One of the great joys of being a university professor is the time spent in the classroom with students and the time we have together discussing important issues. The other day we were tackling the question of our place in the world as citizens. One might think that political scientists may have more opportunity than others to discuss citizenship but truly every discipline does, in one way or another, ask about the nature of our obligations to one another and how we might tackle the difficult problems that exist in the world.
In the past I have written a great deal about the role of government and about how the institutions of government make decisions about public policy. I have not yet spent time on the role of citizenship and yet citizenship is essential to good government and to virtuous politics.
Our citizenship has at least two critical components: our rights and our responsibilities. Our rights are spelled out in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Curiously, the framers of this document actually differentiated between our rights and our freedoms. Our freedoms are those things that we are free do and we generally understand that the state should not interfere with our freedoms. Among our liberties are included our freedom of speech and religion. We also have legal and moral entitlements and we call these entitlements "rights". For example, we have the right to vote and we have legal rights. Rights mean that the state has a duty to make these privileges available to us.
While these rights and freedoms are part of our expectations as citizens in a democracy, we spend very little time talking about our obligations to the democracy. And yet our obligations are just as important. Our obligations as citizens are the building blocks of civil society. It may seem that our individual actions may amount to little but in fact each act of citizenship is at the heart of the most critical part of a successful democracy because active citizenship creates trust.
We might immediately assume that these responsibilities include our obligation to vote or our duty to obey the law but our responsibilities extend beyond these formal political and social obligations. Among the many scholars who write about the importance of citizenship, I am drawn to the work of two: Dallin Oaks and Robert Putnam. Oaks argues that our responsibilities extend to our "own conscience and to one's God" but he also says that we have responsibilities to each other, our "fellow human beings and our community." He argues that "these kinds of responsibilities are rent we pay for the privilege of living in a civilized society." Putnam argues that active participation in society creates a network of bonds that construct "social capital." Social capital is the trust that glues us together in society.
These acts of citizenship are not heroic. They come in the time we spend at a school PAC meeting or in coaching a youth soccer team. They come when we help out at the food bank or when we worship together in church. These small acts of citizenship become bonds of trust because we interact with people throughout our community. At these times we are actually socialized to behave in ways becoming of a citizen. This is why people are generally appalled when a parent behaves childishly at a sporting event. Moreover, when we live in smaller communities we are likely to know one other. The soccer coach might be your doctor or your banker or your barber. In this way, across all the networks of our public and private lives we meet and interact with others. These interactions develop trust and the opportunity to develop empathy and concern for others. The best democracies are shaped through a strong civil society. Thus, while we are given our rights and while we are free to use our liberties, our responsibilities should inform the way we contribute to society.
And, if you are wondering how a professor in mathematics or science might bring citizenship into the classroom, I know for sure that solutions to difficult problems in the world require collegiality, creativity, critical thought, exacting science and extreme discipline. These are the characteristics I see in my colleagues, so I know for sure that they are teaching citizenship.
