The messiness of civic life and showing up

I’ve been thinking a lot about civic advocacy recently, and was pondering about entry points into civic action and how I could engage in small ways while still trying to juggle all the things that are taking up a lot of time in my life.

One thing I’ve had to come to terms with is that my engagement in civic life doesn’t have to be formal, or formalized, and can instead be organic; most of my civic work in the past has been on formal boards or well-organized issue campaigns, but there is room for flexible engagement based on participation and affinity as well.

A recent article by Sam Pressler has articulated this by describing the “professional managerialism” of the civic machine, and how this approach has been increasingly crowding out the “life” from civic life:

As we’ve applied the philosophies, tools, and practices of managerialism to civic life, we’ve begun to approach it as a controllable, predictable, and scalable machine. This machinization of the civic sphere has shifted its modus operandi from participatory membership to specialized management. Our well-oiled civic machine is powered by professionalized fields of credentialed managers, which have displaced voluntary associations of ordinary citizens. It’s optimized by quantitative measures of “impact,” which privilege what can be measured over what truly matters. And it’s linked by disembedded networks of instrumental relationships, which take precedence over local, rooted communities built on reciprocal relationships.

But what’s left out from our civic machine is the actual life of civic life: the particular, local ecologies of people, families, associations, and culture that make our communities and democracy actually work. There appears to be a growing realization that to stand any chance of renewing our democracy, we must renew these local communal ecologies. But this renewal must begin with an account of how we, the professional managers and control freaks who built the civic machine, have devitalized the very civic ecologies we now seek to “fix.”

This professionalization not only changes how we engage in civic life, and who can, but also in what we end up focusing on. Pressler goes on to say:

As we implement our managerial approaches throughout civic life, we contribute to the instrumentalization and _transactionalization _of our civic relationships. In the quest to “achieve scale” and “create impact,” we treat citizens as customers to be delivered a set of programs, services, or products, rather than as agentic “members” of a community, responsible for honoring its past, stewarding its present, and co-creating its future. We see this type of participatory membership — with all its meetings and complex relational dynamics — as a major nuisance, consuming valuable staff time and hindering the efficient production of measurable outcomes. In the logic of managerialism, everything is reduced to the instrumental: participants are expected to complete a program in order to achieve an outcome, while nonprofits and governments are expected to report on these outcomes in order to receive more funding and provide more programs.

But local communities are not machines in which instrumental inputs simply lead to predictable, countable outputs. They are more like ecologies of reciprocal, interconnected relations among humans, groups, place, and culture. They are what Wendell Berry calls a “Great Economy,” defined not by a “‘sum of its parts,’ but a membership of parts inextricably joined to each other, indebted to each other, receiving significance and worth from each other and from the whole.” By reducing the civic sphere to a set of transactions, we remove the “unpredictable human funk” of connections, participation, membership, and reciprocity that nourish the relational soil of civic life.

The whole piece focuses strongly on how to renew the “participatory, emergent messiness of local civic life,” something that I’m really interested in exploring over the next little while.

This focus on participation in the civic sphere is particularly timely, as my friend Jenny recently launched a new project that is explicitly focused on participation in civic life: Show Up Toronto.

There are many things to be lauded about this new project, but the thing that stood out the most for me was its focus on showing up: of participating in direct action rather than simply talking about it.

Jenny’s whole manifesto is excellent and worth a read, but this part stands out:

If the long arc of history ever bent towards justice it’s only because ordinary people like you and I have gotten our hands dirty and pulled. If our collective power were not so frightening, the billionaires would not need to spend so much money and energy convincing us we’re powerless.

If you’re in Toronto, check out Show Up Toronto and share it with like-minded people who want to take action and do something.

It’s too easy to feel befuddled and think that civic advocacy should be left to the “professionals,” but the truth is that civic life should be participatory, emergent, and messy. Let’s all find people with whom we can get messy and do something that matters.

→ politics → civics