Democratic Participation, Part II

I just finished writing about democratic participation, maybe 12 minutes ago. Go read that first. I promise it’s tremendously short, less than 500 words.

I am left thinking, what is the infrastructure of a civil life within a society? What are the places and the places? How do we teach it to our youth? How do we make it feel, not obligatory, but rahter volitional? What would make people want to engage? But, back to the first question, what even is a civil life in contemporary Western culture?

The condition of our civil life is this: We’re taught from a young age that it isn’t polite to talk about politics, so we don’t. Not publicly. When we do talk about our beliefs, we refused be open minded and consider disagreement a personal affront. We try to remove ourselves from people who contradict us.

Once upon a time, that’s as far as you got. Your next move was to… leave town? You still have to go to the bank, the grocery store, the post office. Unless you physically isolated yourself and removed yourself from society, you would have to deal with living in a world where people disagreed with you.

Which, a society that avoids speaking publicly about politics but still remains engaged in a common civil life is better than what we’ve ended up with.

We’ve ended up with a world in which, thanks to the modern internet era, people can remove themselves from society and from a shared civil life. They can find a version of reality that perfectly comports with their belief system. All content and all experience can be acquired within that fabricated world.

So, I think rebuilding civic life means giving up the hyper-advanced tech and consumer goods.

Let’s go back to doing things in a way that makes us go out into the real world and experience a shared reality. Let’s go back to going to the bank. Going to the post office. Going to the office to work. Going to the doctor in person. Going to the gocery store ourselves. Let’s do those things without cellphones to escape into when in those public spaces. Let’s do it without headphones. Let’s take a couple of steps back.

And let’s start talking about politics. I don’t mean we need to have big formal debates in public squares. Maybe just open up a conversation, politely and productively, about current political issues with a friend. I hear shockingly few people, beyond politic pundits and podcast hosts, have any discussion of the Iran war except vague references and critiques.

Let’s talk about it. It was a complete and utter f*ck up. I don’t know any other way to put it.

A civic life requires public discourse. Let’s have discourse in public. Which means 1) going into public and not isolating ourselves within our bright and shiny cellphones and 2) opening and entertaining political discourse.

Okay, got your assignment? Go!!

Maybe let’s get some discourse going here too. Leave a comment. Let’s talk.