The Civic Habit

Civic life is what remains when the speech is over. The meeting, the board, the school pickup, the neighbor’s trash can that has been on its side since Tuesday. None of this photographs well. All of it is how a place decides whether it is a community or a coincidental density of housing.

The renaissance cities were vain and violent and also full of people who believed that a fountain, a guild, a chapel, a library were public arguments about what humans owed one another. We have better plumbing and a thinner idea. We outsource the unglamorous parts to agencies and then wonder why the streets feel like corridors between private lives.

A modest program

Know the names of the people who keep your block standing. Go to one meeting a quarter that does not benefit you directly. Read the local story before the national one. Give money where you also give time, because money without presence is just a cleaner way of not being involved. None of this will trend. That is how you know it is civic.

A renaissance person is not a hermit with better taste. Range includes other people. The workshop door, again, left open. If the journal has a politics, it is this: a life of many disciplines is a private good that becomes a public one when it makes you harder to inflame and easier to enlist for the quiet work. That is not a platform. It is a habit. Habits are how cities survive their more exciting ideas.