Citizenship - "An Enlightened Regard For Ourselves"
Perhaps we’re entering a new era of invention – political and public innovation, I mean. More and more citizen groups are springing up, fuelled by the desire to solve local problems by addressing them in a larger context. There have always been those who fought to keep a school open, or neighbours banding together to keep their communities more secure, but these posts have been about more than that. There is a growing consensus that our modern political structures are underperforming and to meet such a challenge more and more Canadians are talking about a more effective kind of democracy. They go past the bonds of conventional wisdom, seeing politics differently. Many politicians themselves are equally open to new channels of cooperation and are quietly attempting to alter the status quo.But, as stated earlier, their progress won’t be easy. Vested interests stand in their way; friends and neighbours may oppose any kind of change. Some of the rifts within our communities are long-standing and turf wars are inevitable. As odd as it may sound, the cynicism of our age likely stems from our isolation from one another and our individual pursuits of materialism. Over time we might have lost our sociability, especially the kind that originally enabled Canadians to work together despite their differences. The NIMBY (not in my back yard) attitude has often displaced our earlier accomplishments of community festivals or barn raisings. So any citizen desirous of making democracy matter again had better develop patience, tolerance and a thick skin.For decades our political system has been designed to foster self-interest rather than cooperation and our abilities to really deliberate despite our differences has been largely lost. Whatever dedicated citizens undertake to remake their communities and their country, they have to know that their desire for the common good will come up hard against special interests.But we have something on our side that can lift us over such hurdles. Recent research has discovered that the average person most often doesn’t speak in the polarized terms used by academics and political partisans. Instead they use more of a communal language, the kind that seeks to solve problems that benefit others. So, we have the vocabulary; now we need the will to come together over the larger issues that affect our communities. The Georgian philosopher Merab Mamardashvili, bemoaning the lack of citizen courage in his own time, remarked, “Our man now is not a citizen. He does not have the muscles to live in a society.” This is our test and it is our time to respond to its challenge.And let’s be clear what we’re talking about here. In our combined efforts to generate new life and solutions the public, the community, will become the centre of our politics – not Parliament or provincial capitals. They are important to our future, but this time more as partners in our public endeavours. Just the sound of that – “community … will become the centre of our politics” - will send all manner of alarm bells ringing through certain established and privileged circles.Our conventional politics has stressed the need for leaders who will create “solutions” for us, with our without our help. Citizen politics puts the emphasis on citizens taking their own responsibility to society seriously and in themselves becoming part of the solution they seek. Today’s politics puts the emphasis on power and extending it out to the rest of the country. Citizen politics accommodates this but also infuses new channels of power throughout all levels of the community. One of the biggest distinctions between these two kinds of politics is how conventional politics promotes resources that are legislative and financial, whereas citizen politics has, as its primary resource, the public will. Conventional politics assess the requirements of people and seeks to meet them; citizen politics assesses a community’s abilities and builds out from there. The politics of today sees people as voters who hold them accountable; citizen politics actually looks to the public and their communities for direction. We’re all used to a conventional kind of politics that relishes in creating political events; citizen politics creates public space, and there is a world of difference between the two.As our communities struggle, we grow impatient with outside forces like government and business, as they seem deaf to our calls for assistance. This forces citizens to organize themselves, to take responsibility for their respective predicaments, and to cooperate on a more expansive scale. We are beginning to comprehend that we must become a large part of the answer to what ails our country and our communities.Though he was speaking about Americans in his observation of the United States in the mid-19th century, Alexis De Tocqueville referred to how easily they assembled as a people: "The Americans, on the contrary, are fond of explaining almost all the actions of their lives by the principle of interest rightly understood; they show with complacency how an enlightened regard for themselves constantly prompts them to assist each other, and inclines them willingly to sacrifice a portion of their time and property to the welfare of the state." Surely this is the kind of Canada we want, and if we are to achieve it we must invest in each other as the solution.