Citizenship by Design, Part 2: Citizen Centric Design

As we saw in last week's Messenger, Citizenship is an expansive concept. We started by asking 'who is a citizen?' and quoted from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy where:

"a citizen is a member of a political community who enjoys the rights and assumes the duties of membership."

While the definition allows for citizenship in any political community whatsoever, in practice there's one community that dominates the discussion of citizenship.

That's the nation state.

Obligatory quote from James C. Scott’s “Seeing Like a State” below:

Let's say you want to buy a ticket to go abroad. When filling out the passenger details, you will be asked: 'what's your country of citizenship?' The way the question is posed makes it clear that not only do you have to respond with your country of citizenship, that in addition, citizenship only makes sense in the context of nation. The dropdown menu does not give you the option of saying I am a citizen of mechanical engineering.

That's where the definition is a bit misleading. Membership in a community is normally an identity forming exercise. Membership in a political community should be a version of membership in identity forming communities in general. Having attended college X grants you membership in X's alumni community. So citizenship should be like being an alumnus of a very large college.

But that's now it works does it?

It's now common to acknowledge we have many identities. You can simultaneously be a woman, an Indian, a mathematician and a Harry Potter fan. None of these identities excludes the others. You can also be a resident of Bangalore, and have strong voting preferences in your local elections. That would make you a member of Bangalore's political community. And yet, it would be a rare person who says 'I am a citizen of Bangalore,' and even if you said that about yourself, it would have the same flavour as saying 'I am a citizen of the world.' You would be expressing a sentiment, not a fact.

The state dominates politics just as the market dominates economics.

Impatient for the summary? Watch the video version here:

Citizenship beyond the State

And yet, we have to think about politics and citizenship beyond the state. There are plenty of moral reasons to do so, but as political designers, we can offer a novel reason: technological disruption, climate change and other forces are making our lives much more dynamic than in the past. If 'design is what works' then it's too much to expect the state to deliver working solutions for every challenge in every location in a time-bound manner. Citizens can't be divorced from their political powers, at least not when it comes to addressing wicked problems. In any case, don’t we all want to be public problem solvers? Why alienate yourself from that capacity? We need to distribute public problem solving to as wide a community as possible.

Introducing the idea of citizen centric design, of distributing the capacity to solve wicked problems in as wide a population as possible. In fact, every citizen should be a wicked mind.

There's another, perhaps even more urgent reason to think about citizenship beyond the state: ecology. If you think the non-human world - animals, trees, fungi, clouds, carbon - has be brought into politics, we don't have a statist way of bringing them in. Ecology is nested and complex, with the hyperlocal transforming into the hyperglobal. In the face of ecological diversity, the centralizing tendencies of the state are a design flaw. As long as we treat ecology as an externality, we can 'handle' the nonhuman world by assigning it a ministry (often one whose powers are cut all the time) and forgetting about it. But if you want the nonhuman world to be part of the political community, governance can't be homogenised and centralized.

For the last few centuries, we have conducted our political lives as if the state is prime mover, the collective that lies behind all other collectives and makes sense of them all. But as the 21st century plots its course, a new entity is laying claim to being the prime mover: the planet.

Like it or not, the planet is knocking on the door. Neglect it for much longer and it will break the door down.

Consider how district A might have drought as a result of climate change while next door in district B, everyone is dealing with incessant rains. It's unrealistic to ask the same entity - the state - to deliver solutions to floods and droughts in neighbouring districts at once. Not impossible, but a state that has such fine grained capacity will either have to be enormous, an even bigger monopolizer of revenue, or surround us with surveillance at a scale where our freedoms are extinguished. Some nations are going in that direction. Do we want to add ourselves to that list?

But 'state-centric design' is the norm. So much so that we can't even imagine how else a solution can be designed. If you're suffering from an injustice and want the Supreme Court to rule on your case, you're performing state-centric design. If you're a renewable energy entrepreneur and you want state subsidies to compete with fossil fuel companies, you're performing state-centric design.

We can't blame the litigant or the entrepreneur for doing what they're doing, for the state is a party to many of our disputes. However, without rejecting these state-centric moves, can we also prototype a different way of designing political communities? One that privileges citizen-centric design, where the citizen-citizen relationship is at the heart of the political community, not the citizen-state relationship?

What might that look like?

Citizen Centric Design

In one of the most famous speeches in modern history, Abraham Lincoln alluded to democracy as “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” It's a wonderful ideal articulated by a man worth admiring, but let's look at the statement more carefully, shall we? In Lincoln's phrasing:

• government comes first, but
• it's qualified by the type of government it should be: of/by/for the people.

Leaving open the possibility that government that's not by the people is still a legitimate government, i.e., it's possible to cancel the people but not the government. What if we inverted the relationship between the people and the government so that instead of people being a modifier of the government (government by the people rather than government by the king), it's the government that's one of many possible modifiers of the people? Sometimes people come together to elect a government but on other occasions they will come together to create a public park in their neighborhood or deliver emergency supplies to migrant labourers.

The primary political relationship is between people and people, not people and the state.

There's an obvious danger to this formulation: that authoritarianism takes charge in order to fulfill the "will of the people" and sidesteps all institutional checks and balances, including those of the state. Those authoritarians will come to power by using the very peer to peer tools (social media & messaging) that people use to self-organize.

Our self-organization can be gamed and the only way to avoid that fate is to invest in our own learning as citizens.

Buddhist traditions have this idea of skillful means (upaya in Sanskrit), where an agent adopts a way of acting and responding suitable to the context -- and training in the Buddhist path cultivates (or at least claims to do so) that capacity to respond skillfully. Let's get back to our 'people,' replacing the religious concerns of Buddhism with the secular concerns of collective existence. We have many occasions to exercise skillful citizenship; state-centric actions such as voting is one of many such occasions.

Who is a skillful citizen and what goes into cultivating skillful citizenship?

To answer that question, we might want to bend our minds toward the word for community in many Indian languages: samaj, and recast the idea of citizenship as membership in a samaj. We don’t even need to say ‘political samaj’ because samaj is an expansive term, with room for politics, religion or anything else that collectives might organise themselves around.

Summary: When you're in a complicated, fast moving landscape, chances are that the state doesn't have the capacity to respond so quickly. We are all citizens and we are everywhere. So why not distribute the capacity to address wicked problems wherever we are? So what that would mean is to design political spaces around the citizens who occupy those spaces. We want citizens to have the capacity to work together to address the challenges wherever they are, to become the public problem solvers. Samaj can become the means through which public problems are addressed first.

That would be Swaraj in our times

As it turns out, the samajik approach to citizenship was on the minds of many of the leaders of the Indian independence struggle. We end this week’s Messenger with a quote from Tagore:

In our country the king has made wars, I defended his territory and administered his laws, but the social organisation has attended to everything else, from the supply of water to the supply of knowledge, so simply and naturally that the repeated floods of new sovereignty, which swept over the land with the advent of each new era, did not reduce us to brutes by destroying our dharma nor scatter us into vagabondage by breaking up our social structure. The kings incessantly battled against one another, but in our murmuring bamboo groves, amidst the shade of our mango orchards, temples were being raised, rest-houses for wayfarers established, and water-reservoirs excavated; the village school-master taught his simple lore, higher philosophy was not lacking in the tols, and the village meeting-places were resonant with the chanting of the Ramayana and the singing of kirtans. The social life did not depend upon outside aid, nor did outside aggression perceptibly mar its serene beauty.

Tagore might have a couple of blind spots (e.g., caste is entirely missing in this idyllic description of social life) but he’s gesturing towards a form of collective living that’s samaj centric rather than sarkar centric. We will follow in his footsteps next week.