RCAH 292 - Citizenship

Now Serving caaaafffeeeeeiiinnnnnnee as a disclaimer

The middle class is shifting into reverse.

It's driving itself, wholly backwards, down a highway in Michigan. We see it pass the prosperous Flint of years past, on its way to the Flint of today that begins to grow larger in the rear-view mirror. We see that the driver is facing forwards, gazing down the road, apparently not noticing that the yellow dashes are flitting towards the horizon rather than from it. We are concerned for the safety of the passengers, as driving backwards on the highway is generally thought to be somewhat unsafe, but our concerns are wasted - the middle class rolls in a station wagon built like a tank, and even if it weren't, this Michigan highway on which the middle class drives recently installed a system that doesn't allow cars to stray from the paved path. There is absolute safety and negligible effort.

Getting off the metaphors, it's clear that the American middle class faces a significant list of problems. More and more, members of the middle class are finding themselves not only in debt, but without an understanding of how debt works. We are privy not to knowledge about world events, but rather to infinitely inferior news (which, unlike the objective reality of the world, is more or less artificial). We have a commonly held belief that work is meant to be a suffering experience for which we're compensated by a paycheck. Our apathy regarding world events, finally, translates to an apathy for participation in government. This means that we no longer see ourselves as owners of the government, but rather as subjects.

To put it most dramatically, it seems to me that we're slipping very slowly into serfdom. So when I read Peter Block's argument that we should "define ourselves as citizens," I saw a connection.

In theory, all the citizens of our Republic are joint and equal owners of the government. (If you've ever wondered why "public" sometimes seems to be synonymous with "government," that would be why.) It's no secret that this isn't the case in reality, but if we hold ourselves to that ideal, it can have a number of positive results for us. Considering ourselves citizens will familiarize us with the idea that we have a right to influence public policy, as well as the duty to do so. It reminds us that we are equal under the law, and when we see the law applied unequally based on class or race, keeping ourselves grounded in the idea of citizenship allows us to react to that unfairness with outrage, even after we've seen it so many times as to be unsurprised. A citizen demands justice; a serf accepts injustice. Or as Block puts it, a citizen acts on their values; a serf acts on the principle of survival.

Here now is another significant problem regarding the direction of the middle class. We will see if citizenship can help us address it. The world of the middle class is a world of security; our experience of mortal danger is so rare (thanks to our own efforts) that some of us never face it in the entirety of our existence. It follows that we do not expect to face mortal danger personally; it might even be said that we have forgotten our own mortality. Could there be a set of circumstances under which death becomes more terrifying?

Our mortality hasn't forgotten us of course, and while our experience of mortal danger is rare,
our experience of death is not: we are surrounded by stories of frightful disasters or terrorist plots, which each painfully remind us (having forgotten) that we will die. The way in which this fear contributes to our slide into serfdom is obvious; the role of a feudal Lord in his relationship with peasants is that of protection.

Citizenship may be able to help us regarding this by way of its duties. Where the subjects would demand the ruler's protection, the citizens demand this protection of each other. In grounding ourselves in the notion that we are all citizens, we see that the protectors of our country (the President, a significant bureaucracy, and of course the military) are our legal equals; citizens protect citizens. Again, this is obviously only true in theory, but as before, holding ourselves to an ideal enables us to continue striving for it.