Guest Vocals: Bernard Crick
DO we not all want to be good citizens, and for others – especially the young – to be good too? Yet we seem less keen on being active citizens. Even the minimal activity of voting in official elections is in decline. True, many join voluntary bodies, but mostly as mere “standing order members”.
Two great human aspirations came out of what we may properly call Western or European civilisation: the belief in free citizenship and the pursuit of scientific knowledge. Both have spread throughout the world – but some states encourage free citizenship while others go for good citizenship, which can mean unthinking obedience to the laws.
Turkey’s bid to be admitted to the EU is a case in point. The issue should not be whether it is “European”, as the French think, or not Christian, as the Pope thinks, but whether Turkey is democratic not just institutionally but with a real sense of active citizenship among its diverse inhabitants.
This week, in a lecture on citizenship, I will be preaching a secular sermon with three texts. The first is from the Periclean oration in 5th century BC Athens. It reads: “Our constitution is called a democracy because power is in the hands not of a minority but of the whole people … We do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we say that he has no business here at all.”
That’s going a bit far isn’t it? But we should honour those ordinary citizens who are active and informed “in the affairs of the state”. For we may now be facing the inability of politicians to halt the degradation of the planet itself.
The second text is from an 1820 essay by Benjamin Constant. He wrote: “The aim of the ancients was the sharing of social power among citizens of the same fatherland: this is what they called liberty. The aim of the moderns is the enjoyment of liberty in private pleasures; and they call liberty the guarantees accorded by institutions to these pleasures.”
This shows that the concept of “the consumer society” thus came long before the recent invention of the term with its both humanely degrading and humanly pleasing reality.
The third text is from the mission statement from the 1998 English education report, Education for Citizenship and the Teaching of Democracy in Schools. It stated: “We aim at no less than a change in the political culture of this country both nationally and locally: for people to think of themselves as active citizens, willing, able and equipped to have an influence in public life.”
Can this be done? That is the question. But one thing is sure, politics is too important to be left to politicians.
