases in the structure of social justice movements, and to analyze how social protect art contributes to these five phases. The chapter pays special attention to how it happens that emotional and moral engagement with characters in the world of some work get transferred to emotional and moral engagement with persons in the actual world.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the concept of “murderous consent.” The term “murderous consent” refers to any accommodation with violent death, any habituation to murder, any compromise—in reality untenable—with principles that should forbid even the slightest exception, regardless of who the victims are. How does one judge the compromise between violence and silence, or indifference? Is closing one's eyes and plugging one's ears not also a way of “participating” in murder? In taking up these questions, one becomes aware of a twofold temptation. The first is unconditional pacifism, which ignores the reasons that might make war necessary. The second is the rejection of any moral and political engagement against violence because one feels discouraged and weary in the face of all the world's atrocities. Doing nothing, saying nothing, or refusing all feelings because nothing will ever change is always to consent to murder a little bit. This book thus seeks to formulate a hypothesis regarding what ethical obligation means if its conditions are placed in doubt by the problematic of murderous consent.

In this chapter, I begin by reviewing the argument of the book and reflecting on the interactions among these various contradictions. I then discuss how living amid contradictions poses unavoidable moral concerns, arguing that although people can opt to ignore the injustices that result from them, to live a moral life, they must be engaged. We experience the city not just as depersonalized functional relationships but as moral agents with empathy and respect for others.