The Gardens of Democracy: A New American Story of Citizenship, the Economy, and the Role of Government Read Online Free PDF Page B

Citizenship
     
    Society Becomes How You Behave
     

    Why “It’s not my problem” is a problem and why too many people think citizenship is for suckers—Both the market and the state have crowded out citizenship, reducing it to a cramped and crabby consumerism—The intellectual foundation of our old idea of citizenship is outmoded—A new basis for understanding healthy civic life, drawn from the science and reality of interdependence and contagion—Citizens as gardeners: five rules for great citizenship
     
     

    TOO OFTEN IN AMERICA TODAY, to call someone a good citizen is to treat her like a saint who’s gone to some special length to help another—or like a sucker who forgot to look out for herself.
    Either way, what’s assumed so much of the time is that being a good citizen is something either beyond or against self-interest. The very word “citizenship” has a musty, 1950s feel to it, evoking a time when people tried hard to be seen as pro-social, when scouts got badges for it. The memory of that time can stir nostalgia or disparagement. But it does often seem like that time has passed.
    America has high rates of volunteerism and charity and we respond swiftly to disasters at home and abroad. But at the same time, too many Americans today live their everyday lives by an ethic of “that’s not my problem.” The “not my problem” mindset is a problem. It is both the source and the result of an ideology that exalts individual autonomy at all costs. It is also, as we will explain below, highly contagious and quickly corrosive. And thus it is part of a feedback loop in which the disavowal of problems creates the very problems being disavowed.
    Our argument in this chapter is that there’s no such thing as “not my problem.” We don’t mean that all problems are equal or equally our burden, which would be paralyzing. We mean simply that great citizenship treats civic life as a garden demanding constant tending and the willingness to see all problems as interconnected.
    It is an accepted axiom of corporate life that great companies create a culture where any problem the company faces is every employee’s problem. These are cultures where employees compete to identify and solve problems, rather than avoid them. In this way, problems are quickly identified and solved, or even better, headed off completely. By contrast, a corporate culture where problems are avoided or blamed on others inevitably leads to infighting, subop-timization, and failure.
    So it seems obvious to us that we must create a civic culture that mirrors such high-performance organizational cultures—where every problem the society faces is everyone’s problem. As we will explain below, a culture where every problem is everyone’s problem predictably has very few problems.

The Squeeze on Citizenship
     
    In too many American communities today, such a culture of civic ownership does not prevail. Robert Putnam has documented the decades-long decimation of Tocqueville’s little platoons of democracy, the voluntary associations from bowling leagues to Elks clubs that once comprised a vibrant civic ecosystem. National measures of civic health—from volunteering to neighborliness to social connectedness—have all declined substantially since the 1970s.
    All around us, in less measurable ways, there has been a slow and quiet seepage of trust and responsibility. For instance, not until you stop and think about it might this seem odd: today we have a federal law requiring chief executives of public corporations to declare affirmatively in their corporate reports that they are not lying. Perhaps you find it outrageous that private security guards in a public bus tunnel in Seattle would stand by and watch a vicious beating of one teenager by another—and that the guards would justify their passivity by pointing out that the law forbade them from intervening like police officers. But then you move on. This is how it is.
    The two of us don’t