Hahrie Han of Johns Hopkins University on What Moves People to Act Together

You and some colleagues at Johns Hopkins embarked on a kind of a mapping project, if you will, to try and look at the settings and spaces where the possibility of transformation could be realized.

And say a bit more about that.

It's actually a colossally broad and ambitious project.

appropriately ambitious project and what you've been finding as you've undertaken that.

Yeah, so we call that project Mapping the Modern Agora.

And the premise is that one of the things that we know from both neuroscience and political philosophy is that humans aren't born with the capacities they need to make democracy work, right? Democracy is a really hard thing.

We're asking people to engage with people who disagree with them.

We're asking people to think about common interest and then sometimes prioritize that over self-interest.

We're asking people to forge a common life with people who are not like them, right? And that is a complicated and hard thing for humans to undertake.

And so, you know, from the earliest days of political philosophy, we've always understood that in the same way that I have to go to the gym to exercise my body, like I need democracy gyms, so to speak, to exercise my democracy muscles.

And You know, Tocqueville famously calls those kinds of democracy gyms, schools of democracy, right? The great free schools of democracy where we go and we learn how to engage with other people in productive ways.

And that's what the promise of the ancient Agora was.

Like that's what the promise of civic life was.

And what we were trying to do in this mapping project is to try to create a picture of the structure of that kind of civic infrastructure in America in a way that allows us to get the picture of the whole.

The challenge being that, you know, These gyms, quote unquote, have to be necessarily localized and decentralized and embedded in the everyday experiences of people in order for them to solve the purposes that they need to solve.

But but.

Because, you know, because they are so decentralized and localized in that way, what that means is that if I'm trying to make a strategic investment and trying to strengthen civic infrastructure, trying to improve on all the problems that we know have emerged over the last, you know, 40, 50 years.

then it's really hard for me to know how and where to do that.

And so this is a problem where we thought, okay, you know, this is a problem where data could actually kind of solve this.

And all of a sudden now with a lot of the machine learning and AI tools that we have, we can create a picture of the whole in a way that we previously weren't able to.

And so what mapping the modern Agora does is essentially leverages big data as a way of allowing us to create a picture of what civic infrastructure in the U S looks like.

And again, It's really fascinating.

I think one of my favorite findings that comes out of it is that in, I think, almost 80% of counties in America, the top two providers of civic life still are social fraternal organizations and faith institutions.

So social fraternal organizations are like rotary clubs, immigrant hometown associations, ethnic clubs, actual sororities and fraternities, you know, those kinds of entities, or faith institutions, churches, temples, mosques, synagogues, you know, that they're still the ones that are actively engaging and inviting people into public life, even as we see them as kind of older type organizations.

And a lot of the organizations that are most commonly covered in the news, the issue-based advocacy organizations, are almost nowhere on the radar screen in the data and actually being entities that pull people into the kind of pluralistic communities that that we know are so important.