Summer vacation, and the messiness of civic life
We are planning a summer vacation. The big plans—flights, accommodation, transport—have been sorted out. What’s left is the smaller things: activities and meals, mostly.
Trip planning is difficult. I know some people find joy in making the plans for upcoming travel; I am not one of them. Still, we plan. We plan because we want to have memorable experiences, to build memories that will last for years, moments that will leave indelible marks on our lives.
Growing up, we didn’t go on many vacations—things were a bit tight, financially, back then—and when we did, it would mostly involve a road trip to a rental cabin or motel somewhere not far away. Despite not doing much, or having big plans, we still forged memories of fun times with family on the road.
I loved this piece in Anne Helen Petersen’s newsletter about family summer vacations; mostly, I enjoyed reading the snippets of remembrances from her readers. Vacations back then seem very different from the one we are planning now, but I know the result will be the same: we will relish being together as a family, having adventures, exploring the world around us.
I’ve been thinking a lot about civic advocacy recently, and was pondering about entry points into civic action and how I could engage in small ways while still trying to juggle all the things that are taking up a lot of time in my life.
One thing I’ve had to come to terms with is that my engagement in civic life doesn’t have to be formal, or formalized, and can instead be organic; most of my civic work in the past has been on formal boards or well-organized issue campaigns, but there is room for flexible engagement based on participation and affinity as well.
A recent article by Sam Pressler has articulated this by describing the “professional managerialism” of the civic machine, and how this approach has been increasingly crowding out the “life” from civic life:
As we've applied the philosophies, tools, and practices of managerialism to civic life, we've begun to approach it as a controllable, predictable, and scalable machine. This machinization of the civic sphere has shifted its modus operandi from participatory membership to specialized management. Our well-oiled civic machine is powered by professionalized fields of credentialed managers, which have displaced voluntary associations of ordinary citizens. It's _optimized_by quantitative measures of "impact," which privilege what can be measured over what truly matters. And it's _linked _by disembedded networks of instrumental relationships, which take precedence over local, rooted communities built on reciprocal relationships.
But what's left out from our civic machine is the actual life of civic life: the particular, local ecologies of people, families, associations, and culture that make our communities and democracy actually work. There appears to be a growing realization that to stand any chance of renewing our democracy, we must renew these local communal ecologies. But this renewal must begin with an account of how we, the professional managers and control freaks who built the civic machine, have devitalized the very civic ecologies we now seek to "fix."
This professionalization not only changes how we engage in civic life, and who can, but also in what we end up focusing on. Pressler goes on to say:
As we implement our managerial approaches throughout civic life, we contribute to the instrumentalization and _transactionalization _of our civic relationships. In the quest to "achieve scale" and "create impact," we treat citizens as customers to be delivered a set of programs, services, or products, rather than as agentic "members" of a community, responsible for honoring its past, stewarding its present, and co-creating its future. We see this type of participatory membership -- with all its meetings and complex relational dynamics -- as a major nuisance, consuming valuable staff time and hindering the efficient production of measurable outcomes. In the logic of managerialism, everything is reduced to the instrumental: participants are expected to complete a program _in order to _achieve an outcome, while nonprofits and governments are expected to report on these outcomes _in order to _receive more funding and provide more programs.
But local communities are not machines in which instrumental inputs simply lead to predictable, countable outputs. They are more like ecologies of reciprocal, interconnected relations among humans, groups, place, and culture. They are what Wendell Berry calls a "Great Economy," defined not by a "'sum of its parts,' but a _membership _of parts inextricably joined to each other, indebted to each other, receiving significance and worth from each other and from the whole." By reducing the civic sphere to a set of transactions, we remove the "unpredictable human funk" of connections, participation, membership, and reciprocity that nourish the relational soil of civic life.
The whole piece focuses strongly on how to renew the “participatory, emergent messiness of local civic life,” something that I’m really interested in exploring over the next little while.
This focus on participation in the civic sphere is particularly timely, as my friend Jenny recently launched a new project that is explicitly focused on participation in civic life: Show Up Toronto.
There are many things to be lauded about this new project, but the thing that stood out the most for me was its focus on showing up: of participating in direct action rather than simply talking about it.
Jenny’s whole manifesto is excellent and worth a read, but this part stands out:
If the long arc of history ever bent towards justice it's only because ordinary people like you and I have gotten our hands dirty and pulled. If our collective power were not so frightening, the billionaires would not need to spend so much money and energy convincing us we're powerless.
If you’re in Toronto, check out Show Up Toronto and share it with like-minded people who want to take action and do something.
It’s too easy to feel befuddled and think that civic advocacy should be left to the “professionals,” but the truth is that civic life should be participatory, emergent, and messy. Let’s all find people with whom we can get messy and do something that matters.
A poem
Intimacy
Maria Ferguson
When I think about it, tucking the label
back into my husband's shirt
is not that different from eating him
to survive on a desert island.
The musk of cologne as I go
straight for the neck. He doesn't flinch,
doesn't question why my hands
are coming towards him.
He's felt my skin on his skin
so many times before. Our little
tap on the back that says,
I've got you. It's alright.
Some links
An astute observation about the status of colleges and universities in today’s world, in an excellent piece that explores what has gone wrong with higher education and how we can potentially fix it:
The problem is that we have jammed our society's education and research institutions together with its credentialing systems. And the former is crumbling under the weight of the latter.
A startling fact: “Around 40 million acres of lawn, an area almost as large as the state of Georgia, carpets the United States. Lawn grass occupies more area than corn.” I’ve thought about what we could do to our front lawn to make it more interesting and easier to maintain, but in the spirit of keeping with the rest of the neighborhood, our front lawn remains.
I won’t lie: I’m a sucker for a good fried chicken sandwich and will indulge at Popeye’s from time to time, but I hadn’t realized that the sandwich is having a cultural moment and is even starting to challenge the ascendancy of the burger as our favorite handheld.
Apparently, eating certain kinds of foods—many of them my favorite foods—can mark you as gay—or even turn you gay—according to some ridiculous parts of the manosphere. Jaya Saxena has a great piece on this whole phenomenon in Eater.
After the popularity of last years Conclave film and the buzz around this years Papal conclave, I guess it’s not surprise that conclave LARPs—many of which have been going on for years—are getting their recognition now too.
Are you more likely to die on your birthday? The Pudding breaks it down with stats and data.
The origins of the pork taboo—particularly interesting to me as I grew up in a no-pork household.
A long article about text formatting and Markdown and the movement away from complex formatting tools to a focus on text. Perhaps a bit nerdy, but fascinating to me, as I’ve long been interested in how we write, present, and manipulate text.
We didn’t have many school spirit days—where you’re encouraged to dress up in a certain way—growing up, but I’m noticing a lot of them now that our daughter is in school. I hadn’t previously thought about the toll spirit days places on parents, but I’m sure I’ll feel that toll more acutely as Zoya grows up.
You don’t have to believe in God to find hope in Pope Leo XIV:
We are not a people who currently know what to do with hope. Look around. Hope has been demoted from virtue to luxury item. It's something we talk about with nostalgia or suspicion, something evoked in marketing slogans but rarely felt in our guts. War simmers and flares. Like, everywhere. The planet burns and floods with mounting indifference. Politicians parade hollow ideologies dressed up as solutions. The algorithm feeds us despair in increasingly addictive doses. In this context, the idea of a single person--even a pontiff--reigniting some shared spark of optimism feels quaint, even naïve.
“The current right wing endeavor is mass civic, social, scientific and intellectual decline, enforced on a federal—if they had their way, global—scale.“ I’ve been thinking about this “obliteration of the past, denial of future” trend a lot since our recent Canadian election (and of course, in light of everything going on) and it saddens me how much of this is fueled by people refusing to believe in the benefits of social progress.
An interesting take on how the architecture of our houses has made us lose our sense of community. One of the things that I wish our house had was a big front porch—and of course, not having a busy, car-traffic-laden street running in front of it—so that I could spend more time enjoying the comings and goings of the neighborhood.
This statement, astutely remarked by a tween in Brooklyn, is what the bike lane argument around the world comes down to:
The argument over bike lanes becomes a kind of stand-in — a way to complain about change, to push back against how the city is evolving. It's less about safety and more about the feeling that something familiar is slipping away.
A gorgeously devastating piece by Hanif Abdurraqib, one of the best writers out there right now: In Defense of Despair.
A quotation to remember, from Oliver Burkeman, as noted by Mandy Brown: “Aliveness is so central to meaningful human experience that there'll always be a market for those who can cultivate it, embed it in what they create, foster it in institutions and organizations, and bring people together to experience it.”