Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 2, No. 1 | Scholarship for Social Change, page 3 (low bandwidth)

But how exactly does a country do that? Until recently, Sandel says, the call for civic virtue and morality in politics has been monopolized by cultural conservatives who blame big government and cultural institutions for being nonjudgmental to the point of moral relativism. Sandel says, “Egalitarian liberals [Democrats] made a great mistake by ceding moral and religious discourse to cultural conservatives and the Christian right. Rather than trying to banish moral and religious discourse from politics, liberals and progressives would do better to offer their own account of civic virtue.”

What’s missing is a critique of the market’s impact on civic virtue—and that is a central part of Sandel’s current book-writing project as a Carnegie Scholar. “One of the great obstacles to a politics of civic virtue, a politics that revives citizenship, is the power of unfettered markets,” he says. America’s market economy, he believes, is turning us into a market society, where priceless public spaces, institutions and countless other aspects of public life are being priced and auctioned off.

Sandel’s new book will argue that democracy is jeopardized by our marketing mania. “If markets are allowed to extend their reach without restraint we will be heading toward the kind of public life that could no longer support a genuine democracy. That’s because democracy needs certain public spaces and shared experiences that give citizens of all socioeconomic backgrounds a common ground for deliberating about public issues, purposes and ends.”

He plans to open the book with detailed examples of how we are devaluing public life as part of an unbridled commercialization and commodification of nearly everything. Examples include the patenting of human genes; the commercial branding of sports stadiums, theaters and public parks; the growth of for-profit prisons, schools and hospitals; the blurred boundaries between news and advertising in the media; the effect of money on elections; efforts to privatize public schools and Social Security; the phenomenal growth of private security forces and the increasing seclusion of affluent people in gated communities. Individually, these changes have often been accepted, even by many critics, as minor intrusions, infractions or tradeoffs. But when these transactions and others like them are considered collectively, as Sandel plans to do in his book, he says the alarming nature of the trend becomes more apparent.

In this kind of atmosphere, Sandel says, “the public sphere becomes the place for those who are left behind, for the poor who have no alternative.”

In addition to exploring how market forces undermine the public arena that nurtures citizenship, Sandel plans to propose some principles for guiding decisions about what should be marketed and what should not be. He will also make a pitch for greater public investment in what he calls the “public infrastructure of the common life,” including public schools, libraries, museums, health facilities, public transportation and parks. Not only are these improvements much needed public services, but also they would serve a vital civic purpose in strengthening our democracy—an argument, Sandel says, that helped bring about similar reforms in the Progressive era.

Sandel says, his political theory addresses two widespread American anxieties that politics now ignore: “First, a fear that, individually and collectively, we are losing control of the forces that govern our lives; and second, a sense that, from family to neighborhood to nation, the moral fabric of community is unraveling around us.”

Beverly B. Mack
Beverly Mack found the driving force for her scholarly mission while reading The Washington Post in 1984, just after returning from several years in Nigeria. The newspaper had published what she calls “the standard article about Muslim women—indicating that they are oppressed and can’t do anything—implying they have no brains, no ambition, no use.” A Post editor welcomed Mack’s offer of another perspective for its “Outlook” section, and she wrote a moving story about a deeply religious Muslim writer and teacher who sacrificed her work to follow her faith as an illiterate man’s third wife. To Mack’s horror, the piece appeared under the headline, “Being Third Wife Beats Having a Career in Moslem Nigeria.”

“I was dumbfounded!” recalls Mack, who is 50 and an associate professor of African and African-American Studies at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. She is not an apologist for any patriarchal society that discriminates against women and she is especially critical of Muslim regimes that devalue women. But as a scholar of African literature, language, religion and culture, she bridles at simplistic Western stereotypes that she says unintentionally demean Muslim women by writing them all off as subservient underachievers. “No one who has lived among these women could have anything but the greatest respect for them. It made me think the only way to change the Western stereotype was to share evidence of Muslim women’s scholarship through the centuries.”

She also believes that the celebration of Muslim women’s scholarship might be the best way to foster change from within Muslim societies—those that deny women equal access to education and, thus, independence. “Providing historical proof of Muslim women’s continuous involvement in scholarly networks and social development activities is, I think, a culturally appropriate way to support and promote women’s education, not to mention their political and social activism. The scholarly women in Muslim history serve as role models who embraced Islamic values. Reviving their writings and accomplishments should have more influence in Muslim cultures than would Western advocacy of women’s rights, alone.”

Mack grew up in Tolland, Connecticut, and after graduating from the University of Connecticut in 1973, joined the Peace Corps, which sent her to teach in a small village in Sierra Leone. This experience led to her decision in graduate school to study Hausa, the lingua franca of West Africa, and do field work in Kano, Nigeria, the center of Hausa culture. At the University of Wisconsin, she earned an M.A. in African literature and, in 1981, a Ph.D. in the department of African Languages and Literature, with doctoral minors in African history and comparative literature. She is fluent in two African languages, Hausa and Krio, and is conversant in Arabic and French.

Next page: “Providing historical proof of Muslim women’s scholarship is a culturally appropriate way to support women’s education.”—Beverly B. Mack

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