Working together to find the invisible rule

I have been think­ing a lot late­ly about civil­i­ty and the rule of law. You know, the aspects of com­mu­ni­ty life that bind us together.

When I was a young jour­nal­ist, fresh out of uni­ver­si­ty, I was dis­patched by my local news­pa­per to do “man on the street” inter­views. With my Nikon F cam­era, 85mm por­trait lens, and a note­book, I approached peo­ple on the main drag to ask this ques­tion: “Do you think Richard Nixon is guilty?”

Most of the answers were thought­ful and var­ied. I am not sure I was there to pro­duce a deep exe­ge­sis of the Watergate scan­dal. It was more about demon­strat­ing that my news­pa­per and small-town North Carolina were pay­ing atten­tion and cared. Citizens’ pho­tographs along­side their opin­ions print­ed on broad­sheet were proof pos­i­tive that civ­il soci­ety mat­tered. We had faith in a com­mon narrative.

What strikes me about today’s real­i­ty is that there is lit­tle com­mon under­stand­ing about the insid­i­ous events hap­pen­ing around us. Concepts such as civil­i­ty and the rule of law, once bas­tions of our social lev­el set and will­ing­ness to answer gnarly “man on the street” ques­tions have been atom­ized into memes and misdirection.

Instead of trust­ing paths to con­sen­sus, we are locked in myr­i­ad, exhaust­ing strug­gles for dom­i­nance. Inside these strug­gles lives a hint of a weird dystopi­an real­i­ty where any­thing “common”—sense, under­stand­ing, beliefs, bonds, etc.—has been replaced by voic­es that yell the loud­est, are the most out­ra­geous, malev­o­lent, or flat-out wrong.

I rec­og­nize that I am get­ting over my skis to declare that I know “wrong” when I see it. Yet, all of us are becom­ing more com­fort­able with con­di­tions that in the not-too-dis­tant past the col­lec­tive “we” would not have tolerated—masked storm troop­ers abduct­ing cit­i­zens off our streets, abject draw­ing of polit­i­cal bound­aries to ben­e­fit polit­i­cal per­sua­sions, bla­tant Hatch Act vio­la­tions, demo­li­tion of our nation­al sym­bols and fed­er­al agen­cies, demo­niza­tion of acad­e­mia, eco­nom­ic poli­cies that hurt the most vul­ner­a­ble, feck­less leg­isla­tive bod­ies, and more.

The dan­ger­ous com­po­nent of this real­i­ty is that most of us—including mass media and what­ev­er infor­ma­tion chan­nels we embrace – are bop­ping along as if all of this is nor­mal. It’s not. We have lost the pluck that my lit­tle home­town news­pa­per once had—a com­mon con­vic­tion about get­ting along, and the resolve to per­pe­trate it. Setting in are strong asser­tions, regard­less of verac­i­ty or law­ful­ness, as the zone floods with chaos.

Our strug­gle is not a fair fight. People and insti­tu­tions with mon­ey, pow­er, and influ­ence have usurped the com­mons. What we believe to be true about how to trust fel­low humans—the stuff we do here at home with col­leagues, friends, and neighbors—volunteer at the home­less shel­ter, show up at potlucks or church, help cut the rib­bon at a new main street business—are becom­ing anachro­nisms in this new age of disruption.

I under­stand that Western, small “D” democ­ra­cy has prob­lems, espe­cial­ly in the way it was pro­mul­gat­ed by the “lib­er­al” establishment—many, many peo­ple were left behind, hun­gry for an alter­na­tive. But I am not sure any of us antic­i­pat­ed this alternative—the dis­so­lu­tion of com­mon sense and the rule of law.

I leave you with a recent quo­ta­tion by polit­i­cal com­men­ta­tor Fareed Zakaria. “The next demo­c­ra­t­ic revival will not come from clever man­agers or tech­no­crat­ic reforms. It will come from a redis­cov­ery of trust. The invis­i­ble rule that makes all oth­ers pos­si­ble. Unless we can believe again that the ref­er­ee is try­ing to be fair, we will keep shout­ing, ref, you suck, at our own democ­ra­cy, and then won­der why the game no longer feels worth playing.”

I hope we nev­er stop work­ing togeth­er to find that invis­i­ble rule.