Citizenship is a Soft Skill

The Times has two interesting editorials yesterday and today ("What Is to be Done?" and "We, The State") which highlight not only a possible divergence on the editorial board but express an embryonic divide between the conservative "Right" and the social democratic "Left" of the Anglophone classes. The first editorial excoriates the state for not doing its job viz. "governance," especially on terrorism, while the second bemoans the tendency to blame the state for everything, as if the state were anything other than a reflection of the society from which it springs. If the first editorial chides the state to "Be better!" so that the rest of the nation can get on with the business of becoming a superpower, the second calls on all of us to "Be better citizens!", to renew the "social contract" that distinguishes a democratic republic from a colony by practising everyday democracy. The latter is the more fruitful message by far, but it does not go far enough in either diagnosis or solution.

Our problems will not be solved by skirting around formal electoral politics, but to get us to "play our part" fully we need an education system that produces more than technical excellence. To put it in corporate vernacular, citizenship is a soft skill. If our education system is to produce the soft skill of citizenship, it needs to be well-rounded. Strengthen the humanities and the social sciences, and universities will produce well-rounded individuals with the civic and humanistic sensibilities required of a productive polity. Some of these individuals will then value formal politics enough to enter the electoral game and shake it up, creating the meaningful diversity in the polity that is required to produce a robust social contract and strong democratic institutions. Fix the universities by, inter alia, rounding out the curriculum, and you'll fix the nation.

The position of the "Right" predictably crows on about "governance" as if there were a menu of institutions that, if only our wretched politicians had the "political will" to implement, we'd become the mighty nation we ought to be. While admittedly a caricature, this description does indicate an ironic commonality that this position has with the Nehruvian socialists it loves to hate: both have a Plan, all that is missing is (another favourite catch-all term) execution. What the nation needs, therefore, is a CEO. This of course implies share-holder democracy, an institution whose naturalization of inequality is what makes this position conservative and dangerous.

Against this, the "Left" seeks to redefine the State not as something "out there" but as part of a robust quid pro quo that Society has with itself. It implicitly understands that, at the level of society, one cannot simply lay out a menu and execute it without executing democracy itself. While the "Right" would have no qualms about getting rid of democracy (as Sunil Sethi yelped after the Olympic opening ceremony, if democracy can't do the business, what good is it?), the "Left" rejects this on grounds of both principal and pragmatism. It understands that the social contract is not a thing but a process, the very process by which we get strong institutions. It is because this contract is broken, because "we" sit back and loath the state for its lack of will, because "we" have utopian dreams of benevolent authoritarians like good CEOs, that we all are in the present condition. "We" have failed to get our hands dirty with the process of practising democracy, and we all are paying the price.

Yet in pushing us in this direction, the "Left" concentrates on the practise in between elections, claiming that we pay too much attention to elections themselves. While it is undoubtedly true that a strong social contract must reach into the rootlets of everyday life for enrichment, and true that this level of democratic practise has been disastrously ignored, do we not compound our folly if we over-concentrate on the root rather than the trunk?

Elections are ritualized because it is the same set of people running the show, leading to a monopoly which the "Right" correctly sees as leading to criminal inefficiency. Yet the solution is neither centralized corporatization of the state nor simply a ramping up of civic sensibility. It is to enter the messy domain of electoral politics and enrich the process of democracy with a greater diversity of actors.

To examine this lack of diversity in our central political process, we have to disaggregate a little. Who is the "we" who prefer to concentrate on "pursu[ing] our individual fortunes and tend to our private corner of this land"? Clearly this cannot refer to the many thousands who are politically mobilized and participate in elections. The reference is plainly to a set of classes who have been locked out of the political process for too long.

The middle classes, people whose main asset is their human capital, are effectively disenfranchised in our polity. Politics is not a noble pursuit for these individuals. To merely engage in it in any form is to be tainted. Thus the highest expression of civic duty, representing your peers in the collective sovereign body, has been abandoned and indeed demonized by this broad section of society. What results is a debilitating political monoculture.

Now, I would not for a second blame people for demonizing the present political class; it has atrophied our public institutions to a truly criminal degree. But have "we" not left them to it? What prevents a broader section of the middle classes from seeking out politics as a viable and noble profession, I would submit, is not only the abysmal state of play in formal politics but a real problem with the supply side: our citizen factories, the universities, are broken. Without valuing politics as a civic pursuit, we are condemned to outsource it to gross opportunists. Without strong humanities and social sciences, we are equally condemned to a back-office economy. Fixing the universities by rounding them out will create the human capital required for both a strong economy and a vibrant polity.