In How to Be a Citizen, constitutional lawyer Cindy Skach makes the case that better democracy requires less law. Our laws and our democracies have worked to a large degree in defending against arbitrary dictatorship and the lawless violence we see in some countries. But laws can only take us so far. Our over-reliance on law and political elites, Skach argues, has withered our ability to do democracy well.
And things are getting worse. In many previously consolidated democracies, it has already failed to produce the kind of honourable, responsible and effective leadership worthy of our respect. “Unfortunately, credibility and equality don’t yet characterise most governments,” writes Skach, “let alone those in very divided states. Which brings us back to the groundwork we can and must do ourselves.”
The problem, as Skach sees it, is that current systems of law and politics prompt us to sit back and rely on ‘them’ – political elites, the police, the judiciary – to fix things for us, when it is already clear that, in many instances, we are expecting them to somehow succeed where they have repeatedly failed before. Now is the time, she insists, to move outside the inadequate box of laws and rules and hierarchical leadership and instead make democracy work in a different way. This will require that we become more active citizens and start to build communities that respond to local problems on the basis of horizontal reciprocal relationships, without sole recourse to hierarchies of politics, police, and the law.
How to Be a Citizen explores ideas across a range of areas where less reliance on top-down rules and more reliance on self-organising communities could contribute to addressing some of the most challenging problems we face. These include climate change, environmental destruction, immigration, disinformation and crime.
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The book outlines seeds of possible futures in community initiatives such as the Cure Violence project in Brooklyn, New York, where the police stepped back to allow local communities reduce crime; the development of community-based skate parks in Birmingham, where young people were allowed the freedom and resources to develop the recreational facilities they wanted; and in Liverpool, where the council turned over ownership of derelict buildings to local residents to develop as a community centre and affordable housing.
Field too exhorts us to reach for moments of connection – despite ourselves – in a world designed to make it easy for us to stay apart
The central, compelling argument in How to Be a Citizen is that public space is a vital but sorely neglected component of a functioning democracy. Such an idea is not new, of course. Aristotle believed that through public participation we develop our character in such a way that makes us good – good in the sense that we develop civic virtue, a specific kind of well-meaning attitude towards our fellow citizens.
Skach also reminds us that, in the 1930s, as they witnessed Germany’s descent into fascism, Jurgen Habermas and other members of the Frankfurt School of philosophy argued for the vital importance of the public sphere for the very survival of democracy. They pointed to the role of ordinary citizens engaging with one another in free spaces to generate critiques of the ruling classes, and programmes for better, more equitable and democratic futures, as a crucial means of curbing the rising violence of the political class.
More recently, in his book Encounterism, performance artist Andy Field has similarly argued that chance encounters with strangers are vital for enriching our lives and knitting together the social fabric of our societies. Field too exhorts us to reach for moments of connection – despite ourselves – in a world designed to make it easy for us to stay apart – whether through poor urban planning, or because of our smartphones and headphones, which shut others out.
One area which Skach highlights as being of particular importance is the role of public spaces in building communities that welcome diversity and reject prejudice. Law cannot solve prejudice, she writes. “No dividing line, no wall or boundary, no devolution of power will replace what is necessary: our mutual interest in those members of our community who are significantly different from us in some way or another.”
This is as true for marginalised members of our own communities as it is for refugees and immigrants. Writing recently about the Portal public art project linking Dublin to New York in real time, Fintan O’Toole argued that what is needed is a portal that links the prosperous, high-tech, optimistic side of Dublin with the angry, resentful and alienated side. This is precisely what Skach too is calling for.
The message of How to Be a Citizen is twofold: that the quality of our public culture is a critical measure of both our democracy and the wellness of our society; and that addressing the challenges we face, from climate change to the rise of the far right, will depend crucially on a fundamental transformation of our public spaces.
Ian Hughes is author of Disordered Minds: How Dangerous Personalities Are Destroying Democracy
