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Creating Citizens: A Selected Reading (1)

This is a selected section from the book Creating Citizens: Political Education and Liberal
Democracy, by Eamonn Callan:

"Political debate in our liberal democracies is largely confined to questions about the
pursuit of material prosperity and the maintenance of civil peace, respect for liberty, and
the just distribution of wealth and privilege. Political debate about education follows the
same pattern. We talk about how schools and other educational institutions could help to
create a more productive workforce, mitigate the violence and lawlessness that afflict our
cities, accommodate the freedom of people who want very different kinds of education for
their children, and contribute to more just distributive patterns. These are certainly
important questions. . . .

"Imagine an enviably wealthy and peaceful society that has descended, through a couple of
generations, from the society to which you or I belong. Imagine also that the society exhibits
whatever distribution of wealth you think best. The particular rights we require of any liberal
democracy -- rights to political participation, freedom of expression, religious practice,
equality before the courts and the like -- continue to have the force of law. But when
elections are held, scarcely anyone bothers to vote. The mass media ignore politics
because the consumers to whom they cater do not care. The parties who vie for power are
sponsored by more or less the same political elites, and so virtually nothing separates one
party from another. Freedom of speech has been reduced to a spectral existence because
speech is no longer commonly used to defend a distinctive vision of the good and the right
or to say anything that might initiate serious ethical dialogue with another. That is so
because citizens are either indifferent to questions of good and evil, seeing the point of their
lives simply as the satisfaction of their desires, or else they commit themselves so rigidly to
a particular doctrine that dialogue with those who are not like-minded is thought to be
repellent or futile. This Brave New World . . . still contains much of the religious, racial, and
ethnic diversity of the society that preceded it. But although citizens respect each other's
legal rights, they shun contact with those who are different so far as possible because
they despise them. When transactions across cultural divisions are unavoidable, everyone
tries to extract as much benefit from the other (or cause as much harm as possible) within
the limits imposed by law.

"The institutions of liberal democracy seem poised for collapse here because the shared
public morality that once enlivened them has vanished, and therefore, they survive only as a
pointless system of taboo or a modus vivendi [a manner of living] among antagonistic
groups who will support it only so long as support serves their interests. We might also feel
that this society is appalling as it is, regardless of any worse fate that is imminent for its
inhabitants. If its probable decline into a less orderly barbarism could be arrested, it would
still be a place that many of us regard with sheer horror. The culture that has vanished was
a great good, and the institutional framework it leaves behind is divested of much of its
value because of that loss alone. . . .

"To believe in liberal democracy is to believe in free and equal citizenship. Part of what that
demands of us is the development of public institutions that function in ways we can justify
on the basis of that ideal, and much of our politics is about how well we have succeeded or
how badly we have failed in that project. The consensual core of liberal democracy resides
in just those matters of institutional design where we can all agree that free and equal
citizenship unambiguously requires certain social rules, such as legal protection for rights
to free speech. But free and equal citizenship is also about the kind of people we become,
and the kind of people we encourage or allow our children to become. . . .

"You are simply asked to consider a possible world in which certain illiberal cultural
tendencies already abroad and powerful in our own have intensified and countervailing
cultural resources have disappeared. . . .

What is lost in my Brave New World is a distinctive kind of political culture. More precisely,
it is a shared way of public life constituted by a constellation of attitudes, habits, and
abilities that people acquire as they grow up. These include a lively interest in the question
of what life is truly and not just seemingly good, as well as a willingness both to share one's
own answer with others and to heed the many opposing answers they might give; an active
commitment to the good of the polity; as well as confidence and competence in judgement
regarding how that good should be advanced; a respect for fellow citizens and a sense of
common fate with them that goes beyond the tribalisms of ethnicity and religion and is yet
alive to the significance these will have in many people's lives. . . .

"What we sometimes forget is that the vitality of the political order depends on an
education that is dedicated to specific ideals of character. . . . Liberal politics is a politics of
virtue. . . . Creating virtuous citizens is as necessary an undertaking in a liberal democracy
as it is under any other constitution."