Unpredictable Patterns #75: On becoming a citizen
Citizenship, agency, questions for citizens, projects, systems and the question of how we view social change
Dear reader,
Today was a travel day and I have snuck in writing in airports and hotel rooms, but on an issue that I think is interesting for a wide variety of reasons: on how to be a citizen. I increasingly think that we undervalue the degree to which democracy is performed and constantly remade, and so tend to miss that our role in social change is absolutely essential. We have looked for too long at deterministic schemas where economy, technology and social phenomena are identified as the core driver of change - ignoring the role of the active agent, or worse: reducing the agent to victim of those same deterministic schemas. It is worthwhile to re-examine our ideas of how we act as citizens.
Practicing citizenship
How many hours a week do you spend practicing civic duties and being a citizen? How many hours do you spend in charity work, political party discussions, engaging in debate in the public sphere or just conversing about important social and political issues with your own friends? The answer to that question is in many ways a good metric for how important you find our shared polity and democracy, and how much you are willing to invest in its growth and continued existence.
I do not mean that in a snarky way, either - it is just a simple observation.
Democracy is not a state of nature, it is a human practice. In an image: democracy is not like the weather, it is a symphony performed by an orchestra where we play different instruments but perform an agreed piece of music. Learning to “perform democracy” requires practice and engagement, and investment of time. If we care about democracy we have to be citizens - in the older sense of that word: people who care about the polis, the city, and strive to uphold its values and the overall idea of democracy.
It can be hard to become passionately engaged in democracy - for several reasons. The simplest is that we have had democracy for a generation, and these things require constant re-commitment and engagement. Our democratic institutions and values have a half life, and unless renewed they fade away. A more complicated reason is that democracy is far from a stable equilibrium. Any human community left to its own devices will revert back to a more hierarchical autocratic form. Call it a kind social organizational gravity or a biological default - the cause does not matter - but democracy is not a naturally stable state, it devolves into authoritarian society, as pointed out by Plato in The Republic.
Adam Gopnik pointed this out eloquently in an essay in the New Yorker:
"The default condition of humankind is not to thrive in broadly egalitarian and stable democratic arrangements that get unsettled only when something happens to unsettle them. The default condition of humankind, traced across thousands of years of history, is some sort of autocracy."
Being a citizen, then, is an act of resistance to the pull of autocracy. But what does it mean in practice? Is there a citizen frame of mind that we can hold up as our ideal? And how does it differ from what we see today? This is no small issue, but I do think that there are a few suggestions here, and we can think of them as alternative questions - questions we ask if we want to be citizens, and questions that are contrary to the citizen mindset.
The “citizen questions” include the following:
"What is good for our community?" A starting point is to argue from community and think through how this community is constituted. Who is a part of our community, and who can be part of it? All citizens need to have a view of how our "we" is built up - and this is a good first point to debate! A narrow and tribal definition of community is possible and if this is what you believe we should debate it, but we should do so against the backdrop of our second question.
"How do we live together?" This is, I think, the fundamental political question. It is not a question about right or wrong, first, nor is it a question about what is true or false. It is a question about compromise and putting the common good ahead of our own benefit. It is a staggeringly simple question, but asking it requires that we assume that there is a broad, inclusive we - something that seems harder and harder in today's world. But it is our choice to ask that question or to dig in and ask "How can I get what I deserve / need / want?" And asking this question does not really presuppose an ideology: the answer can be liberal or conservative or socialist, but the answer starts from a we, not a smaller group or an individual.
"What are the bad outcomes and how can we avoid them?" This is another example of a question that is deceivingly simple. It suggest that we start from the end and then work backwards when we discuss politics. The reason it is a good question for someone who aspires to be a citizens or practice citizenship, is that it focuses on getting agreement on outcomes rather than values - and agreeing on what is a bad outcome may be much easier than agreeing on values from the outset.
"What does the reasonable disagreement look like?" This question is based on the recognition that citizens do not need to achieve consensus, they need to agree to the reasonableness of the other party's position and understand it as a legitimate view - rather than condemn it as morally void or reprehensible. Always looking for a statement of the other party's belief that we believe is logically consistent, strong and defensible given their value set is a good practice.
"What are reasonable methods of dispute resolution that we can agree to?" This is a question in the same spirit. It assumes an agonistic understanding of democracy - there will be fights and different opinions - but it also identifies a common method of solving disputes and adjudicating issues. If we all agree that we will solve our issues through voting, and respect the outcome of the vote, a lot is won.
"What responsibility do I have in this issue?" One of Simone Weil's more provocative points in The Need for Roots is that there are no rights but those that grounded in responsibilities. The argument is often seen as either elitist (not all people have the power to assume responsibilities) or relativist (rights need to be absolute and given a priori or they will be undermined), but neither criticism is very convincing. The idea that responsibilities precede rights is not a constitutional design principle, but a moral perspective: it is a suggestion to us as individuals about how to think about the world, not a legal structure. And as such it is an important corrective to the error of making constitutional design the principle for moral choice.
The point here is simple: there are certain requirements for how we design documents that enshrine our rights in law, and those require that we assume rights are given without conditions, but that does not mean that we should assume that we individually are granted those rights when we consider a moral choice: if we start from the position of responsibility in analyzing a moral issue we are much more likely to find the citizen perspective than if we start from a position of entitlement or certain rights.
But the state should - as an institution and upholder of the constitution - start from the position of rights. The individual has responsibilities that underpin the rights, and the state grants rights that are unconditional, albeit in need of balancing.
"What would make me change my mind on this issue?" This is the Alexander question - after epidemiologist Russell Alexander who asked it during the Swine Flu insistently, and was later recognized to have been right in his skepticism about the approach the CDC took there. The reason this is a citizen question is that it requires intellectual honesty and that our arguments are based in facts. If there is no fact pattern that would change your mind on an issue, then you have not so much an opinion as a feeling or an antipathy of some kind.
"How can I best make my view known in a way that will further debate?" Again, this is a question about methods. If we want to be citizen we have to choose our agoras and areas within the public sphere where we can contribute. Lazily assuming a "like" or retweet is engaging in the public sphere is not enough. Both social media and Twitter can be great agoras, but that requires that the engagement is thought-through. Are you seeking to further debate or create a stronger sense of we in your in-group? Engaging in the public sphere requires a recognition of the other side's strongest points - as in the old rule that says that you have not won an argument if you have not stated your opponents view in terms that make them say "I wish I had put it like that!".
Together these questions form a start for practicing citizenship - and reading them also tells us that there is another problem here - a problem of feasibility. Is the ambition here even remotely realistic?
Can we be citizens?
So far, being a citizen looks very much like being an alien - who would go through all of this and try to be fairminded and open to all arguments in today's climate? And is this even possible in today's media environment - polarized from the newspapers down to the tweets? In short: can we be citizens?
This is an important question. If we do believe that it is practically impossible to be citizens in this constructive sense in today's society, well, then we have a larger problem that we need to solve - and that is how to re-engineer our societies so that citizenship becomes possible again. Otherwise, democracy - dependent on our citizenship - is doomed to deteriorate into autocracy.
If this is the question we also need to identify the dimensions that make citizenship in this sense possible. Has globalization rid us of smaller groups in which citizenship could be practiced and relegated us to opinionated tribes? Is social media responsible for polarization and for making it is impossible for us to be citizens? Is our education flawed and lacking in the core elements needed for us to grow up as potential citizens?
In a sense this is the first question of democratic design: are we designing our society as to enable us to be, even incentivize us to be, citizens and uphold its basic values over the long term? In a bad, but interesting analogy: citizens are like genes that carry the expression of democracy from one generation to another. Our societies are not cohesive wholes, but individual societies built around generations and their successive evolution and mutation depends on citizens. A society without citizens will evolve through social and political drift, and the center of gravity in the evolutionary search space is autocracy, leading to a degeneration of societies into autocracies unless they have a fresh influx of new citizens.
The evolutionary angle only takes us so far, but it can be complemented by another metaphor: that of chess. The reason there is still chess is that the rules have been transmitted successfully across generations of players, and so the new players can play chess as successfully as the old ones. Democracy is also a kind of - serious - game, and playing it requires some kind of transmission of the rules.
It is possible to say that this has become impossible for various reasons, and that we can no longer be citizens or play democracy - the rules of the game have been lost and we now just move around the pieces more or less aggressively without clear purpose. If that is the case, then a call to be a citizen is largely meaningless and futile.
But any such claim needs to remove our individual agency and suggest that we are victims of something: technology, economy, de-evolution or even just propaganda. If we believe that we are agents, we can reclaim citizenship and make it our own objective to practice being citizens every day.
Citizens and sovereignty
The idea of citizenship is also the idea of belonging to a community, and being able to rely on that community. The old saying "civis romanus sum” - I am a citizen of Rome- was said to protect anyone across the known world from harm, since Rome would exact severe revenge on anyone harming one of its citizens. Citizenship is connected with the idea of the state and its jurisdiction, and being a citizen is not just giving something to the state, but it is getting something back for the investment we make.
If we practice citizenship, we can expect the state to become more healthy and functional, and so the return on our investment will compound over time, and it will do so in sovereignty.
Now, sovereignty is sometimes understood very narrowly as the ability a state has to exercise and project power across a territory, but the meaning of the term is much deeper than that. To be sovereign is to be ”super”, to be over all of the citizens. Sovereignty is the sum product of our work as citizens, and gives us collective agency to rule ourselves. There is a feedback loop here where our investments in being citizens build sovereignty that makes it more interesting to be citizens. We move from victims to agents, and we can take our destiny in our hands.
We have seen this shift before, in a previous note, where we spoke of the problem of systems and projects. In that note we said that the Internet had moved from being a project we all participated in to becoming a system that we all felt locked into (some exaggeration for sure, but not much). The same goes for our modern society. A key reason that we tend to neglect our roles as citizens is that we do not feel that we participate in society as a project.
Citizens see society as a collaborative project that improves when we all invest time and engage in it. They do not see society as a system that is balanced against them or seeks to undermine them. They create their own sovereignty through the practice of citizenship.
If you think this all sounds suspiciously collectivist, I would point out that there is no necessary link between being a citizen and being a collectivist. You can be both, or you can prefer to practice citizenship to allow the individual as much liberty as possible. Committing to citizenship is really just committing to society as a project, a project to build and strengthen our sovereignty as a polity.
So what?
The reason the concept of citizen deserves a revival, and deeper study, is that we find, more and more often, that our mental models of society are models of systems that evolve outside of our own ability to impact them. Technology polarizes us, populism erodes democracy: these are systems models in which vague, abstract concepts cause each other. They lack agency. By revisiting the agency of the citizen, and building it out to understand it in a technological age, we could perhaps move away from the kind of contemporary political theory that seemingly sinks deeper and deeper into determinist schemas.
To ask what citizens can and should do is to reclaim the source of our sovereignty. It is to ask the, in many ways, hardest question in all of social and political thought: what should I do. To ask what should be done, or what others should do, comes easy - but to turn that same analytical gaze back at ourselves is harder - yet infinitely more helpful.
Social models that start from citizens rather than deterministic schemas around populism or technology also have the advantage of providing us with a lever for change: we can change ourselves and we can change how we engage in society, and the result of that change is immediately felt in our self-governance. Asking how we change technology or political systems is ceding the power to change society to engineers and lawyers, to professional classes, rather than assuming that power ourselves.
So, building a citizen diet - a set of commitments around how we show up as citizens - is the first step towards a less deterministic mindset.
Thank you for reading!
Nicklas