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Melissa Harris-Perry: Welcome back to The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. The 1955 Montgomery bus boycott was foundational to the Civil Rights Movement and while it's often remembered as a triumph of the leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, the reality is a little different.

Integrating public transportation in Montgomery was not an individual victory. It was one brought about by a full year of coordinated collective action.

Georgette Norman, Director of the Troy University Rosa Parks Museum, tells a little bit of the story in a documentary produced by the History channel.

Georgette Norman: At the time, most people rode the bus to get around. There weren't as many cars in the road. You begin to realize that if we don't ride the buses, we are able to break the system to a great degree.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Now, the importance of the first person plural, the collective we is the subject of a new book by Peter Levine.

Peter Levine: I'm a professor of Citizenship & Public Affairs at Tufts University and author of What Should We Do? A Theory of Civic Life.

Melissa Harris-Perry: The book suggests ways individuals acting within a group can reason together, cooperate, act, and ultimately create change.

Peter Levine: It is impossible to distinguish sharply between the individual and the group, the I and the we. Which pronoun is most appropriate is often a choice that requires judgment. The focus of this book is on the we with an understanding that the I always remains as well.

Melissa Harris-Perry: You write in the opening lines of the book that as a good person, you should ask, "What should I do?" but as a good citizen, you need to ask, "What should we do?" Can you talk about that I and we?

Peter Levine: Yes. I think that I, all by myself, am both weak and stupid. I'm weak because I'm just myself and I can't accomplish that much and I'm stupid because I only have my own experiences and biases and knowledge. I need to get together with other people and it needs to be the we, not some other they, because it's so tempting to displace responsibility and not ask what we should do.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I appreciate the weak and stupid. I typically say to students, personal experience is a great place to generate hypotheses but a lousy place to test them but I suppose the weak and stupid is a shorter hand version of saying that we actually need the we to even know anything.

Peter Levine: Even to know what we should be thinking about because otherwise, we're only concerned about our own experience.

Melissa Harris-Perry: This vision of civic engagement that you offer us includes this possibility of reasoning together and reasoning together in a fairly broad conception of doing so, not just our classrooms of iterated interactions over the course of a semester where we have also all done the reading. How can we reason together in a diverse, enormous, divided body politic?

Peter Levine: I think it requires a lot of emotion and interpersonal commitment not just reasons. Sometimes that language of reason which I use makes it sound as if we want our whole democracy to become a seminar room and everybody to just give explicit arguments that are supposed to persuade other people's brains but that doesn't work. Actually, it doesn't work in the seminar room either unless you have some trust and concern unless you think you're part of a group.

I think reasoning depends and rests on a whole base of taking care of each other, caring about the whole person, knowing the other person. We have to make sure that we're organized as society in those kinds of forums before we can imagine that we'll be able to reason very well together.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm wondering about that ability to even see the other as another person and the ways that our current civic life may not give us that capacity. We look at our opponent as somehow not human in the same way that we are.

Peter Levine: Right. Of course, it pays off to dehumanize other people especially if you play certain kinds of roles, like you're a celebrity trying to get attention or you're a politician trying to win the election. Dehumanizing other people is very tempting or you're a national leader like Putin in Russia right now. Then I think also the huge scale and speed of our society with the electronic media and the fact that in some ways, billions of people are connected, again makes it very easy to dehumanize.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Not only does it make it easy to dehumanize, does it also make it harder to engage? In certain ways, you might think that social media speed, the information would ease our capacity to communicate across all these broad differences, geographic differences, time differences, but then it can also make it hard to iterate and sustain those interactions.

Peter Levine: Right. It's hard to generalize, isn't it, about the new social media world. It offers both and it changes so fast. Just a few years ago, we were all worried about anonymity online and nobody knew your name and now we're worried about complete transparency and everybody knows everything about you, so it keeps changing.

I'm in some way, optimistic that we can make it work for us but we need to hold onto the core values, which include a need to really engage with other people who are different from us as people.

Melissa Harris-Perry: When you talk about those core values, what role has explicit civic education typically played in the capacity of creating that core value?

Peter Levine: I think that civic educators, K-12 educators have played a very important role but the curriculum in the US and probably in other countries too isn't very well aligned with the learning that I'm advocating and I think you support as well because it's usually too much about just getting down some facts about the way the system works. The three branches of government and so on, which I do believe is important but it's much less about deliberating and forming relationships.

Again, I think a lot of teachers actually teach that and a lot of students actually learn in the classroom how to form relationships and discuss but it's really not in the curriculum. It's also typically not measured or assessed or tested, so that's a battle a lot of us have been fighting for years.

Melissa Harris-Perry: To engage some of your insights on that, are there ways to both explicitly assess how that democratic capacity, civic engagement learning is happening?

Peter Levine: Yes. I'm hoping that we can get past individual 'don't look at my paper while I'm taking the test' assessments because if we're trying to assess interaction among people, then that's a very weird way to do it. To say, "It's time for a test, sit separately from your neighbor and don't talk." I'm hoping we can move towards assessments of how we interact with each other. Of course, teachers can do that and have always done it.

Part of our problem right now is that the public is so distrustful of teachers that they won't accept teachers' assessment and so they demand something more independent. I think the independent assessments have yet to be built.

Melissa Harris-Perry: For those who may not have heard the phrase before or maybe heard it but didn't fully understand what it means, what is social capital?

Peter Levine: It's the resources that we have in common that allow us to solve problems together. You and I have known each other before and so we have a connection and that is something that we can collectively use to get things done coming along with trust and respect as well. If we were strangers, we wouldn't be able to operate that way. A whole community can have a lot of those kinds of connections which allow it to solve its problems more effectively.

Melissa Harris-Perry: You write in part about social capital as underlying the capacity of the Montgomery bus boycott. Always, when I remember I'm teaching Montgomery bus boycott, the thing I think that surprises even college students who have maybe heard about it or learned a little bit about it before is how long it was sustained, more than a year with no one in Montgomery taking those buses.

Invariably, I'll get at least one student who's like, "Man, we can't even organize to get something done and stay on a protest of something for say a week or something." That idea that social capital operated to create that long-term sustained movement in Montgomery, how did it operate that way?

Peter Levine: They were successful in an incredibly sustained very difficult enterprise, not only not riding the bus, but providing alternative means of transportation for thousands of people every day on an ongoing basis with nobody paying for it. Incredible organization because they were already organized through predominantly churches but also union, various associations, even through businesses like hairdressers.

People already had habits of working together quite intensively. To get everybody into the pews every Sunday is also an organizational task and if you've done that for years and years and years, and it comes naturally to you, you can translate those skills and habits into political action. At least they did it in 1955.

Melissa Harris-Perry: In part, what you're doing here is giving us on the ground, real life examples of how social capital helps to address and overcome collective action problems. One of those potential solutions or tools has also often been suggested that leadership, a focusing, sometimes charismatic leader-- You write about Martin Luther King, you write about Mahatma Gandhi, what are some of the possibilities for solving the leadership aspect of collective action problems that doesn't necessarily require the single charismatic leader?

Peter Levine: Especially for young people nowadays who don't have a deep understanding of the civil rights movement, I would push them a little bit away from the assumption that it was this charismatic leader who made things happen. There were, first of all, a bunch of leaders and they were the big five national civil rights leaders but there were a lot of local and other leaders. Then there were a lot of participants who had influenced--

My favorite fact about the beginning of the Montgomery bus boycott is that really, Martin Luther King was pushed into leading that almost-- I don't know if against his will is too strong. He was pressured into becoming a leader because a bunch of people already active in Montgomery identified him as somebody with some specific skills they needed like public speaking, which there's no doubt he could give a public speech.

In some ways, his leadership was the result of other people's recruitment, not his own magnificence. Gandhi is a different case which we could talk about. I think leadership is a little bit exaggerated in the history that we learned about the civil rights movement. Then that also translates today because people say, "Why don't social movements today have great leaders?" In some ways, they do. It's harder to discern who the top leaders are until history has closed on a movement.

Melissa Harris-Perry: To come around a bit to Gandhi, one of the other problems that has to be solved or one of the tools for solving collective action problems includes sacrifice. I had a conversation with a conservative colleague who clearly is quite Catholic and we laughed about the Catholicism present in his discourse when he said this, he's like, "Everybody wants a network. Nobody wants a community. Nobody says, 'What can I do to sacrifice myself for you?'"

I was like, "Oh, you're such a good Catholic kid." This notion though that collective action also often requires self-sacrifice, something that Gandhi-- not a Catholic, brought to social movement.

Peter Levine: Well, Martin Luther King, a Protestant, and Mahatma Gandhi, a Hindu, both actually used the word sacrifice itself quite often. They both call on it. It should be a little troubling too. I always want people to reflect on-- because leaders call on sacrifice in ways that are very unfair and exploitative. They're always asking the oppressed to sacrifice when obviously if things were just, it would be the powerful who would sacrifice, not the oppressed.

It is also true that effective political action requires sacrifice, it does. It goes on a whole spectrum from just not buying a product that you would like so that you can boycott the company, to putting your life on the line, in fact, to sacrificing your life. Successful movements require sacrifice and it probably is too easy nowadays for reasons that are beyond our control for us to just associate without giving anything up to just link up to each other. That's probably not very powerful.

Since you brought up the theology, I think Gandhi makes sacrifice too intrinsically valuable for me. He will say that basically, sacrifice is intrinsically good and important and it's what we should be doing and the politics just flows. I don't know, I'm not a devout Hindu. I can't accept that but I do accept that sacrifice is powerful and that sometimes you have to do it.

Melissa Harris-Perry: It can lead to this notion and I think this is where I was going with my friend, Michael, who's quite Catholic is that undeserved suffering is redemptive and therefore, we can watch people suffering in this undeserved way and say, "Oh, don't worry, they're redeemed by that suffering." You're like, "Could we pause on that actually because there might be some other ways of framing justice?"

Peter Levine: I don't think King asked for that either because his own theology wasn't leading him in that direction. I think he saw the need for sacrifice but I don't think he's thought that we should be hoping for it.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Indeed, I think we could argue that he saw it as the responsibility of the leader to sacrifice and he was constantly tortured by the experiences of violence that were meted out against young people, against the elderly. It really ripped at him ethically and morally that he would have much preferred himself to have been killed in that Birmingham church than those little girls.

Peter Levine: Right, and that was right.

Melissa Harris-Perry: We agree theologically. Who knows if we're right. We'll have to find out at some later point. What's the one takeaway or what is a key takeaway that you hope people get when they engage with this book?

Peter Levine: I think I was trying to lay out a lifelong learning agenda for people the finite list of things we need to learn how to do. You mentioned social capital. That would just be one, it's a much longer list but learn how to build social capital. I'm hoping that this will inform people's self-education as citizens. It should also matter for K-12 civic education policy but that's a different story. For the reader, it should be a list of things that we can work on getting better at.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I suspect that you might also hold out a bit of internal belief that the right syllabus will in fact change the world.

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Peter Levine: Yes, maybe [unintelligible 00:15:55] probably a mistake.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Peter Levine is a professor of Citizenship & Public Affairs at Tufts University and author of What Should We Do? A Theory of Civic Life. Thank you, Peter.

Peter Levine: Thanks so much.

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