needleman

I've had many good discussions about what I call every American's civic duty. It is, in my mind, our job to take ownership of our civic thoughts with some degree of learning and opinion making. The learning should be obvious. The opinion making should be responsible--this is not a game (contrary to CNN's panel of pundits), nor should we allow ourselves the leisure to think our political choices are free from consequence.

On the other side, it is the duty of civic leaders to avoid the leasure of Machiavelli. Would be leaders have a duty to speak earnestly and with intellectual honesty.

Both these duties (the citizen and the politician) are in steep decline. And we shall return to the topic. Namely, am I right, or filled with elitism, when I assert we have no choice to withdraw from civic awareness? I'll argue the former, but not right now.

What, more importantly, is the point of our civic duty? I often argue that we are born (or become) Americans, and as such, we have no choice--just as we do not choose our parents. But to what end does our political thinking serve? The answer, I think, is to our Country. But without an articulation of what that means, as I am reading now in Jacob Needleman's "The American Soul," one would stand awefully confused by that end.

I am only shallowly dug into the book. For now, I can only say that his foundational point is what lies behind my insistance on civic duty:
"To a significant extent, democracy in its specifically American form was created to allow men and women to seek their own higher principle within themselves."

Thinking about our Country, quite literally, is thinking about ourselves.