The Gardens of Democracy: A New American Story of Citizenship, the Economy, and the Role of Government by Eric Liu, Nick Hanauer Read Free Book Online Page A

than bond. For some Americans, citizenship is expressed by clustering with people very much like oneself. There’s of course a fulfilling place for that in life. But we believe in what Mark Granovetter called “the strength of weak ties.” What sustains the ecosystem of citizenship is not reinforcing old and already strong ties with, say, fellow liberals or soccer fans or Brooklynites, but instead building new and somewhat weaker ties with conservatives or baseball fans or Manhattanites. In every latticework, whether chemical or physical or human, it’s the links that connect a tight ring to another tight ring that add the greatest collective value and make the network bigger and more powerful. Or to put it in terms used by Robert Putnam, bridging social capital is better than bonding. Great citizens build bridges between unacquainted realms, more than they reinforce bonds among people already close. Bridging spreads trust while bonding concentrates it. This is why, as Putnam described long before he wrote of “bowling alone,” southern Italy with its more tribal blood loyalties has long been a less functional and prosperous social milieu than northern Italy, where weak ties and openness prevail. But because people tend naturally toward building strong ties, they often have to be encouraged to develop the habit of creating weaker ones. In this light, programs like a universal draft or required national civilian service are necessary for diverse democracies. These experiences connect us in ways that the tribalism of everyday life does not.
    Create Dunbar units. We believe that one of the great forces that feeds both citizen apathy and the citizen rage of the Tea Party phenomenon is bigness, and the powerlessness it engenders: big government fighting big business as reported by big media, all fueled by big money, and leaving most of us on the sidelines. The antidote is smallness. Our vision of citizenship is moral and philosophical, but it comes to life only on a face-to-face human scale. There is reason why, across all cultures and time periods, the maximum size of a coherent community has always been about 150. This is known as Dunbar’s number, after the social scientist Robin Dunbar, who named the phenomenon. As a matter of both public policy and private self-organization, we should be de-chunking ourselves into units of no more than 150, and then connecting the chunks. A neighborhood or a housing project of 1000 units is not really a neighborhood. A neighborhood consisting of 10 sets of 100 houses, each set linked to the others—that’s more like it. Since vast cities and vast national organizations create deserts of citizenship, we believe in localizing globally—every chance we get, making little Dunbar units and getting them to identify as such, bridging with one another, sometimes competing in a healthy way with one another. When one’s civic action consists of being just a dues-paying member of a vast national organization, one is only a fraction as powerful and empowered as when it consists of being a leader in a local network, particularly one tied to other local networks. A small-town ethos situated in a high-tech web—as found, for instance, in the statewide network of Watershed Councils in Oregon—makes for effective 21st-century citizenship.
    Make courtesy count. Courtesy—a cooperative consideration of, and deferral to, the needs of others—is the start of true citizenship. It is what we practice when we don’t live on an island alone. And that is why we believe courtesy should be actively encouraged in American civic life, not as ritual or routine but as mindful practice. When you open doors for others, let others into traffic, say “please” and “thank you,” you are watering the garden of social life. These kinds of choices can be named and promoted. Though courtesy connotes something courtly and quaint, it is actually one of the most vital and fluid forces in any civic ecology. That is