Being A Responsible Citizen
What I read: To be a responsible citizen today, it is not enough to be reasonable by Francisco Mejia Uribe. Published January 12, 2021.
Anyone who follows my social media posts and writings knows that I consistently position myself as a political pragmatist. Without a doubt, I’m a liberal. I believe our country and the world are awash in misogyny, racism, homophobia, transphobia, religious nationalism, xenophobia, and a host of other social ills. Economic inequality and wealth disparity have had a profoundly negative effect on combatting those issues as well as the existential crisis of our time, climate change.
I fall squarely on the progressive liberal end of the political spectrum on all such issues. I believe the liberal mindset is the key to a better world.
One of the recent examples I’ve often given to demonstrate my pragmatic view of politics is that during the last Presidential election primary I strongly backed Elizabeth Warren. She was my candidate. What a remarkable woman. But the fates decided she was not to be the candidate and Joe Biden won the primary and is now thankfully our President.
When it was clear Warren was not going to be the candidate and it was going to be Joe Biden, I took a few breaths of disappointment and quickly pivoted to full support for Biden. To me, that’s what pragmatic politics is about. You make a strong case for your candidate or position, then take the cards you’re ultimately dealt and play that hand as well as you can with the goal of winning for the greater good.
In hindsight, I now think Biden was the correct choice for this moment in time. I think Warren would have been a superb President, but perhaps we needed the specific character, temperament, and experience Biden has brought to the office. I think Biden’s masterful handling of everything from the pandemic to the Ukraine crisis is evidence of that.
While pragmatism is particularly useful in political discourse, it’s an effective approach to dealing with all of life in a reasonable manner. Stepping back from the problems of our lives, on a micro or macro scale, and seeing the pragmatic path forward to the best outcome seems like a good way to go.
I’ve always considered a cornerstone of my pragmatism to be reasonableness. I try to be reasonable. Reasonable is to align with reason, to not be extreme, to be fair. That’s good, right? I thought that was enough to adequately bolster my pragmatic view of politics and how we should generally navigate this thing called life.
So, when I read the article to which I’ve linked here, the topic of being a reasonable citizen drew me in. Citizens should be reasonable. Seems self-evident, doesn’t it? But the writer feels that being reasonable is no longer enough.
Francisco Mejia Uribe lays the groundwork for his argument that being reasonable is no longer enough by paying homage to the prevalence of elevating reasonableness in liberal thought.
Let me start with an interesting fact: the word reasonable is mentioned 1,124 times (which is, roughly, twice per page on average) in John Rawls’s Political Liberalism (1993), perhaps one of the most influential books in political philosophy over the past half-century.
When brilliant minds like that of John Rawls consider being reasonable a key element for a competent liberal as recently as 1993, that was good enough for me. At least it was until now.
Uribe points out that a liberal citizen is supposed to “propose terms of social cooperation that others might endorse” and also accept that others might arrive at diverging beliefs during their honest search for truth.
Putting the two together, Rawls tells us that ‘reasonable persons will think it unreasonable to use political power, should they possess it, to repress comprehensive views that are not unreasonable, though different from their own.’
So far, so good. I’m still on board with being reasonable. But then Uribe points out that the average modern-day citizen doesn’t consistently do those two things. Scan any active social media platform and you’ll witness firsthand that far too many citizens violate that definition of reasonableness. The average global citizen is sadly unreasonable.
Uribe considers this baseline standard of reasonableness a relic of the analogue era. The emergence of the internet and more recent iterations of ubiquitous social media and digital communication platforms have fostered a hyper-connected environment in which the reasonable among us will be severely trounced and pummeled by the vociferous herds ready to pounce on any opinion that deviates even a smidgen from their own. I’ve experienced this myself. I bet you have too.
Being reasonable is no longer enough. What Uribe proposes is that the citizens of the world should instead be hyper-responsible. Still remaining firmly rooted in pragmatism, a hyper-responsible perspective is one that emphasizes the importance of sustained logical argumentation.
We’re not talking about “arguing” in the loud, entrenched way many of us see play out online, in the media, and perhaps at family dinner tables. Rather, argumentation of the sort that listens to the other, uses facts or axiomatic thinking to support an opinion, and attempts to craft common ground from which everyone will benefit as best the situation can.
Instead, the pressing need to engage in logical argumentation and to offer reasons to support our commitments should regain their centrality as the hallmarks of what it means to be reasonable.
It’s incumbent upon us all to go above and beyond reasonableness and strive for being hyper-responsible. We need to double check facts. We need to pause before clicking that controversial social media share. We need to engage in civilized debate using facts and sound reason to arrive at conclusions. We need to check our tendencies to post and communicate simply to erect walls to any change of mind rather than to participate in meaningful dialogue.
Putting it all together, a reasonable, hyper-responsible citizen is one who above all is aware that, in a digitally interconnected society, we all have the moral obligation to believe only what we have diligently investigated. Irresponsible practices of belief-formation are the deepest sin of a digital society since the stakes of credulity are simply too high. What we need today is a citizenry that understands that we act as we believe, and that, since our actions have potentially global and instantaneous ramifications, we all have the ethical responsibility to ensure the soundness of our commitments.
Far too many times I have posted a comment or shared an article based on flimsy knowledge on a topic. I’ve taken what I read or watched at face value without taking the time to investigate its veracity or ponder it a bit before arriving at a hasty opinion.
As someone active on a variety of social media platforms who also writes for large audiences and speaks at numerous community events, I need to abide by this advice more so than most. I’m sure I’ll screw up, but self-awareness is the precursor to corrective action. If you see me violating this online or anywhere, feel free to point it out. But please do so after you’ve also taken the time to be a hyper-responsible citizen.
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