I assume there are many civic stories, or at least more than one.  The narrative that defines the civic for me begins in the United States with the struggle for the abolition of slavery, which achieved some success when previously enslaved Africans gained the right to vote after the Civic War.  In contrast to the early years of our Republic, when only property owners could vote, now property-less people were also recognized as citizens.  It is true that by 1850, white men without property could vote, but when you consider that African Americans represented around 20% of the US population (40 % of Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia), their inclusion in the civic was historic.  The establishment of various Jim Crow laws soon after the war largely negated this victory, but these laws did not stop the emergence of the civic.

The civic story continued with many different episodes, including women obtaining the right to vote in the 1920’s, workers gaining the right to organize in the 30’s, the civil rights in the 60’s, the feminist movement in the 70’s and the LGBT struggle for civil rights today.  Even though I am a white heterosexual male, this narrative of fighting for inclusion—for full citizenship—provides a context for understanding my civic membership.

This civic narrative also tells us something about the kinds of activities that members should pursue.  This struggle for inclusion—really for the integrity of the very meaning of citizenship—is not only a good story, but also an obligation.

Civic membership has its obligations.  The first, and most obvious, is to recognize the equal moral worth of every member.  Secondly, since we are members of the same global community, live at the same time, belong to the same generations, are dependent on the same planet, our social structures should be balanced; they should be fair.  For the 1% to have so much more than the 99% violates basic civic norms, as does wasting our economic surplus on political campaigns instead of using it to improve our life together and to protect our planet.  We may disagree about how to make these changes, which is OK, if we could agree on the meaning of civic membership.

A commonsense way of thinking about disagreements is that they arise when people have opposing opinions, they have an invested interest in maintaining them, and they have to make a decision.  In this framework, our positions are seen as things we own—as our property.

If our opinions are our own (in the sense of being what we own), then entering into disagreement becomes a kind of property management, where we use different strategies and tactics not only to keep what we have, but also sometimes to take another’s property if we can.

To own is not only to possess, but also a challenge to “own-up-to,” which is a kind of coming clean about what one has done.  It is a way of accepting responsibility for what one has said.

To see disagreement or conflict in this way easily lends itself to thinking that a solution to the conflict should begin by looking at the different “investments” in the issue—each person’s self-interest.  Then we simply find a way to satisfy each person’s interest as much as possible—trying to find what is called a “win-win” solution.  This is essentially the strategy of the Harvard Negotiating Project as presented in the book, Getting to Yes.

This all seems so commonsensical because we live, for the most part, in a world that has been constructed around ownership and property.  I am the owner of my life and my voice, and whatever I say belongs to me.

This framework, it turns out, is deeply flawed.  We are not property.  Neither are our ideas.  Language is not something we own, but something in which we participate.  Right now, we are participating in English.   As we participate, the sharing of ideas can become thought provoking and we think new things.  We may even change our mind.

In this framework, we see ourselves as constructing a conversation with others rather than living isolated and throwing words at each other.  Instead of spending our time defending our property, we spend our time learning how to design new ideas and proposals that will move the conversation forward.  We engage in a common learning process.

Our responsibility here is something like “owning what we say,” but now we can speak of it as our responsibility to be present before the other as well as to recognize the other’s presence.  It is a matter of personal and relational integrity.

As owners of opinions, disagreement leads us to endless battles over what we already know.  As participants in conversations, disagreement leads us to think together about what we do not know.

Thinking, at least the kind we need, is guided by experiencing.  The preachers of positive thinking, I believe, are actually afraid of concrete experiencing, especially when the experience might lead to some thought that had not been thought before.   New thoughts negate old thoughts.  That is their power.   They open a new field of vision that allows the viewer to see a different world

The preachers of positive thinking aim to manage our thoughts so that their thoughts will not be questioned—will not be negated.  They try to inspire us to be happy or at least satisfied with the way things are.  Positive thinking is a tool of the privileged, and those who represent the privileged, to maintain their privilege.

The real problem with positive thinkers is that they never repair anything, because they avoid anything that is broken.  The fact is we need to repair our roads and bridges.  We need to repair our schools.  We need to repair our economic system.  We need to repair our commons.  We need to repair the planet.  There is a lot of repairing to do.

There are really two options here.  We can either split apart positive and negative thinking, project negative thinking on our enemies, and then claim positive thinking for ourselves (American exceptionalism), or we can integrate them into the dialectic of experiencing and think together about what is wrong and how to make it right.

If god prevents you from seeing the actual trends that are determining the future, such as the growing gap between the rich and the poor, the continued destruction of the planet, or the trend toward feudalism.

If god allows you to turn away from the claims of concrete relationships with actual persons by defining these relationships with such abstract terminology as saved or unsaved; deserving or undeserving.

If god is used to sanction force and violence on others

If god gives you advantages over others who have other gods.

If god is more important than your neighbor

If god sanctions the violation of civic rights

If god prevents you from seeing the need to repair your understanding of god

If god guides you much like a dog on a leash.

Disintegrity, like disunity or dishonesty, is primarily a violation of a basic norm; in this case, the norm of integrity.  If integrity is what holds things together, disintegrity separates them.  If integrity represents the integration of all the parts that belong to a larger whole, disintegrity excludes some of the parts, or denies the whole.  It is atomistic rather than holistic.  It has various manifestations; in daily life, in economics, and in politics.  The report from the New Hampshire primary that young people were attracted to Ron Paul’s ideas is particularly disturbing.  Paul’s libertarianism is a classic form of disintegrity that has a long history in Anglo-American thought.

The philosopher who many consider the father of libertarianism, John Locke, had an almost lethal case of disintegrity.  Locke believed that individuals existed alone, not belonging to anything but themselves, and then as individuals they formed a government to protect their individual property—themselves.  For Locke, people do not belong together, but rather get together to protect what belongs to each one of them, and then they assume that whatever they have, they have acquired by themselves.  This is the worst aspect of the libertarian notion of individual freedom, which is infected with disintegrity from top to bottom.

So how can we treat it?  First of all, we can tell the whole story of our nation rather than only the story of property owners.  American prosperity has been just as much the result of slavery, and the exploitation of land and labor, as it has been the result of hard work, ingenuity, and luck.  All these are parts of our nation’s story.

We can also think more critically about our social identity.  We all are located in some time, some place, some tradition, and some family.  Much of what comes our way actually depends on where we are among these many social groups.

There is much more to do, of course, but for now, a third treatment that might work is to shift from thinking like an owner to thinking like a member.  In fact,  the most effective treatment of disintegrity might be to stop identifying with what one owns, and to  start identifying with what one shares—with what we have in common as members of a civic realm.

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10402659.2011.625873

Opening Paragraph:

The economic crisis of 2008 and the great recession in which we still find
ourselves have made it abundantly clear that mainstream economic thought
needs an overhaul. The profit motive of a capitalist economy, combined with
a nearly unregulated financial sector, caused financial firms to pursue actions
that were in their own short-term interests, but which added no real value to
the economy and, in fact, undermined the very system of which they are a
part. In his newest book, Civilizing the Economy, Marvin Brown challenges
the framework of a free-market economy and offers an alternative vision for
the place and purpose of economic interactions. The economy, Brown argues,
should be based on providing for the needs and wants of humans, and we
should recognize the role of the providers themselves. Reframing the way
we speak of and view the economy would engender changes in the way we
organize firms and markets and would re-position the economy within the
social and civic sphere.

Thinking like a citizen means, for of all, to think as a member.  The original meaning of citizen is a member of a city.  Today, we need to replace the notion of city with that of civic, since some of us do not live in cities, but all of us have the right to belong to the civic.  The civic is simply a realm or sphere created by civic conversations in which all members have moral equality, and live together in reciprocal relationships.  Its existence arises from civic conversations in which we think like citizens about how we want to design their common life.

Now some may resist the very idea of someone writing about how we should think. Is there any greater freedom than the freedom of thought?  This is true, of course, and yet it overlooks that our capacity for exercising this freedom depends not only on our capacity to participate in languages but also on our choice of how to participate.  Thinking like a citizen, in other words, is not a behavior that we should reward but an action that we should choose.

Universal membership in the civic may sound like socialism, and it does continue the principle of solidarity that is one hallmark of socialism.  It also differs.  Socialism, for the most part, resides in the conflicts among social classes and groups.  It is grounded in the social.  Civicism, if I may use the term, is grounded in civic conversations.  We should acknowledge different languages, different cultures, different engagements, different backgrounds, and different social identities.  This is the stuff of our social life.  Thinking like a citizen does not erase these differences and conflicts, but it can provide a platform for dealing with them.  Thinking like a citizen, in other words, is something we can do with others who are different and who disagree with us.

To think as a member of the civic is different than to think like an American or like any national culture.  The civic is global.  The family in Africa is as much a member of the civic as a family in Europe.  American thinking, in fact, has been influenced much more by commercial thinking than civic thinking.  Early on, citizenship was restricted to property owners, and there is a deep legacy in the United States of thinking like owners rather like members.  In fact, I see the current contest as a contest between two ways of thinking: as owners or as members.  This contest has a long history—from the Civic War to the civil rights movements to the occupy movement—and who gets the upper hand this time will have enormous consequences for us and for future generations.

Civic conversations are quite different from commercial conversations.  Commercial conversations are about commerce—about the exchange and the overall flow of things.  Civic conversations are about how we want to live together—about the design of our collective life.  Civic conversations should be the context or platform for commercial conversations.  Only when we know how we want to live together will we know how to design the flow of things.

In the history of the United States, for the most part, commercial conversations have dominated civic conversations.   Still, we have witnessed the rise of the civic, such as in the civil rights movement.  And, now, we see it again.  The civic is occupying the commercial.

The goal, of course, is not to eliminate commerce, but to civilize it—to have commercial conversations about how to provide for one another on a civic platform of moral equality and reciprocity.  Commerce is not the problem.  The problem is its separation from civic norms.

When people say, ”We have seen the problem and the problem is us,” they deceive themselves.  We are not the problem.  The problem is one of design.  Our current design of how we live together in unjust and unsustainable, and it is still controlled by commercial conversations without any moral foundation.  Those who control financial markets are sovereign.   If we expand and protect civic conversations we may, in time, participate in the solution—an economy based on civic norms making provisions for this and future generations.

Money appears to have several functions in economic systems.  First of all, it is a means of exchange.  People exchange one thing for another and use money to facilitate the exchange.  In such exchanges, it belongs to all and is owned by no one.  It is a commons that facilitates the exchange between different properties, but it is not a property itself.

Money is also used in economic systems as a means of credit (and debt).  Individuals and businesses, for example, apply for credit from banks to develop projects that have the potential to increase the debtor’s worth enough to not only reward the debtor for his or her effort, but to also repay the loan.  When money functions as credit, it exists in a human relationship wherein the parties make promises to extend credit and to repay it.  This relationship is best understood as a relationship of reciprocity: where each party should expect to receive good for good.  Money flows in this relationship of mutual trust, not as a commodity, but as a means for fulfilling mutual promises.

A third function of money is simply to give citizens a means to pay taxes.  Some would say this is the origin of paper money—a rulers’ need to cover expenses, especially the expenses of war.  Today, of course, taxes are collected for more than to finance wars (still a major expense for the United States), but also to finance social, infrastructural, and other public expenses.

In all these uses of money, it functions as a commons, used to facilitate exchanges, provide credit, and pay taxes.  We can call it “public” money because it is embedded in communities, facilitates interactions among community members, promotes the making of provisions for all, and is protected by public agencies that enforce laws against such crimes as counterfeiting and fraud.  What governments have not done is to protect money from privatization.

The privatization of money is to take it out of circulation and to treat it as a commodity—as an object cut off from any human relationships.  Once this occurs, then those who take the money can decide how to insert the money back into the community by giving it to one organization or cause according to their preferences.

As the CEO of Microsoft, for example, Bill Gates withdrew millions of dollars from the economic system, some of it by not paying taxes, and then used some of that money to set up the Melinda and Bill Gates Foundation.  The Foundation then inserted the money in the public educational system, which had experienced a steady decline in the past decades.

What was the reason for declining quality in public schools?  Various factors, of course, but one significant factor was the significant decrease in the collection of corporate taxes.  In the year 2000, for example Microsoft paid zero corporate taxes, although they have a large profit.  How did they do this?  They moved their profit-center to Ireland and paid the Irish 12 percent tax instead of the US 35 percent corporate tax.

The evasion of taxes has been a standard practice of corporations.  The percentage of federal income taxes paid by corporations has declined from 40% in the 19060s to 5 or 6 percent today.  Without public funding, of course, individual schools have looked for private funding of their schools and in cooperation with such Foundations as the Gates Foundation have improved their schools.

If we take a step back, it seems reasonable to assume that many of the first generation of Microsoft employees was educated in public schools.  Certainly, much of the innovation in early computer technology originated at state universities.  The growth of Microsoft, in other words, was dependent on a good public school system.  Then corporations stopped paying taxes, which left them with greater profits at the expense of public services.  With these profits, they turn around and decide who will receive that they decide to “give back to the community.”

When one considers that Gates riches were largely the result of using copyright laws to transform what had been common knowledge into private property, as well as Microsoft’s infamous attempts to destroy competitors, the money in his hands is certainly not only the result of Microsoft’s contributions to the world of information technology.  Once he has the money, through his Foundation, he can decide what schools to improve.  The net result is the general impoverishment of public schools, and the establishment of a feudalistic relationship of a few schools with their benefactor: in this case the Gates and Melinda Foundation.  That’s what philanthropy is: the privatization of money.