Yesterday, our village held a public meeting. There is an
EU funded initiative which helps rural communities like ours start up, and
later implement, a Community Action Plan. There were some highly articulate and
thoughtful children present who flagged a number of important issues. Some of
these were specific to their own needs, such as the lack of adequate play areas
and of weekend or after school facilities for younger people. They also contributed
to discussions pertaining to the needs of the wider community and of the environment.
These children were politically aware. It was clear that they came from a home
where people encouraged them to have views and they were still young enough,
and good enough, not to have become cynical. They cared about their village
with a kind of reasoned passion.
Reasoned passion is the nearest approximation I can think
of for wisdom, understood in its biblical sense. We need more of this kind of
wisdom in politics but we will not get it unless we engage with the political system
which we have. The people of Scotland seem to have realised this. The turnout
for public meetings called to debate the pros and cons of Scottish independence
is unfailingly robust – larger, according to a source cited by the BBC (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-26558087),
than it has been for 40 years. All of a sudden, politics mean something to
people. This signals something important and positive about our society, that
fundamentally people care about what happens to their communities and to their
country. It suggests that there is a certain goodness in them which has to do
with taking responsibility for what society itself is becoming.
The idea of responsibility suggests dialogue. It is about
responding. Ultimately, a person who only has their own interests at heart cannot
be truly responsible. That is the kind of selfishness which fragments society
and isolates the individual, and the selfish individual always ends up alone
with themselves, which is a hell on earth existence. So human beings have to
learn, sooner or later, that the way to happiness, and to genuine prosperity,
has to do with forgetting about self and being mindful of the needs of others,
because the well being of every individual ultimately depends on the well being
of others. Similarly, the well being of society depends on the extent to which
individuals consider themselves to be part of that society, or of the microcosm
of society which is any given community.
Engaging wisely with the politics of the day therefore
requires a new way of seeing and thinking about the way society is going, as
the two children present at our village meeting were able to do yesterday. They
were taking responsibility for themselves, for other children (they had
canvassed the opinions of children living within walking distance of where they
live) and for the wider community. They gave us a glimpse of good politics.
Good politics depend on all of us because in a democratic
society they are an ongoing dialogue between the electorate and those it votes for,
so giving politicians a blanket mandate and then forgetting about it until the
next election is simply not good enough. It is irresponsible, because political
apathy destroys communities and nations. Political apathy creates a moral
vacuum into which politicians, supported by the powerful and greedy, can lull
us into believing that things would be much better if we trusted them to just
get on with the job, or if we reverted to the kind of xenophobic mythical past
dreamed of by English politicians of the extreme right. Both are dangerous but
easily believed myths.
Resisting political apathy does not require that everyone
becomes an expert in the field of economics, politics and all the areas which
intersect with them, but it does require what St. Paul, in his letter to the
Philippian church, calls ‘politeomai’ or ‘living well for the city’. For
Christians, this means engaging with the politics of the day and making the
good news of the gospel a reality in one’s own political decision making. In
other words, it is the kind of good citizenship which calculates its values
according to the slide rule of what Jesus calls the Kingdom of heaven. In the
sermon on the mount he shows us that good citizenship is not just a matter of
public duty but of reasoned passion, the kind of reasoned passion which
connects human beings with the wisdom and love of God. Good citizenship therefore
requires that we question and take responsibility for the values of society, as
those values are shaped by concern for the weakest and the most vulnerable.
Protecting their interests has
traditionally been held as the mark of a civilised society.
Political apathy is a sign that such concerns are no
longer what matter most. Instead, what matters is meeting the needs of those
with the money to pay for them, as well as generating those needs in the minds
of us all. As a result, the human person is being reduced to the status of client
or, worse still, consumer, and the things which shape civilised life, like education,
are becoming a commodity designed to shape more consumers and more providers of
commodities. The notion of sociality is beginning to unravel, as we are seeing
with the deterioration of public responsibility in the sphere of politics,
journalism and banking. The questioning which makes for good citizenship reaches
maturity as it becomes more and more a questioning of the politics which make,
or might break, our society and of which the two children at our community meeting
were innately aware.
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