Skillful Citizenship - by Rajesh Kasturirangan - Ranganaut
Public Problem Solving Continued
Buddhism has this idea of skillful means (upaya in Skt), where an agent adopts a way of acting and responding suitable to the context – and training in the Buddhist path cultivates – or at least claims to do so – that capacity to respond skillfully.
I see public problem solving as both
the training for and
the outcome of skillful citizenship.
Citizens should be able to self-organize themselves to solve problems at every scale: from a hyper local need to a national emergency. The COVID19 crisis is throwing up many new opportunities from the skillful use of media to organizing food drops on the fly. A little thought shows that civil society needs to organize itself along (at least) four different lines:
Speculative systems. The fate of daily wage earners and migrants during the lockdown, the (sometimes) brutish response by the state to enforce it and the deliberate attempt to communalize the crisis show that the pandemic might well accentuate existing injustices. When the crisis ends and the economy has to be restarted, everyone from big business to migrant laborers will demand a piece of the stimulus. On the plus side, the lack of industrial and transportation activity has cleaned our air and our rivers as nothing else has. In short, the COVID19 crisis is an opportunity to highlight alternate models of living and a better world for everyone. We need new imaginations of our collective future.
A successful response to these challenges will need (and lead to) a deep transformation of our societies. The question is who is going to lead the transformation – the state or citizens. In my view, the state doesn't have the independent capacity to lead us to this promised land. At the same time, scale can't be achieved without active engagement with the state. Therefore, we are far more likely to create a flourishing society if skillful citizens have a platform that helps them self-organize in response to emerging challenges and they engage the state as the platform grows.
Writes Building Belonging ·Apr 27, 2020
I love this, Rajesh - thanks for sharing. I very much appreciate the thinking about rethinking citizenship (beyond the narrow boundaries of geopolitical jurisdictions) and of enabling self-organizing at scale... very much the direction my mind is going these days. I just published a post thinking about the conditions necessary for democracy... and it's relationship to patriarchy (here on Substack :-) Would welcome your reactions: https://citizenstout.substack.com/p/why-does-patriarchy-persist-part-e2d
1 reply by Rajesh Kasturirangan