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What does it mean to be an engaged citizen, eric liu discusses how to foster a shared civic identity in today’s polarized america..

This year’s Independence Day marks the 243rd birthday of the United States—a country that today has a population of around 330 million people from all walks of life.

Our growing diversity, combined with an increasingly polarized politics, challenges us to imagine what a modern American civic identity looks like. America is not the same country it was decades ago, so it makes sense that our view of what it means to be a citizen in today’s America would evolve, as well.

Eric Liu is a prolific author, civic activist, and former Clinton administration official who founded the organization Citizen University (CU) in 2012 to help reinvigorate Americans’ sense of civic identity. CU does not define the term “citizen” by legal status—it is a wider conception of Americanness that encompasses everyone who lives in the United States.

CU promotes civic identity with a slate of programs such as Civic Saturday . During these events, community members gather for 90 minutes of discussion and activities, including civic sermons designed to make them think about how to be engaged citizens.

Greater Good ’s Bridging Differences Writing Fellow, Zaid Jilani, spoke with Liu about his new book, Become America: Civic Sermons on Love, Responsibility, and Democracy , which is based off some of the civic sermons Liu has delivered. In our interview, Liu discussed how we can improve our civic life in America and engage productively across our political differences, as he did with right-wing radio host Glenn Beck, and what it means to be an American.

Zaid Jilani: American civic life is under stress—people don’t feel like they’re part of the same communities, they don’t feel like they can engage civilly in discussing political and social issues. What are the big stressors that are challenging our civic community and our civic ethos that Citizen University is addressing? 
 


Eric Liu: One is . . . the profound level of income inequality and wealth concentration in the United States right now. When you get this degree of clumping, hoarding, and inequality and concentration of not just wealth but of voice and opportunity and self-reinforcing opportunity to participate, you begin to cut away at the very foundation of the idea of equal citizenship. It’s really hard to sustain a notion of equal justice and equality under the law when conditions are this unequal and where inequality is self-reinforcing.

A second great stressor is that we’re undergoing a tectonic demographic shift right now. So the question ‘Who is us?,’ which has always been a central American question, has never been more salient than it is today. People are realizing that whiteness is no longer the default setting for Americanness.

There’s great opportunity in that but also great dislocation. And the opportunity and challenge that we all have right now is how to articulate a new narrative of “us” that can reflect our great diversity and give us a basis for unity. So our work at Citizen University really tries to address both of these stressors.

The point of American life is to generate hybrids of culture, of cuisine, of bloodlines, of musical styles, of approaches to problem solving, whatever it may be. A lot of our work at Citizen University . . . is about trying to encourage people to . . . mix and not match—to mix and scramble their sources of friendship, their sources of reading, their sources of inspiration in ways that can generate new hybrids.



ZJ: A lot of people have different conceptions of what it means to be a civic-minded person. What does being an American in 2019 mean, particularly in a diverse country with as many cleavages as this one?

EL: Our work is about a notion of citizenship that is broader than documentation status—it’s a deeper, more capacious ethical notion of being a member of a body, a participant in and contributor to community. And we really think about citizenship broadly defined as being about this fusion of power and character—being literate to power, understanding how power works on the one side, but also coupling that literacy with a grounding in moral and civic character; the values, norms, and ethics of being a prosocial member of a community.

The point of civic life is not necessarily to have unanimity, even if that were possible. It’s not to foster consensus around [the American] creed; it is to foster healthy engagement with that creed, a sense of responsibility for sustaining and living up to that creed, and then welcoming not only diversity but disagreement and argument about what that creed calls us to do. So a really short version of saying that is: To be an American is fundamentally to be in creative, joyful, productive argument about what it means to be an American.

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ZJ: In your book Become America , you talk about meeting Glenn Beck, a longtime conservative radio talk show host (although he’s not so comfortable with the current president in some ways). For someone who has more left-of-center political beliefs, what was that experience like?



EL: I noticed a year or two ago that Glenn Beck was taking a very public pivot . That he was taking steps in major media outlets to take responsibility for his part over the many years in how toxic and poisonous our political culture had become.

I went down [to Beck’s studio outside Dallas, Texas] for a conversation that was not on air, not for the cameras or the microphones—it was just for us to get to know each other. And we did. We started talking about our common interests in American political tradition. We started arguing about the Federalist Papers. We started talking about the Progressive Era. We started getting to things that were not just about politics. We talked about the relationship each of us had with our father. My dad died young when I was in only my early 20s. [Beck] had a very fraught relationship with his father that compelled him to go into media to find some voice and identity. We started bonding at a human level just about different life experiences.

Then he invited me back to continue that conversation but to have it on air. So that we could actually show his base and his viewers what it would look like and what it would sound like to engage in this way. And we did that. So we just built this relationship that is not naive. It is not requiring that either of us abandon our actual policy beliefs, and still requires us to challenge each other and to be disappointed with one another when either one of us (or our side) says or does things that either one finds really objectionable or challenging. But we laid down this foundation of humanity. And I think that is the necessary precursor for any sustained renewal of trust in humanity and in civic life.

ZJ: Based on your experience with Beck and others, how do you approach someone who seems to be totally on the other side of the universe from you in terms of what they believe?


EL: I think it’s really important to start those conversations not by diving in first to the policy or the political issues that you’re going to debate, but with some human universals. Who were your greatest mentors? Who shaped you? What were your formative experiences? How did your values or worldview get developed, whether by positive experiences or by trauma? By challenge or by trial? How did you come to be interested in what you’re interested in?

These kinds of human questions allow us to find chords of connection. I don’t care who the person is; they can be someone who is an outright bigot who thinks that you shouldn’t even get to be here. But if you somehow got into a room and were both answering those kinds of questions, you would find some chord of connection in your experience.

What we need in American civic life is not necessarily fewer arguments. We just need less stupid ones. I don’t mean to be glib. . . . I mean more emotionally intelligent, more historically literate, more honest about power and power differentials, and more grown-up. Being able to do that requires that you not only start with the universal human dimensions and questions but that you also go into these conversations letting down your guard. It’s really hard to change someone else’s mind if you’re not willing to have your own mind changed.

The corollary is if you enter into these encounters not to win but just to understand, that makes all the difference. That’s the big message that we have in our Better Arguments project at the Aspen Institute, which is if you take winning off the table, a lot of things become possible. If you engage a person not to persuade them that you’re right, they’re wrong, that you’re smart and they’re dumb, but just to say, “I want to understand you better. I want to understand how you come to this view that I find so abhorrent. How you see the world the way you do which is so different than my own. I’m not here to judge you or to make you feel defensive or bad about yourself. And hopefully you can understand me.” That’s hard enough, but I think that’s an approach that we found can help, both in our work at Citizen University and . . . the Better Arguments project.

ZJ: What is something that gives you hope about the future of civic life in America? What are the silver linings to the conflicts we’re having right now?



EL: I actually am hopeful about our chances for civic and democratic renewal right now for a couple of reasons.

“The question “Who is us?,” which has always been a central American question, has never been more salient than it is today”

One, everywhere I go, in the work that we do at Citizen University—far from the circus and the shouting matches of national politics in D.C.—I see people in communities all around the United States who are showing up, who are engaging across lines of difference, who are just saying, “However we got here, my job now is to help start fixing things.” They are part of the renewal (in a very vocal way) of trust, of capacity, of inclusion. That’s in small towns, in big cities, in rural areas, in urban areas, it’s red places, blue places. Our work brings me into contact with people all across the United States who are part of that body of renewal. I think that’s a story that’s under-told in the national media.

The second thing that gives me hope is recognizing that the pain and the anguish and the anger that we feel in our politics are birthing pains; we are birthing a new America right now. We are trying to do something that hasn’t yet been done in human history—which is create a mass, multicultural, democratic republic. Different societies along the way have done two or even three of those. But to do a mass multicultural democratic republic—to be at a mass scale of 320 million people, to have this diversity of cultures and traditions within that society, to be a democratic culture (which means not just run by elites, not just having the game rigged by the one percent), and then to be a republic (which means to govern ourselves, to treat ourselves as citizens responsible for the health of the body politic)—no one’s ever tried to do all four of these things at once.

We’re trying. And it’s hard. And it’s painful. And what seems like a lot of cacophony and hate and anger—I actually see the positive side of it. These are a lot of voices that for most of American history were never in the public square. Voices of people of color, voices of angry left-behind disenfranchised white people, voices of Appalachia, the voice of immigrants and refugees.

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So much of American public life and politics was driven by a very narrow band of voices of white men of relative privilege who got to shape the discourse. That’s no longer the case. So of course we’re going to have more noise and arguments and pain. And what makes me hopeful is we are going to find a way through this by cultivating not just the habit of getting your voice heard, but to come back full circle to civic religion: habits of the heart. The capacity for empathy; capacity for arguing better; capacity for re-humanizing and checking your own worst instincts to dehumanize.

In our work at Citizen University, we’re spending all day long with people trying to cultivate these capacities, and that gives me some hope. We don’t need 320 million Americans to be this way. We just need a critical mass—a critical mass to start shifting norms, to start to embody what it looks like to build a 21st-century beloved community. And once we get that critical mass in community after community, city by city, a tipping point will arise.

About the Author

Zaid Jilani

Zaid Jilani is Greater Good 's Bridging Differences Writing Fellow. A journalist originally from Atlanta, he has worked as a reporter for The Intercept and as a reporter-blogger for ThinkProgress, United Republic, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, and Alternet .

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Background Essay: Rights, Equality, and Citizenship

Directions:

Keep these discussion questions in mind as you read the background essay, making marginal notes as desired. Respond to the reflection and analysis questions at the end of the essay.

Discussion Questions

• Is suffrage a right or a privilege?
• Is suffrage necessary for a person to be considered a citizen?
• Is legal equality necessary for liberty?
• Can a person be free if not equal under the law?

Introduction

What is equality? What is the connection between equality and citizenship? The principle of equality means that all individuals have the same status regarding their claim to natural rights and treatment before the law. Our definition of citizenship has expanded throughout American history, most often through claims to our natural equality. The story of women’s suffrage is an example of the patience, determination, and sacrifice necessary to carry out long term change within a constitutional order. The word, suffrage, meaning “the right to vote,” originated with the Latin suffragium, meaning “a vote cast in an assembly, or influence given in support of a candidate.”

The Declaration of Independence asserts as a self-evident truth that all people were created equal. Something “self-evident” is a plain truth that does not need to be proven through reasoned deduction from other principles. It is apparent immediately (or self-evident) to any reasonable observer that there are no natural differences among people which give one person or group of people (such as kings and queens) the power to rule over others without their consent. All have equal rights and dignity.

In his Second Treatise of Civil Government (1690), as part of an argument against slavery, English philosopher John Locke theorized that all people are born free: “The natural liberty of man [human beings] is to be free from any superior power on earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man [humans], but to have only the law of nature for his rule.”

Almost a century later, Samuel Adams quoted Locke regarding the natural liberty of man, agreeing that all people are created equally free; there are no natural rulers.

Equality and Natural Rights

Further, the Declaration asserts that it was “self-evident” that human beings were “endowed by their Creator” with certain rights. In the Founders’ view, since rights come from God, the creator of our human nature, an individual’s natural rights could be neither given nor taken away. They are, to use the Declaration’s word, unalienable

The term “natural” here refers to human nature. Natural rights are those rights humans have at birth, including life, liberty, freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, and others. No person or government can “give” an individual these rights; they are part of what it means to be human. One can know natural rights are natural because they can all be exercised without requiring anything from others. Natural rights are sometimes called negative rights for this reason. They are also called inherent rights because they inhere in humanity: they are an essential characteristic of human nature.

Painting depicting Thomas Jefferson and his fellow committee members presenting their draft of the Declaration of Independence to the Second Continental Congress. Declaration of Independence by John Trumbull, 1819. United States Capitol.

“Nobody Can Give More Power Than He Has Himself”

The assertion of inherent rights remains the foundation for the principle of equality. In the same argument against slavery, Locke reasoned:

“This freedom from absolute, arbitrary power, is so necessary to, and closely joined with a man’s preservation, that he cannot part with it…for a man, not having the power of his own life, cannot, by compact, or his own consent, enslave himself to any one, nor put himself under the absolute, arbitrary power of another, to take away his life, when he pleases. Nobody can give more power than he has himself; and he that cannot take away his own life, cannot give another power over it.”

In other words, Locke maintained, individual lives and the rights that flow from human nature belong to the Creator

Again, Adams echoes Locke in The Rights of the Colonists (1772):

“It is the greatest absurdity to suppose it in the power of one, or any number of men, at the entering into society, to renounce their essential natural rights, or the means of preserving those rights; when the grand end of civil government, from the very nature of its institution, is for the support, protection, and defense of those very rights; the principal of which, as is before observed, are Life, Liberty, and Property. If men, through fear, fraud, or mistake, should in terms renounce or give up any essential natural right, the eternal law of reason and the grand end of society would absolutely vacate [make void] such renunciation. The right to freedom being the gift of God Almighty, it is not in the power of man to alienate this gift and voluntarily become a slave.”

Because humans are born with inherent rights, these rights are the same under any political system. An unjust government— including a tyrannical majority—may abuse or abridge the people’s inherent rights, but can never remove them, since these rights are essential to human nature.

But not all rights are inherent. Political rights, for example, may vary through times and places, because, unlike natural rights, they are given by government. Many political rights, including voting and serving on juries, have been expanded to more groups of people throughout American history through claims to natural and inherent equality. Although people use the term “rights” to refer to them, these rights conferred by civil society could more accurately be considered privileges—abilities that can be justly given or denied by government under certain conditions. For example, a driver’s license will be granted if a person passes a driving test, but can be revoked for drunk driving or too many accidents. A person can lose the ability to serve on a jury and to vote if convicted of a felony. People have inherent rights by nature, but must have permission in order to exercise a privilege.

Samuel Adams by John Singleton Copley, about 1772; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

The U.S. Constitution

The Declaration asserted two more principles that were self-evident: that in order to secure our rights, “governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” and that when a government repeatedly abuses the peoples’ rights, the people have the power and the duty to “alter or abolish” it and create a new government that will better protect their rights and ensure their safety and happiness.

After a time under the Articles of Confederation, many observers recognized the need for a more powerful central government, giving rise to a convention of the states in 1787. The resulting new Constitution’s opening lines “We the people…ordain and establish this Constitution” outlined a government of limited powers, recognizing the sovereignty of the individual and protecting the natural right of the people to govern themselves.

With this right to self-government come many responsibilities. In fact, it could be argued that citizenship is more about responsibilities than about rights. Individuals are free to make choices about their government and direct their own lives within a system that guarantees the equal right (and responsibility) of others to do the same. The Constitution reflects the sovereignty of the individual, by limiting the national government to certain enumerated powers, leaving everything else to the states and to the people.

Theory vs. Practice

Despite the bold proclamation, the principle of equality was not meaningfully reflected in the lives of all people during the early republic. Enslaved persons and Native Americans were unable to exercise their inherent rights and were not afforded political rights. The Constitution sanctioned slavery both explicitly and implicitly: it gave Congress the power to ban the international slave trade, but mandated a 20-year waiting period before doing so. The Constitution also allowed slave states to count three-fifths of their enslaved population toward the calculation of those states’ representation in Congress. Though this compromise prevented slave states from having even greater power (they had wanted to count their entire slave populations), the policy tolerated the practice of owning and trading in human beings. Though many of the leading Founders were convinced of the evils and injustices of slavery, they did not end it in their lifetimes.

Women also lacked legal equality. Enslaved women and Native American women were denied all of their rights. Among white women, and depending on varying state laws, widows had some political rights and could own property, but married white women had no legal status at all under the traditional doctrine of coverture. The English jurist William Blackstone explained this doctrine in 1765. Through marriage, husband and wife become one person under the law: “the  very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband; under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs everything.”

The Constitution left voting requirements to the states, and so states could adopt different policies. Some states did away with property requirements but still required voters to be taxpayers. Some states required a tax to vote, or a poll tax. Vermont became the first state to grant universal male suffrage in 1777. New Jersey allowed property-owning white women and free African Americans to vote for a short time before that right was revoked in 1807.

Extending Equality

The Founding generation did not perfectly live out its ideal of equality. However, it provided a foundation for greater expansion of liberty through time. Through sustained effort and commitment over time, Americans have persistently appealed to Founding documents and their root principles to insist on changes that gradually recognized and protected both natural and civil rights.

The women’s suffrage movement provides a model for implementing social and legal change to better align institutions with principles of liberty, justice, and equality. The pathway for change was long. Seventy-two years passed between the Declaration of Independence assertion of self-evident and equal natural rights and the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, where women planned to “discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of woman.” In most parts of America in 1848 it was considered improper—even illegal—for women to speak in public meetings. Now they were convening one. It took another seventytwo years of struggle for women to achieve a constitutional amendment—the Nineteenth in 1920—protecting their right to vote, and guaranteeing their opportunity to participate more fully in the political process.

The Constitution contains the means to institute the meaningful changes required to bring it more in line with the governing principles on which it was founded. One of these methods is the amendment process, which is slow but effective. Reformers committed to equality and justice endured hardship and sacrifice to implement the amendment process to end slavery, and to grant the vote to black men, women, and people ages 18-21. Other methods of aligning the law with these principles, particularly equality, result from the system of checks and balances. The Supreme Court in 1954 checked the power of majorities in states when it ruled segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. Congress has also invoked its enumerated powers to protect legal equality with laws such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Appeals to equality continue today as Americans debate the meaning of the principle as it applies to undocumented immigrants, the unborn, LGBTQ community members, disabled people, and many others.

REFLECTION AND ANALYSIS QUESTIONS

• On what basis did John Locke and Samuel Adams claim that slavery was unjust?
• List four truths the Declaration of Independence asserts are self-evident.
• What is a natural right?
• Should voting be considered a right or a privilege? Explain your choice.
• Do you agree with Locke that there are limits to what we can consent to? Does consent make any action good? Explain why or why not
• Some say that natural rights do not exist because so many governments have abused them throughout history. (Indeed, the Founders argued that the British King and Parliament were abusing theirs.) They say that if a right cannot be exercised effectively, it does not exist. Evaluate this assertion.
• The Founding generation did not fully live out its ideal of equality. Which ideals do people fail to live up to in modern times?
• Principles: equality, republican/representative government, popular sovereignty, federalism,inalienable rights
• Virtues: perseverance, contribution, moderation, resourcefulness, courage, respect, justice

• Science & Math
• Sociology & Philosophy
• Law & Politics

Citizenship Essay: Fundamentals Towards the Future

• Citizenship Essay: Fundamentals Towards the…

“Citizens are made not born” [1] . This statement is the basis on which citizenship is defied because it takes into account that citizenship is more than just being born into a country, it encompasses the notion that citizenship can be changed, is active and can be taught. In order for a democratic society to function properly, citizens must be actively involved in a multitude of areas.

If citizens are not willing to convey their ideas socially, politically, and economically then the government, whose founding principle, is rule by the people that are effectively governing blindly. The state depends on the actions of its citizens. An example of this is the state could not provide free healthcare if its citizens did not agree to taxation that enables Canada’s highly coveted healthcare system [2] .

I feel in a libertarian society, a citizen is best defined as an individual who is invested in society and contributes to its stability by performing civic duties. In order for society to be made up of these invested citizens, the individuals of a nation-state need to be sculpted in accordance with the fundamental principles that would best serve society.

These principles; open-mindedness, critical thinking, and political knowledge should be taught in schools to form the individual that can definitively be called a citizen.

I will examine each principle and why it is fundamental in creating the type of citizen as defined above. Within each fundamental principle, I will present counterarguments opposing the teaching of set principles in schools as well as ways of implementing these principles in classrooms.

A society is built upon basic institutions. The accessibility of these institutions depends on the willingness and accommodation of others’ differences by the citizens of set society. [3] In order for citizens to learn how to accommodate each other’s differences, education in schools is needed.

One of the first fundamental things that individuals need to be taught is to enable the possession of an open mind and the value of it. The possession of an open mind is becoming more important in Canada’s libertarian society due to multiculturalism. Individuals need to be aware of the differences of opinions, religious views, morals, and values that other individuals possess.

The teaching of possessing an open mind will help individuals understand each other, and help instill the value of tolerance and ideally, the ultimate goal; acceptance. [4]

This goal of acceptance is achieved through obtaining personal autonomy. Personal autonomy is defined as “the skills and inclination to choose on the basis of critical thought about the right and the good.” [5] By possessing personal autonomy, individuals are able to become aware of the diverse ways of life that the other individuals in their society possess. [6]

The role of education in this is imperative. According to Callan, “civic education can no longer be understood as wedded to the idea of the culturally homogenous nation-state.” [7]

On account of the fact that Canada is multicultural, its education of citizenship cannot just encompass homogenous values. This means that if Canadian citizenship is to be constructed in accordance to our multicultural society that the conceptions of citizenship and the educational training that supports it need to be revised. [8]

Some may argue that the teaching of toleration and cultural diversity is another form of western ethnocentrism. [9] However, what civic education on open-mindedness and new civic ideals would teach is not ethnocentrism but would help individuals be better equipped to deal with global diversity and help to battle hate and violence. [10]

This civil education of broader thinking could make sure that events like the Holocaust could not happen because of teaching intrinsic values of citizenship and with it the value of being anti-racist and anti-discriminatory. [11]

Acting out the democratic duties of a citizen through an open mind or with personal autonomy would ensure that laws passed would aid the greater good, ensure equal rights and not infringe on minorities.

This will enable the advancement of a multicultural society because according to Kymlicka, the “ health and stability of society depend on the attitudes of citizens.” [12] It is only with an attitudinal change that the government can enact laws, implement values and dictate the direction of society with the support and help of its citizens.

Once individuals have learnt in schools how to view others and differences with an open mind, or at best obtain personal autonomy, a second instrumental attribute is needed to be taught.  This attribute is critical thinking and it enables individuals to examine political, moral, economical, and overall societal issues while looking at both sides of an issue and weighing the solutions or opinions carefully and reasonably.

The ability to think critically and effectively is needed in order for citizens to dutifully enact and obey Guttman’s and Thompson’s norm of reciprocity. The norm of reciprocity should be one of the sub-fundamental principles of good citizenship that must be taught to children in schools.

The norm of reciprocity is a guideline for public debates and acting politically based on moral beliefs. [13] In short, citizens in order to obey the norm must respect others and their beliefs and must not “impose a requirement on other citizens to adopt one’s sectarian way of life” in order to understand another’s moral views or claims. [14]

The teaching of critical thinking and with it the norm of reciprocity helps to make sure that children will not be educated just to advance their own moral interests. This will create adult citizens that will be able to examine the norm and in turn, be able to recognize the value of public debates as well as being able to scrutinize and deliberate on public views. [15]

Furthermore, the ability to deliberate and scrutinize public opinions effectively ensures that laws will not be passed due to political leaders or groups lobbying out of their own personal moral convictions. Ways of implementing this in schools are through open public debates on controversial issues with no right or wrong answers as well as critically examining issues in society. This can be done through teaching how to analyze, interpret and present issues of societal concern in a classroom setting.

The ability to teach critical thinking and the norm of reciprocity may seem to some problems. Some argue that finding unbiased teachers that will have the ability to teach children how to reason about emotional and controversial issues will be extremely tough. [16] Another argument against the teaching of critical analysis and thought is that some parents may think that their child is being indoctrinated or that prejudices could be taught. [17]

Moreover, some parents may feel that it is unfit for their children to critically examine issues that may go against their personal religious beliefs. The argument that civic education could be biased can apply to any institution or person that occupies an authoritative position in society.

The fact is that institutions like the family can teach children values that go against or come into conflict with libertarian principles and values of society. [18] I feel that even though teaching citizenship may not be possible without bias, creating more enlightened, critical-thinking individuals while giving them the ability to interpret for themselves will create a more well-rounded citizen, without having coerced them into believing anything.

In the last Canadian election, the percentage of citizens that enacted their duty to vote was the lowest ever recorded. This apathetic mindset in Canadian citizens reflects political ignorance as well as ignorance of the duties of citizens. The classroom is where this political ignorance needs to end. 

The attitudes, morals, and values of society have drastically changed, yet the education on citizenship and politics has remained stagnant. I believe that in order for citizens to become more knowledgeable in the political spectrum, they must first be taught the basic democratic duties that come with being a citizen.

A curriculum should be created that specifically discusses and outlines the duties and rights of a citizen. The duties that should be taught are but not limited to, the duty to vote, the duty to maintain a just society and tolerate others. [19] Specific duties, such as voting, have been neglected on account that many citizens are unaware that voting is a duty, not just a right of a citizen.

Furthermore, it is imperative that individuals, specifically those aged 14-17 receive knowledge about political issues in society in order for them to make informed decisions when they are the age of majority. This will help make sure that these informed citizens will continually exercise their civil, political, and social duties that define a citizen.

If individuals are taught that voting is a duty then they are more likely to make sure that they maintain a basic knowledge of politics in order to vote and be active in the political arena. Being active in the political arena also draws on the two other fundamental principles discussed above.

If citizens use an open mind, think critically and are knowledgeable about issues, specifically political issues, then these enlightened individuals are more likely to be involved politically and act for the common good. They are also more likely to form educated opinions that have a factual basis rather than just moral beliefs.

Another argument against this is that in order for a state to be justified legitimate consent must be earned and that education on citizenship, specifically civic duties, is gaining consent in an illegitimate way. [20] Although, if through education you give individuals the tools to think critically then by teaching them about the duties of citizenship, they will be critically examining them and may choose to consent or not, which would be legitimate.

Another possibility is that only those that accept the fundamental principles and will keep up with their duties of a citizen should be granted the status of a citizen.  Maybe to some, being a citizen is too much work and people may not want to have to exercise their duties and would rather be ignorant and apathetic. 

Perhaps through education of the duties of a citizen, ability to think critically and with an open mind individuals before they enter the age of majority, should be allowed to choose whether or not they want to become a citizen. Possibly only those that are able to attain these fundamental attributes promise to enact their duties and want to, should be granted the duty to vote. This would ensure that those that are defined as a citizen, are indeed a contributing member of a society dedicated to ensuring that they fulfill their duties, think critically and act for the common good.

This would also solve the problem of educating individuals in order to coerce them into accepting the state because in order to become a citizen it would require explicit consent.

Regardless, education on the duties of citizenship will help create political awareness and with the teaching of the other two fundamental principles described above, collectively citizens may want to create laws distributive justice and property rights that benefit the collective good and whole and not necessarily strictly benefit themselves.

This would also cause them to critically look at the systems we have in place in society and either collectively come together and ask for a reform, or stand behind the policies already enacted.

In order to keep up with societal values the concept of what a citizen needs to be redefined. This definition may depend on the society an individual inhabits, but the idea that citizenship needs to be taught in school should not be up for debate. Many societies have realized this and have altered their definitions of citizens and created a curriculum to complement it.

An example of this is in France where children are expected to know how political institutions work, understand fundamental rules of political and societal conduct and be capable of effective communication in a formal debate among other things. [21] This ensures that the youth of the nation will be knowledgeable about their civic roles in society.

As the world becomes smaller with globalization and technology it is crucial that citizenship encompass more than just living in a sovereign state. The citizens within a sovereign state must not only be aware of the values and norms of that society but they must be open and tolerant of new cultures.

Perhaps in the near future, citizenship to nation-states will be obsolete and citizenship and its definition will pertain to a global context where personal autonomy, critical thinking and political knowledge are a must in order to be a functioning member of the globe.

Works Cited

Brighouse, Harry., and ed. McKinnon, Catriona. “Citizenship”: Issues in Political Theory , New

York: Oxford University Press, 2008

Callan, Eamonn., “Citizenship and Education” Annual Review of Political Science 7 (2004) : 71-90.

Kymlicka, Will., Contemporary Political Philosophy; An introduction , 2 nd Ed. Oxford

University Press: 285-326

[1] .  Harry Brighouse, “Citizenship”: Issues in Political Theory , ed. Catriona McKinnon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008) 254.

[2] .  Will Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy; An introduction , 2 nd Ed. (Oxford University Press): 285

[3] .   Eamonn Callan, “Citizenship and Education” Annual Review of Political Science 7 (2004) : 74.

[4] .   Callan, 75.

[5] .  Callan, 75.

[6] .   Callan, 75.

[7] .   Callan, 72.

[8] .  Callan, 72.

[9] .   Callan, 77.

[10] .  Callan, 77.

[11] .  Callan, 75.

[12] .   Kymlicka, 285

[13] .  Harry Brighouse, “Citizenship”: Issues in Political Theory , ed. Catriona McKinnon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008) 247.

[14] .  Brighouse, 244.

[15] .  Brighouse, 247.

[16] .  Brighouse, 255.

[17] .  Brighouse, 256.

[18] . Callan, 87

[19] .Brighouse, 243.

[20] .  Brighouse, 257.

[21] .  Brighouse, 257.

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Home — Essay Samples — Environment — Global Citizen — What Does It Mean to Be a Global Citizen

What Does It Mean to Be a Global Citizen

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Defining global citizenship, key attributes of global citizenship, challenges of global citizenship, opportunities of global citizenship, conclusion: embracing global citizenship.

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Citizen science says anyone can be a scientist

Yes, even you. The practice is being increasingly accepted by researchers as a way to gather data.

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You can be a scientist! Or at least you can play a crucial part in up-and-coming scientific research. Because citizen science is becoming increasingly accepted by researchers as a way to gather data. Modern technology also makes it easy for anyone to participate, using just a smartphone or the internet. Amid a climate crisis in particular, the ability to collect large amounts of data and input can make all the difference in scientific progress. 

What is citizen science?

Scientific research is ongoing, and experts need all the help they can get. Citizen science, the "field of research in which members of the general public participate in scientific projects, often in collaboration with professional scientists," Three O'Clock said, is gaining in popularity. While letting the public participate in research might appear unscientific, "the areas of scientific study that utilize information gathered by everyday individuals span the gamut, from environmental science to marine biology," said Popular Science .

Citizen science has become an "increasingly acknowledged approach applied in many scientific domains, and particularly within the environmental and ecological sciences," said a 2022 study published in the journal Nature Reviews Methods Primers. Researchers often create citizen science groups to aid in monitoring and data collection without requiring extra funding. For example, bird-watchers can be considered citizen scientists as they help track species and add to existing databases. "Interested volunteers, amateur scientists, students and educators may network and promote new ideas to advance our understanding of the world," said National Geographic .

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Citizen science has also been rapidly expanding in recent years thanks to more technological access. "Armed with phones that have built-in GPS receivers, volunteers can readily provide geo-location information about species or situations in real time," said National Geographic. Online citizen science projects can also "involve members of the public participating in online projects, such as classifying images or transcribing historical documents," said Three O'Clock.

What are the benefits of citizen science?

The growing popularity of citizen science provides a unique opportunity to engage local communities as well as collect large amounts of data, especially from harder to reach places. "We are privileged enough to spend a lot of time in extremely remote areas where conducting scientific research has very high costs and is often prohibitive for some scientists," Marcos Goldin, geologist and citizen science coordinator at the cruise line Aurora Expeditions, said to Popular Science. Citizen science "allows for the research questions addressed to be focused on the needs of the community," and "democratizes access to data," providing "participants with the tools to conduct their own research and decision making," Three O'Clock said.

The largest benefit is the power in numbers. "Data collection isn't just for researchers," said Popular Science. Climate and environmental science can particularly benefit from citizen science. "For issues that affect huge swathes of areas like pollution or radiation, which can only be properly measured at scale, that kind of mass data collection can be vital," said Wired . "Publicly available data gathered by citizens removes the chance of any middleman who may be unable, because of underfunding or political crisis, to gather enough data."

What are the drawbacks?

Critics of citizen science argue that, "untrained citizens could collect shoddy or even biased data that won't have scientific rigor or reliability," Wired said. While data collected by the public could provide valuable insight, the lack of data-collection training could pose issues. "Designing and implementing citizen science projects require a unique set of skills and knowledge outside the research itself, such as communication planning and execution, community building and participant management," the Nature Reviews Methods Primers study said. Without proper oversight and organization, the data collected may not be reliable.

Citizen science could also highlight societal inequality . "Citizen science may engage only certain parts of society, which may potentially fail to include historically underrepresented groups, less-affluent members of society and individuals and communities from certain socioeconomic, racial and ethnic groups," said the study. "This raises concerns about the relevance of citizen science to diverse communities and may affect the quality of results." Pieter Franken, co-founder of the nonprofit Safecast dedicated to citizen science, said to Wired, "Citizen science doesn't just let people collect data, it empowers them and gives them a voice."

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 Devika Rao has worked as a staff writer at The Week since 2022, covering science, the environment, climate and business. She previously worked as a policy associate for a nonprofit organization advocating for environmental action from a business perspective.  

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Opinion: Citizen Times serves community well, launched an international journalism career

A local newspaper serves as an integral part of a community. It’s the medium through which many collective memories are built, shared and stored. Our Asheville Citizen Times is such a publication. Founded in 1870, it’s long been a news foundation for Asheville and still is today. I hope it will continue.

Earlier this month the Citizen Times newspaper’s executive editor, Karen Chávez, wrote a moving article announcing, clearly with deep sadness, the news that the staff would have to move out of its 85-year-old building March 31. Distressed at learning this, I’ve been remembering how the Citizen Times has been an important influence in my life from childhood.

“Watching in awe for the first time what appeared to an 8-year-old as ‘mighty presses’ in action — huge machines rolling, printing, noisily churning out beautiful newspapers — is a powerful memory from my childhood…” was among some memories I noted in an op-ed “Freedom of the press under attack across US, in Asheville,” published last year.

That was winter 1953-1954 when as a third-grader I first visited the city papers in the distinctive “Asheville Citizen-Times” building “uptown,” as we called Asheville’s “downtown” perched on the flattened hillside. I remember being in awe on meeting the distinguished Mr. D. Hiden Ramsey, then in his last year as longtime editor and vice-president of the papers. He graciously congratulated me on starting my own first newspaper, making copies with carbon paper and delivering it early Saturday mornings around the Montford neighborhood.

Even before I could read, my parents had read newspapers aloud to us children. Growing up here in the 1950s and early 1960s, we enjoyed the morning and the afternoon papers, the Citizen and the Times respectively, and on Sunday the combined Citizen-Times.

When I was in the fourth grade at then Grace (now Ira B. Jones) School, the Citizen-Times published an article about my newspaper enterprises. Reporter Marguerite Alexander described my 9-year-old self: “The ink must flow in the veins … an ardent newspaper woman ...”

What did that mean, I asked my parents. They said it was a figure of speech, suggesting I was born with “printer’s ink” to be a journalist.

I later learned from my maternal grandmother, Sarah “Sadie” Thomas Watters, how she had adventurously gone from North Carolina to New York to study at Columbia Journalism School. Years later I learned that a paternal great-great-uncle, Henry Elliott Colton, had been the young editor of the “Asheville Spectator” newspaper in 1857-58, resigning when the paper started again running slave-ads, and then publishing the first detailed guidebook to WNC, “Mountain Scenery” (1859).

I was hired as ACT’s “Teen Talk” columnist-reporter in my last two years of high school. On Wednesday afternoons after school on the ACT’s second floor, I sat in with the grown-up editors and reporters meeting, typing, smoking, talking around a big conference table. After editing and approval, I typed it out on a big pre-electric typewriter. I was in heaven. I remember the editor, Hal Tribble, penned editorials promoting progressive community action supporting the civil rights movement. The so-called “Woman’s Page” editor of the section covering much community news was a pioneering female journalist, Gertrude Ramsey, with her top reporter and later successor, Mary Ellen Wolcott. They were all journalistic role models.

The Citizen Times was my training ground. I pursued a journalistic career worldwide in all the news media, including as executive editor of 10 weekly Virginia newspapers during which our flagship “Loudoun Times-Mirror” paper won national “Newspaper of Excellence” in the Suburban Newspapers of America. I owe much to my hometown newspaper for all it taught me about journalism, news coverage, the values of community newspapering. 

Last week I nostalgically visited the old Asheville Citizen Times building. I admired the specially designed building with the newspaper’s name above the entrance, the mosaic map of WNC in the entryway, looked back toward the area where the “mighty presses” had once been with windows to look down on the printing action, the humming advertising and circulation departments, remembered the newsroom’s various locations on the second and ground floors.

The Asheville Citizen Times, though printed now only six days a week, is still our daily, regional community newspaper. The editors, reporters, photographers, all staff are dedicatedly working to keep this historic Asheville-WNC newspaper going. I for one am deeply appreciative and encourage all their continuing work that is such a great service to our community.

More: Opinion: Press under attack in USA; What happened in Marion, Kansas, can happen anywhere

More: Opinion: 1st Amendment right to freedom of press important everywhere, including Asheville

Elizabeth (Liz) Colton, Ph.D., an Emmy Award-winning journalist who worked in all the news media, and later a diplomat, currently teaches Diplomacy & the Media for UNITAR’s global courses. She serves as board chair of Reporters Without Borders-RSF-USA/North America and also as Diplomat & Journalist in Residence at Warren Wilson College.

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Guest Essay

A.I.-Generated Garbage Is Polluting Our Culture

By Erik Hoel

Mr. Hoel is a neuroscientist and novelist and the author of The Intrinsic Perspective newsletter.

Increasingly, mounds of synthetic A.I.-generated outputs drift across our feeds and our searches. The stakes go far beyond what’s on our screens. The entire culture is becoming affected by A.I.’s runoff, an insidious creep into our most important institutions.

Consider science. Right after the blockbuster release of GPT-4, the latest artificial intelligence model from OpenAI and one of the most advanced in existence, the language of scientific research began to mutate. Especially within the field of A.I. itself.

Adjectives associated with A.I.-generated text have increased in peer reviews of scientific papers about A.I.

Frequency of adjectives per one million words

Commendable

A study published this month examined scientists’ peer reviews — researchers’ official pronouncements on others’ work that form the bedrock of scientific progress — across a number of high-profile and prestigious scientific conferences studying A.I. At one such conference, those peer reviews used the word “meticulous” more than 34 times as often as reviews did the previous year. Use of “commendable” was around 10 times as frequent, and “intricate,” 11 times. Other major conferences showed similar patterns.

Such phrasings are, of course, some of the favorite buzzwords of modern large language models like ChatGPT. In other words, significant numbers of researchers at A.I. conferences were caught handing their peer review of others’ work over to A.I. — or, at minimum, writing them with lots of A.I. assistance. And the closer to the deadline the submitted reviews were received, the more A.I. usage was found in them.

If this makes you uncomfortable — especially given A.I.’s current unreliability — or if you think that maybe it shouldn’t be A.I.s reviewing science but the scientists themselves, those feelings highlight the paradox at the core of this technology: It’s unclear what the ethical line is between scam and regular usage. Some A.I.-generated scams are easy to identify, like the medical journal paper featuring a cartoon rat sporting enormous genitalia. Many others are more insidious, like the mislabeled and hallucinated regulatory pathway described in that same paper — a paper that was peer reviewed as well (perhaps, one might speculate, by another A.I.?).

What about when A.I. is used in one of its intended ways — to assist with writing? Recently, there was an uproar when it became obvious that simple searches of scientific databases returned phrases like “As an A.I. language model” in places where authors relying on A.I. had forgotten to cover their tracks. If the same authors had simply deleted those accidental watermarks, would their use of A.I. to write their papers have been fine?

What’s going on in science is a microcosm of a much bigger problem. Post on social media? Any viral post on X now almost certainly includes A.I.-generated replies, from summaries of the original post to reactions written in ChatGPT’s bland Wikipedia-voice, all to farm for follows. Instagram is filling up with A.I.-generated models, Spotify with A.I.-generated songs. Publish a book? Soon after, on Amazon there will often appear A.I.-generated “workbooks” for sale that supposedly accompany your book (which are incorrect in their content; I know because this happened to me). Top Google search results are now often A.I.-generated images or articles. Major media outlets like Sports Illustrated have been creating A.I.-generated articles attributed to equally fake author profiles. Marketers who sell search engine optimization methods openly brag about using A.I. to create thousands of spammed articles to steal traffic from competitors.

Then there is the growing use of generative A.I. to scale the creation of cheap synthetic videos for children on YouTube. Some example outputs are Lovecraftian horrors, like music videos about parrots in which the birds have eyes within eyes, beaks within beaks, morphing unfathomably while singing in an artificial voice, “The parrot in the tree says hello, hello!” The narratives make no sense, characters appear and disappear randomly, and basic facts like the names of shapes are wrong. After I identified a number of such suspicious channels on my newsletter, The Intrinsic Perspective, Wired found evidence of generative A.I. use in the production pipelines of some accounts with hundreds of thousands or even millions of subscribers.

As a neuroscientist, this worries me. Isn’t it possible that human culture contains within it cognitive micronutrients — things like cohesive sentences, narrations and character continuity — that developing brains need? Einstein supposedly said : “If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be very intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” But what happens when a toddler is consuming mostly A.I.-generated dream-slop? We find ourselves in the midst of a vast developmental experiment.

There’s so much synthetic garbage on the internet now that A.I. companies and researchers are themselves worried, not about the health of the culture, but about what’s going to happen with their models. As A.I. capabilities ramped up in 2022, I wrote on the risk of culture’s becoming so inundated with A.I. creations that when future A.I.s are trained, the previous A.I. output will leak into the training set, leading to a future of copies of copies of copies, as content became ever more stereotyped and predictable. In 2023 researchers introduced a technical term for how this risk affected A.I. training: model collapse . In a way, we and these companies are in the same boat, paddling through the same sludge streaming into our cultural ocean.

With that unpleasant analogy in mind, it’s worth looking to what is arguably the clearest historical analogy for our current situation: the environmental movement and climate change. For just as companies and individuals were driven to pollute by the inexorable economics of it, so, too, is A.I.’s cultural pollution driven by a rational decision to fill the internet’s voracious appetite for content as cheaply as possible. While environmental problems are nowhere near solved, there has been undeniable progress that has kept our cities mostly free of smog and our lakes mostly free of sewage. How?

Before any specific policy solution was the acknowledgment that environmental pollution was a problem in need of outside legislation. Influential to this view was a perspective developed in 1968 by Garrett Hardin, a biologist and ecologist. Dr. Hardin emphasized that the problem of pollution was driven by people acting in their own interest, and that therefore “we are locked into a system of ‘fouling our own nest,’ so long as we behave only as independent, rational, free-enterprisers.” He summed up the problem as a “tragedy of the commons.” This framing was instrumental for the environmental movement, which would come to rely on government regulation to do what companies alone could or would not.

Once again we find ourselves enacting a tragedy of the commons: short-term economic self-interest encourages using cheap A.I. content to maximize clicks and views, which in turn pollutes our culture and even weakens our grasp on reality. And so far, major A.I. companies are refusing to pursue advanced ways to identify A.I.’s handiwork — which they could do by adding subtle statistical patterns hidden in word use or in the pixels of images.

A common justification for inaction is that human editors can always fiddle around with whatever patterns are implemented if they know enough. Yet many of the issues we’re experiencing are not caused by motivated and technically skilled malicious actors; they’re caused mostly by regular users’ not adhering to a line of ethical use so fine as to be nigh nonexistent. Most would be uninterested in advanced countermeasures to statistical patterns enforced into outputs that should, ideally, mark them as A.I.-generated.

That’s why the independent researchers were able to detect A.I. outputs in the peer review system with surprisingly high accuracy: They actually tried. Similarly, right now teachers across the nation have created home-brewed output-side detection methods , like adding in hidden requests for patterns of word use to essay prompts that appear only when copy-pasted.

In particular, A.I. companies appear opposed to any patterns baked into their output that can improve A.I.-detection efforts to reasonable levels, perhaps because they fear that enforcing such patterns might interfere with the model’s performance by constraining its outputs too much — although there is no current evidence this is a risk. Despite public pledges to develop more advanced watermarking, it’s increasingly clear that the companies are dragging their feet because it goes against the A.I. industry’s bottom line to have detectable products.

To deal with this corporate refusal to act we need the equivalent of a Clean Air Act: a Clean Internet Act. Perhaps the simplest solution would be to legislatively force advanced watermarking intrinsic to generated outputs, like patterns not easily removable. Just as the 20th century required extensive interventions to protect the shared environment, the 21st century is going to require extensive interventions to protect a different, but equally critical, common resource, one we haven’t noticed up until now since it was never under threat: our shared human culture.

Erik Hoel is a neuroscientist, a novelist and the author of The Intrinsic Perspective newsletter.

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