What does it take to be ‘good’ person?
How much does that have in common with being a ‘good’ citizen?
What is the difference between personhood and citizenship?
These questions have caused ripples across my mind for many years. They bubble up when I am reading the labels at the supermarket, when I get those texts soliciting money for political candidates, when I walk past the Salvation Army bell ringer outside the superstore at the holidays, or when flu-shot season rolls around. They sink (only temporarily) when I’m late and hungry and need a fast food pit stop (or indulgence), when the group is having a good time and it’s easier to not go there, or when they are weighted by nihilism asserting each drop is in an empty bucket rather than making up an ocean.
I suspect that a populace concerned with these questions is easier to cohere and therefore to govern. But that ease seems to rest upon tacit acceptance of the premises. At EcoGather, we’re rarely content with leaving important notions unscrutinized. As national borders are being hardened, the legal status of citizenship — defined as belonging to a nation state — is everywhere and nowhere. At the same time, our awareness of planetary crisis requires a reckoning with the more nebulous, legally insignificant but existentially essential notion of global citizenship. So here come those questions again:
What is a citizen?
What is a good citizen?
How does being a citizen relate to being a conquer, a steward, or any of the other roles we are offered?
In years past, a desire to be good led me down the paths of intermittent political participation and border-line obsessive ethical consumption and intermittent political participation. I read Omnivore’s Dilemma, signed petitions, donated to charities, reminded friends to ‘Go Vote!,’ washed out my recyclables, tried to be “zero waste,” and followed the supply chains of most things I consumed back to their source. I was left completely exhausted, anxious, and confused — plus I couldn’t shake the creeping sense that no matter what I did there were near-constant inherent contradictions in this way of fulfilling your civic, personal, relational, and spiritual duties.
Then it hit me… I came of age in an era when good citizenship was typically conflated with conscious consumerism or the impossible-under-capitalism aim of ethical consumption. Was I just “voting with my wallet!” because the representative electoral democracy I supposedly live in is captured by lobbying on behalf of elites? Could it really be that, even among the working class, the only way to be a “good” citizen is to have enough wealth to shop at the farmer’s market, donate to charity and have spare time to volunteer? All my good deeds started to seem like a desperate attempts and poor substitutes for participating in activities that would actually effect change, prefigure the world I want to live in, or to align my actions with my values. Familiar?
So, if consumerism is just a toxic mimic, a cuckoo egg we are dutifully, unwittingly tending to in place of citizenship, what does the swapped out egg really look like? What does it really mean to be a citizen, rather than a conqueror, steward, kin, or some other way of being human that we haven’t explored in our EcoGathering cycle?
The concept of citizenship has been contested by philosophers throughout history. With birthright citizenship presently under attack in the United States, it’s safe to say that these questions are far from settled. A fairly standard, flat definition for citizen given by Britannica is “a person who legally belongs to a country and has the rights and protection of that country.” This concept is both clearly a creature of the nation-state and a little one-sided. We might add that in addition to rights and protections, citizens have responsibilities: to perform certain duties, abide by the laws, make sacrifices and give back.
Aristotle defined a citizen as someone who was willing and able to engage with other citizens, by participating in the goings-on of the community and staying educated and informed on the issues of the citizenry. The responsibility of citizenship in Aristotle’s conception is to deliberate with other citizens to reach agreement for the common good. Even this more comprehensive definition was reserved for the wealthy. In Ancient Greece, the right to participate in the democracy was reserved for those with slaves – it was a status that belonged to those with minimal need to labor, and therefore had the time to be well-informed on the issues of the polis.
As societies grow and become more complex and fast-paced, this intimate form of engagement becomes close to impossible, even for those with wealth. Hobbes and Locke formed the liberal position on citizenship which posits that voting for representation based on one’s own self interest will converge on a common good, at least for the most amount of people. But as we know, in a party system with majority rule, this usually results in a lot of people being unhappy a lot of the time. And it can easily result in intolerable conditions for those in the minority. In large scale governments, this detached form of citizenship is at least easier to afford to more groups of people, regardless of wealth, but it’s efficacy in allowing folks to participate is questionable to say the least.
More recently, Dr. Lyla June Johnston framed citizenship another way:
“Civilization comes from the Latin word civis, which means a citizen, a townsman. And so, to be civilized is to be inducted into the town system, which in Roman law, involved being governed by certain statutes and institutions. So, to be civilized, also kind of means to be governed.”
For example, The Fourteenth Amendment to the United States constitution declares: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
Within modernity, to be a ‘good’ citizen is to abide by what Daniel Quinn describes as ‘invented laws.’ Invented laws are
“… Contrivances. Not things that had proved out over thousands of generations, but rather arbitrary pronouncements about the one right way to live. And this is still what’s going on. The laws they make in Washington aren’t put on the books because they work well—they’re put on the books because they represent the one right way to live.“
By contrast, ‘received laws’ are those that have evolved much like other biological and cultural traits based on what works. Received laws are those that recognize our second nature. As David Fleming says, “second nature is the animal spirit at the heart of the tamed, domesticated citizen… second nature, if not cared for, can go feral.” Received laws help us respond to the emotional, mercurial, human nature. They guide us when we mess up, rather than punish us when we fail to be perfect, and they adapt as our world changes.
“Tribal laws are never invented laws, they’re always received laws. They’re never the work of committees of living individuals, they’re always the work of social evolution. They’re shaped the way a bird’s beak is shaped, or a mole’s claw—by what works. They never reflect a tribe’s concern for what’s “right” or “good” or “fair,” they simply work—for that particular tribe.” – Daniel Quinn
Perhaps part of what is so confusing about being a citizen today is that we’re largely operating within invented laws (legal and economic) that have been imposed across enormous swathes of the planet despite ample evidence that these laws do not work. One (of many) ways of conceptualize collapse is to recognize it as the result of imposing one right way of living and ignoring the immutable laws of nature. In this context, we might need to be citizens of another type and scale altogether.
To support be-longing, we might need systems, laws, agreements, and norms that allow us to be our whole selves – wild, feral humans that are just one species of many in a diverse community of life. David Fleming posits that the “radical break” of carnival is one way that we might create systems – “laws” that “[remind us] that normal, good behaviour is not a habit, but a matter of choice – for now.”
There is nothing inherently wrong with being governed, as Lyla June suggests is the definition of citizenship, but what if our allegiance was to another governing body? To the protections of and responsibilities to the abundant gifts of the community of life? Perhaps this is where citizenship gives way to kinship with those in our place. Or perhaps citizenship returns to its predecessor, denizenship, defined by Cambridge dictionary as “an animal, plant, or person that lives in or is often in a particular place,” whose etymology means “from within.”
“The only law worth following is that of nature. Which is to say, those laws that tell you how you have to live if you want to avoid extinction, and that’s the first and most fundamental knowledge anyone needs… [T]he Law of Life isn’t what governs life, it’s what fosters life, and anything that fosters life belongs to the law. ” – Daniel Quinn
At the scale of citizenship most of us are operating within, we cannot have living, adapting, received laws and we cannot engage or deliberate intimately with our local community (both human and more-than-human), to either reach a decision for the common good or to influence the direction of society to reflect our personal values for our own self interest.
So is it possible to be true citizens within the frameworks available to most of us today? It’s hard for me to answer yes, but I’m keen to discuss it over our next EcoGatherings. I’m curious about how you are each taking a relationship to this role as you previously understood it (whether crisply or hazily) and as we might reconfigure it.