How to be a Citizen: Learning to Rely Less on Rules and more on Each Other
By C.L. Skach
Basic Books
ISBN: 978-1541605534
262pp.

Recently, I was in a London bus where the driver thought he saw a passenger get on the bus through the back door without showing a valid ticket. He shouted at the presumed culprit. The driver had been mistaken. The gentleman in question had not done anything wrong. And the matter was quickly clarified, and the driver apologised.

What was interesting for me, in the whole episode, was what the driver had shouted. He had said: “Sir, why are you being anti-social?” He did not say why are you breaking the law.

Constitutions and laws are important for societies. They set the basic framework. But they do not and cannot make societies function, and function well. For that, we need a lot of other things. We need citizens who have at least a certain level of trust in laws, institutions and other members of the society. Citizens need to be engaged with other members, they need certain level of empathy with others, and they need to be public minded.

Constitutions and laws are rather blunt instruments. They can never be clear and unambiguous enough to give simple answers. They are always dependent on interpretation. Interpretation will be done by judges and it will vary with the biases or sensibilities of the judge.

The underlying laws in the US had not changed by 1954, from the ‘Jim Crow’ days, but the US Supreme Court interpreted the same laws to strike down segregation in educational institutions.

A book that shows how public spaces, education and markets can be reshaped to nurture cooperation and help a society flourish

Recently, the majority of the US Supreme Court judges found the majority opinion of 1973 Roe vs Wade to be at fault. Earlier, the judges had found the right to abortion protected in the US Constitution. Now, the majority of judges have not been able to find that protection in the constitution.

Brown vs Board of Education (1954) had an impact in de-segregating schools for sure. But it was the struggle of countless people, for decades, that had fed the civil rights movement. And even after Brown vs Board of Education, it was the effort of countless people to actually get the decision implemented. If law could change things immediately and fully, why is the US still struggling with issues of race, exclusion and discrimination?

US, as a society, is very rights conscious and quite litigious as well. Constitutions and laws need to be supplemented with involved, engaged and active citizens to make democracy work and society function.

For societies such as Pakistan, where constitutions and laws are not enforced in the same manner or to the same degree, where institutions are much weaker, history and tradition of democratic rule murkier, corruption and competence are major issues, to expect the constitution and law to be enough to deliver on decent democratic order and governance is an impossibility. We have even more work to do than in countries where democratic rule and traditions are more rooted and have been going on for much longer.

Various judges of superior courts, at times, have expressed this as well. If every dispute comes to the courts for resolution, the society would be all but impossible to govern and will not be functional. And we have been seeing this over the last couple of years as Pakistani political system has descended into near chaos.

But this is not about the issues of politics, parliament and establishment alone, it is about everyday functionality, too. Citizens have to have interactions with each other all the time. If every interaction is to be governed by laws, and intermediated by law, society will descend into chaos.

Think of the smallest example. On an airplane, who does the space between seats belong to: the person facing that space or the person in front, who has been given the ability to tilt their chair back and enjoy that space?

The airlines leave this ambiguous and it tends to get decided by individuals: people tilt the seat back in normal times, but seat is made upright at meal times. This is a convention.

What if a person disagrees? And there have been plenty of disputes on this. Is it for the law to resolve this issue? The law could assign the right to one person, but would that resolve the issue? More importantly, in a society, should law be invoked for such things? It will be a non-functional society if we have to rely on the law, and the law being implemented, to address such matters.

But, if citizens have to interact with each other, we better prepare them to do so too. Professor CL Skach outlines some suggestions.

We have to start early. Pre-schools and early grades have to be reconfigured to allow children to learn empathy, cooperation and kindness rather than competition. They have to get children to interact with each other more, have interactions across cultures, traditions and religions, and children have to learn skills for getting along with each other and having trust in and on each other.

Adults have to do, more or less, the same, but since they are not in schools, it will have to be done in society. We have to have more opportunities for citizen interactions, where we get the opportunity to know each other, our traditions, cultures, languages, religions, and even cuisines.

These interactions can be around clubs and/or places/activities, where people have to engage with each other. Professor Skach creates these opportunities around growing and sharing food (good for the environment and making for better urban living) and tasting different cuisines, but there can be many other opportunities. For countries such as Pakistan, it can be around festivals too.

The issue was highlighted in our 2017 UNDP Pakistan Human Development Report on Youth, for which academic Adil Najam and I were the lead authors.

We found that the youth in Pakistan are not ‘engaged’ with the society. Most have no opportunity for interacting with others in their communities, do not have access to sports facilities or clubs, recreational facilities, educational facilities or even avenues for getting involved in community-based initiatives. What kind of citizens would they become?

Well-functioning democracies require a lot of trust, empathy and interaction among citizens. They cannot just rely on constitutions, laws and institutions for good governance. This is especially true for societies where constitutions are often disregarded, laws are broken or are made for sectional interests, and where institutions are weak.

Think of the crises Pakistan is facing. The way out is going to be through citizenship. How and where do we start, that is the question.

The reviewer is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives, and an associate professor of economics at Lums

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, September 15th, 2024