Every five years I squirrel away everything I can find on the changing contours of civil society, and then try to make some sense of it all in relation to larger trends in politics and culture. It’s always tough because the universe of voluntary, collective action and interaction isn’t a “thing” that is static or owned by one particular geography or ideology; it’s constantly being contested and reshaped in theory and reality, though there are always some dominant themes.
This difference is important because, whereas advocacy groups and protesters argue for a particular stance on a particular issue, groups such as the PTAs are able, albeit imperfectly, to argue through those stances to identify the interests they hold in common. All these groups are part of civil society , but few are engaged in bridge-building. Simply put, there are now too many special interests in civil society, and not enough common interests or spaces where they can be negotiated, and that’s a significant factor behind the rise of cultural and political polarisation and the problems it creates.Civil society is only one of many influences on trends such as polarisation, but there are some things that could help.
Second, we need to invest in public spaces of all kinds where people can meet and “not draw the knife”, as civil society scholar John Keane once put it in defining the essence of this idea. Difference and diversity are not the enemies of civil society, they are strengths. What’s problematic is the absence of mechanisms to sort through these differences and reach some common ground.
There must be places that are not dedicated to making money or accumulating power if civic values and relationships are to take root — places where we can meet each other for conversation and shape a collective course of action in line with our own democratically derived priorities. That possibility, at root, is what is threatened by current trends.Ultimately, there is no recourse to theory or to history if the problems of civil society are to be fixed — that’s our job as citizens.
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