AN INVOLVED LIFE

I went to a memorial service the other day for a former next door neighbor.  She was quite the community activist, a former state president of a well-known non-profit organization and was involved in several others.  She died in a local assisted-living facility which she had moved into a few years ago.

The service was well attended and nice things were said.  Whether she heard those things or not – or if we believe she did – is a matter of religious conviction.  What I do know is that we heard those things and it was gratifying.  The room had a glass wall so that we could overlook a forested view, very pleasant.

          I mention this because the topic of my posting today has to do with how rational or reasonable it is to be involved in civic activities.  There are different ways to think about this issue.  How one feels about whether to become involved or not is probably highly dependent on how one views government and politics.

For those of you who have been reading this blog all along, early on, I shared an extended quote from the famous political/social writer of the nineteenth century, Tocqueville.  He describes an American scene in the 1830s when people were eager and enjoyably engaged in conversations and activities that had a strong communal and civic character to them.

Here, there, and all around were people either talking or otherwise engaging in the local, community goings on with pride and a feeling that being so engaged was entertaining.  The tone portrayed a whiff of competitiveness:  who was the best citizen?

It surely was a reflection of a shared sense of duty.  And from our perspective in the twenty-first century, this scene is a source of wonder.  Why?  Why were these people so engaged?  Does it make sense?  Not from our perspective.  And here there is, in true natural rights fashion, a calculation to perform.  To see how this analysis works, let me provide an analogy.

Suppose your daily drives take you past an intersection where there is heavy traffic in every direction.  You are unfortunate on three counts.  One, you have to go through this intersection – there’s no other way to get to where you are going.  Two, there is no traffic light.  And three, your path has a stop sign staring you in the face as you approach the intersection, which causes the traffic to back up quite a bit.

This means you have to inch forward as you wait for your turn to cross the intersection.  This extra inconvenience you deem to be dangerous.  One more bit of information is that you are fairly wealthy and you can afford the cost of a traffic light. 

Should you approach the “traffic” officials and say, “Put in a traffic light; I’ll pay for the damn thing!”?  Or should you go on suffering this daily, headache inducing experience?  What is the reasonable thing to do?

You can probably think of other options, but let us leave it at that.  Here is a “community” situation, one you can improve, but will you?  Should you?  Of course, the reasonable thing is for you not to “buy” a traffic light.  That’s why government buys such things as traffic lights to begin with.  And it is also why most people don’t even get involved with political advocacy or engagement of any sort.

Let me quote Paul Burstein:

[In regard to organizing to meet some communal concern, citizens] aren’t likely to create organizations because of the collective action problem… [O]rganizations attempting to affect policy seek a collective good that will benefit every member.  Because everyone will benefit, whether or not they have done anything to win the collective good, it is rational for everyone to let others do the necessary work.  The result will be little or no collective action.  The same argument holds for individuals:  why try to influence policy when letting others do the work will produce the same benefit?[1]

So, according to this account, not only will you not buy the traffic light, but chances are you will not stir up enough organized effort to get the “traffic” officials to do what it is you think is so desperately needed.

          So what motivated my former next door neighbor to be so involved?  Assuming she didn’t have some mental abnormality – she acted “normal” in every other way – she must have developed an emotional sense that encouraged her to see engagement as either entertaining or fulfilling in some way.

Perhaps there was a religious angle or an intellectual take or some other motivating factor.  The thing is that she had something that most people don’t have.  I think she simply had a strong sense of duty, a sense that as a citizen, she just had certain responsibilities to fulfill.

          Whatever it was, I would bet it had something to do with how she grew up.  I don’t know for sure.  As an educator, I tend to believe schools do make a difference either proactively or from their inactivity in such matters.  She, I like to believe, was exposed to a more active education, one that encouraged her to care about what was happening around her and how others were being affected by the conditions of the time.

This blog has argued that there is an array of social/political problems that schools have, at a minimum, enabled by inaction by not addressing issues, especially if they have a moral aspect to them.  This neglect is caused by many reasons, one of them being that there has not been an acceptable theoretical basis by which to proceed in a more aggressive manner.  Hopefully, this blog is addressing this shortcoming.

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[1] Paul Burnstein, American Public Opinion, Advocacy, and Policy in Congress:  What the Public Wants and What It Gets, (New York, NY:  Cambridge University Press, 2014), location 206.