Saturday, January 16, 2021

Adult civics

 Since the infamous Capitol Shtup of 1/6/21 I've seen -- and supported -- numerous calls for a return to the teaching of civics in our schools. At the same time, however, my own experience of being taught the subject tells me that what we need is not so much the *teaching* of anything, but the *doing* of something that requires us to act for the common good.

In part this is because my experience in school has made me skeptical that the mere offering of mature subject matter to adolescents of 14 is a recipe for success. This is not a knock against adolescents of 14. A few of them would no doubt get fired up and, later in life, remember the experience as absolutely formative. I sense, though, that those few will be few indeed. I was a good and dutiful student in all of my subjects, civics included. But the only thing I remember from that class is a poetry recitation contest that kept getting me voted up in the competition with my (cheesy?) rendering of Walt Whitman's O Captain! My Captain! all the way to a final with classmate Barry Miller of blessed memory whose poem I don't remember but think it was maybe something by Longfellow or O.W. Holmes. Who won? I don't remember that. Probably Barry? Cheese works a lot better on pizza than on poetry. I just remember a feeling of brotherhood with Barry for allowing ourselves to embarrass ourselves so epically. This was 1968. Shall I say understatedly that grandiose, hoary patriotic poetry with extra cheese wasn't real hot among ninth graders in the spring of that year? (Prague Spring, Tet Offensive, MLK Jr. assassination, Born to Be Wild, etc., and let's not forget Gary Puckett and the Union Gap's Lady Willpower.)

It's not the subject of civics itself that's the problem, though. The harvest of "head learning" depends greatly on individual focus and desire. My "come to Jesus" experience in this matter was scoring best on AP tests in a subject I'd never taken a class in, but instead was self-taught through wide reading and intense interest.

There are undoubtedly manifold ways of making the teaching of civics more effective, but they all suffer from the same weakness: they start and end at the instruction of adolescents. Our problem these days isn't adolescents not learning about civics. It's adults not doing civics.



There too, the problem isn't that we're not asking adults to do things. We do ask them. Most importantly we ask them to volunteer to do things to help their communities. And many, many give of their time (the most valuable asset we all possess) above and beyond what might reasonably be expected. I know several such people who build houses, serve on nonprofit boards, collect books for library fundraisers, and perform other such commendable and valuable activities. Their sole motivation comes from the goodness of their hearts.


What I'm talking about here is different. It has to do what is often called civic duty, which is shorthand for the obligatory requirements of citizenship. Yes, there are some so-called "duties" that appear to be voluntary, but I want to start with the ones that are more obviously obligatory in order to emphasize what we often don't want to admit: the civil compact that protects us from chaos requires compulsion in order to enable its very existence. If there are to be laws, the laws must be enforced. If there are to be chosen leaders, there must be a system of choosing them, and once chosen, their authority must be duly respected. If there are to be revenues, taxes must be paid. If there are to be trials by jury, juries must be chosen. If there is to be civil defense, some sort of defense force must be raised and maintained.


"Must be done," however, is a passive formulation. Must be done by whom? Who is the agent of this doing? In classic political theory, the active agent is -- must be -- the citizen. It isn't stuffy pedantry to remember that civic theory derives from the practice of city-states of yore -- the "civis" at the root of civic, civil, civilization, from which emerge the citizen: the denizen of the city.


The uber-citizens of all time have to have been the ancient Athenians, the citizens of which practiced a radical democracy in which the "demos" -- the citizens -- were the legislators, the judges, the juries, the executives, the police, and the army. Next came Rome, the locus classicus of republicanism: the mix of institutions with distributed authority resting on the will of the citizenry. There followed the city-states of Renaissance Italy -- primarily Florence and Venice -- whose histories further sharpened the civic understanding of the men who founded the USA.


Lest we forget, the creation of a constitutional USA was itself a revolutionary act in the history of the world, a fact of which the founders were well aware. In studying the past, they knew the limitations of previous governmental models: Athens, Rome, Venice, and parliamentary Great Britain (which they knew best) had all yielded to the temptation of empire as a device to avoid paying their own way, only to bring ruin to their liberties. In this regard, the founders saw Switzerland as an example to follow, not only for its democratic self-defense by means of a popular militia, but also for its virtuous avoidance of imperialism.


One common thread runs through the examples that led up to America: civic virtue is not a miasmic, notional "belief system." Only through practice can it be achieved. It is not a right to be claimed from time to time. It is an obligation, a duty. It was understood that the state could compel such duty because everyone believed that it was only through unified performance that a republic could be preserved. Who wants to fight and risk being killed? Anyone? But the future absolutely depended on it. The shared burden of the state-enforced obligation watered the seeds of virtue.


One thing that very much worried the founders was whether and how civic virtue could be cultivated and maintained in a republic as large as the United States -- and remember, this was when it was only the original coastal states, and the trans-Appalachian region was the wild west. It was finally agreed that the states -- both the existing ones and any to be admitted in the future -- would be the laboratories for the continuation of civic virtue.


Then came the great withering. The starkest example is provided by the sad history of the militia.  Originally defined by statute as obligatory, universal service by adult males according to a discipline established by Congress, the state militias were intended to be a great reservoir of public defense that would obviate any dependence on a standing army; they would also form the backbone of the police power in counties and cities. By the mid-1830's the notion that this should be a universal obligation had faded to such a degree that it was invisible to de Tocqueville, the French observer who decided that the genius of American democracy lay in free association and voluntarism.


The current state of the original intention vis-a-vis the militia is almost laughable. A close family member who is a public attorney can only refer to it as "arcane." As much as we may respect the volunteers who serve in our National Guard (the current "well-regulated militia") or careerist police officers -- whose admirable motto in my county is "citizens serving citizens" -- it is painfully obvious that, in the matter of the common defense, we are as far away from the intent of the founders as it is possible to be. This carries with it such pathologies as a popular understanding of the 2nd Amendment that would make an anarchist swoon with admiration.


Another factor contributing to the disappearance of any sense of small-r "republican" obligations has been the expansion of suffrage and of free speech. This -- while manifestly and hugely admirable in and of itself -- has further pumped up the notion that rights form the only real basis for citizenship. This was mostly because the sense of universal obligation had already disappeared. But whatever undercurrent remained militated against its revival: Adult white males having abrogated "universality" only to themselves in the first place, they weren't about to weaken their own grip on things by insisting on the service of the new citizens -- black males first, and then women.


The long and short of it is that the states have failed in their federalist assignment to cultivate a sense of republican duty. They have proven to be only spasmodically interested in cultivating anything other than the most basic, absolutely-necessary civil obligations. Jury duty is still obligatory, but it is uncommon: 538 cites data showing only 27% of Americans serve on a jury at some point in their lives. (I've served three times.) Voluntarism provided state governments with an easy way to avoid their own job of assuring the continuation of universal duties. And now state governments are the absolute worst conspirators against the franchise (the vote) itself. They spend more time in figuring out how to get certain groups of citizens *not* to vote than in doing their republican job of insisting that they do.


An ironic exception is education. Which is pretty clever when you think about it: You can make schooling compulsory, but you can't oblige anyone actually to learn. You can be offered civics in school, not learn it, and then go on to an adult world that carries with it no obligation to apply it except in its most unpleasant form: paying taxes. Is it any wonder that our civic garden has become mostly invasive weeds, one nefarious variety of which recently came close to choking off the basic, constitutional process of ratifying a presidential election? If we are to keep that republican garden, we had better cultivate those seeds of republican virtue. There is no choice.


And yet ... there's a reason this blog is called "Follies." Give me some arcana with extra cheese.

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