Death of Civic Institutions
As someone who works part time for a church, the last few months during the COVID-19 pandemic have been strange and challenging. Like most churches across the country we spent the first few weeks in reaction mode, simply doing what we could to get our Sunday service and other aspects of the church online. While it has been a joy seeing people engaging with church in a novel way it is also becoming increasingly harder to proactively engage the congregation. This has led me to reflect on the ways institutions like churches have reacted to not only the Coronavirus, but the general decline of social institutions. Specifically I have been reflecting on how this will affect our politics in the UK
I recently read an article about the social scientist Shawn Rosenberg who predicted that democracy will not last, that our democracies are eating themselves up and will be replaced by authoritarian populist governments. His thesis is that there has been an erosion of democratic power of the elite in holding together democracy. Every person who can write a blog now has access to news sources on the internet. This has led to a complete dissemination of information and power but also leads to an explosion of misinformation and consequent social instability. Rosenberg argues that people will abandon the complexities of democracy for the simple answers promised by populism.
This paints a particularly dark picture of both our past and of our future. There is a clear understanding that there is no such thing as a fully functioning democracy in which there are equals and that the elites and those entrenched in power are central to keeping together democracy. In fact, he is saying, in some sense, that too much unrestricted democracy is destroying itself. While I disagree with some of his conclusions about what is the cause of the death of democracy, I take away one very key point… democracy is hard work.
Democracy, by definition, needs the complete investment by all parties involved to bring about a healthy society. The problem is, we as a society are less and less invested in society as we become more and more individualised. With the advent of the internet in a world dominated more and more by the capitalist drives of the market, we are being forced to become more and more individual. In some ways this is empowering as it has enabled those whose narrative is different to the collective to have their voice heard. However, it has also lead to the death of the ideal of the civic institution. Civic institutions, whether churches, mosques, clubs, schools, unions or societies bring people together, collectively enhancing their voice and power. They bring different people together and help them share their aspirations and burdens with others, enabling and empowering action where there would have previously been isolated inaction.
Not only do they bring people together though, civic institutions help us make sense of the world around us. Our relationships within these organisations are where we discuss the ways in which the world does and should work. This is what Rosenberg means when we now have access to information directly without these mediators. The greatest example of this currently is the way in which Donald Trump directly tweets his supporters without any mediator in the form of the media or institutions. While this direct access in many ways can be incredibly transformative it can also be manipulated by those in power. Without institutional lenses to see what politicians are saying they can feed us a narrative that is completely of their own making and avoid the kind of scrutiny they would usually have. This has led to the blossoming of ‘fake news’ and a lot of populist rhetoric.
Politics is complicated and when people are a part of institutions that is ok because the complexities of politics can be explained or dealt with by people who we trust and have relationships with. However with this layer gone we now crave a simplicity that doesn’t exist in politics. Politically trying to bring every voter into that complexity would be impossible and so instead, politicians seek to simplify issues and reduce them into slogans. It is no coincidence that in the UK and the US the most successful campaigns have centred around very simple slogans that capture popular sentiment (“Make America Great Again”, “Get Brexit Done”). Making America great and getting Brexit done are not simple ideas, but when presented as such can capture a political imagination while avoiding proper scrutiny.
In the context of democracy, we need civic institutions to drive positive change because they enable people to have power that they would never possess otherwise. Even in British political history we see countless occasions where social institutions have held power to account. Political parties have their roots in civic institutions, it is said that the Labour Party owes more to Methodism than to Marxism. This is because genuine positive social change is driven by people and not just abstract ideas. It is driven by people coming together with their neighbours to bring about change that is mutually beneficial.
However, over the last 20 years and the rise of companies like Google has led to a real decline of social institutions. There is no longer a need to go to church as you can listen to a sermon from home, there is no longer a need to engage face to face with your neighbours because there is no longer a mutual need. If you have a question you can look it up rather than knocking on your neighbour’s door and information is spread via online forums rather than local meetings.
This is not to lay the blame of the increasing individualisation and isolation we have seen over the last couple decades entirely at the feet of the internet. The internet is a powerful tool for bringing people together and dramatically increasing social interaction, particularly politically as in the Arab Spring. Countries that are traditionally very rural have seen an explosion of connectivity that would previously been impossible. It is simply a tool but a tool that has been socially hopelessly misused when coupled with rampant consumerism at the same time as being heavily restricted in some countries where it has been used in grassroots political activism. Rather than being used as a tool to bring people together, the internet has been used to drive people buying things and increasingly becoming orientated around commerce rather than investing in people around them
In my role away from CiPol I work as a community organiser. It is my job to bring together people to generate this political power that we do not have as individuals. Community organising is a method of power building in civic institutions so as to hold both the state and the market to account. It is built on the principle of self-interest and people coming around their shared self-interests to bring about positive social change. This as a principle operates all the way from an individual level up to organisations of thousands of people coming together.
Community organising, while a powerful tool, relies on strong civic institutions and a strong democracy in which the peoples’ voices will be heard. Therefore, most of my time as an organiser is spent trying to bring people together who are not a part of civic institutions or socially connected. What I have found is that people are not in need of helping or empowering, but they are isolated individuals in need of being connected to wider networks which allow them to express their own ideas and skills.
As the UK becomes more and more fragmented by the market forces of consumerism and populism take hold, civic institutions will come under more and more strain. And the further we slide to Rosenberg’s predicted populist future, the harder and harder it will be to create social institutions of power. The more authoritarian and less democratic society becomes the harder it is for the people to bring about positive political change as their political tools and opportunities are stripped from them. In my opinion the UK has to start investing in the social structures that allow for democracy to flourish. It needs to invest in the social and civic institutions that hold democracy together and we have to do it ourselves. For CiPol that means encouraging the social institutions that we are connected with—namely churches—to take on that role of civic institutions engaged politically. We passionately encourage churches to not hide away from politics and further that relegation of civic institutions to the side-line, but rather to be at the forefront of communities engaging with politics positively.
Notes
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/09/08/shawn-rosenberg-democracy-228045
This article was written by Alasdair Howorth, CiPol Intern, as part of a Democracy series posted in July 2020.
Other articles in the Political Heroes of the Bible series:
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