What follows is a response to scholar and author Harry Boyte, who requested comments to a draft on “Courageous Citizenship,” a current focus of the national group, Braver Angels, a group whose mission is to promote respectful dialogue between and among those with divergent political views.
Thank you Harry. I appreciate the opportunity to comment.
I am a member of Braver Angels, and have supported them for years. In my only book written as (speculative) fiction, Braver Angels facilitates a discussion with farmers, business reps, civic leaders and students, which became a turning point in the students’ attempts to counter the neo-fascist student movement on campus, aligned with White Nationalists groups organizing and training in the same area. I respect the work Braver Angels does, and recognize the role they play in attempting to maintain our democracy. Their work needs to continue. However, we also need to support other forums and opportunities that call out fascism for what it is and fascists for what they represent.
The “Public Achievement” initiative is important, for itself, and as a model to build upon. I firmly believe paid public service should be a requirement of all high school graduates, whether done apart from, in conjunction with, or after post-secondary education. It is only through exposure and active engagement with others of diverse backgrounds in areas unfamiliar to the participants (in other words taking them outside the protective bubbles we have we have built up around ourselves, to engage in productive, collective activity). I believe this is necessary to support long term attempts to overcome division and polarization. However, there needs to be more.
Much of the draft is devoted to “Courageous Citizenship.” It is represented as an “honored norm,” necessary to renew “civic culture.” I would question whether it has been an honored norm (something that is universally accepted and acted upon without having to question its legitimacy or appropriateness) or simply an honored ideal, which we profess to value but for most of our history abused, neglected, and outright rejected (at least as applied to certain people, the most recent group being immigrants). As for civic culture, in my work I define culture as representing “the many manifestations of how we, as humans, working alone and collectively, understand, reconcile, transform, enjoy, fear, transcend, manipulate, separate from, integrate with and exist within the environments we are in and share with others. In this work of engaging and interacting with our respective environments and with one another in meaningful ways, we create culture, and the manifestations of such culture are expressed in music, art, religion, literature, customs, social hierarchies (or lack thereof), work patterns, tools, games, folklore, and more. All of these are expressions, manifestations of culture, both extraordinary and mundane.” This way of understanding culture is consistent with your civic engagement model. Only through collective work is the development of any form of cultural development possible, including civic cultural development. However, even if successful, there is a missing component that should form the underpinning of any long term effort to turn courageous citizens into ordinary active and engaged citizens.
That missing piece is community. You mention community numerous times and in numerous contexts in your draft. And, like most, I believe community is viewed as a given. Such an assumption dooms our efforts in the long run when those efforts have to do with the maintenance, protection and expansion of democracy. John Dewey (I believe in his book, The Public and its Problems) wrote, “Only when we start from a community as a fact, grasp the fact in thought so as to clarify and enhance its constituent elements, can we reach the idea of democracy which is not utopian.” I have read a number of Dewey’s books and greatly admire his work, and I may have missed it, but do not believe he ever went to any lengths to explain what are those “constituent elements” of community. From my work and perspective, there are three interrelated and indispensable elements to community: commonality (mostly but not exclusively geographic), interdependence (my gain is your gain, your loss is my loss), and collective capacity (some ability to achieve commonly held goals only or best achieved through collective effort).
Community, in its most powerful form and consisting of these constituent elements, is the antithesis of capitalism, some of the primary goals of which are to facilitate the manipulation and exploitation of consumers and workers through isolation, distraction, and economic/political marginalization. For democracy to work, the tools of democracy must be accessible. That is only possible through the medium of community. (And it is community that must come first, before local institutional development, as espoused by a number of published works from former leaders at the American Enterprise Institute.)
My main point is not to disparage those things you (and groups like Bracer Angels) are promoting. Creating public space and opportunities for public discussion, interaction, and social bonding is critical. Facilitating engagement in “bottom up” public policy discussions and local public works is essential to restoring that sense of connection to one another, while simultaneously promoting or reinforcing “somebodyness.” These efforts, the work of students, all are necessary. All I am advocating for is the recognition of the value of community and the fact that it is a necessary precondition to a true democratic society, while also acknowledging that it is a dying reality at present. As Christopher Lasch writes in the Revolt of the Elites, “Self-governing communities, not individuals, are the basic units of democratic society…It is the decline of those communities, more than anything else, that calls the future of democracy into question.”
In closing, we all need to do what we are able to do to revive the concept of citizenship, which is a status that includes not only rights but responsibilities. We need to understand that we are a part of this world, and not apart from it. Not only are those who come to this country looking for a better life (that is the pull), but they are also being pushed out of their country for any number of reasons, many having to do with how the West has exploited their countries and their people over many centuries. Along with all the good work going on, exemplified in your draft, we need to work in the long term to rebuild community, which can get us to a point where life goes from being seen as a zero-sum game of suspicion, fear and hatred, to a positive sum game where value in working cooperatively is a given, and all those engaged can benefit. It may even get us to start acting consistent with that Ubuntu philosophy, I am, because we are. Many will say I am a hopeless and anachronistic ideologue, but we have the ability ensure all people can thrive and the planet we live on can be sustained, but not by being solely satisfied with making conceptual changes around the edges of a despotic, destructive, and dehumanizing political economy.