The 4 Duties of the Modern Citizen

Let’s go back to 1776 today—one of those years, those pivotal historical moments where a whole bunch of things happened all at once. While Jefferson was working on the Declaration of Independence, Adam Smith was publishing his “The Wealth of Nations.” We’re talking about two of the most important documents in modern history written and released in the same year! These works provide the moral and intellectual foundation for the entire modern liberal order. We may take things like democracy, capitalism, and political and economic freedom for granted but in 1776 these ideas were revolutionary.

While history books tend to focus on the political side of the revolution, the economic side was just as important. Adam Smith may not have set out to establish the moral framework for economic freedom but he ended up doing so. In studying the emergent industrial economy, he noticed this interesting feature of economic life whereby somehow the independent self-oriented actions of individuals produce a complex system that actually kind of works. To a world filled with things like slavery and serfdom, Smith’s “Invisible Hand” was as revolutionary as Jefferson’s stance on equality and God-given rights, for it implied that the path to economic prosperity required ever greater economic freedom.

I think Smith’s notion of the Invisible Hand is basically right—when people are left alone to pursue their economic self-interest, the result will be a decently functioning, complex economy. But this is one of those ideas we’ve taken too far. In coming to worship economic success, we’ve made a huge cultural mistake, for we’ve given powers to the Invisible Hand that it simply does not possess. The Invisible Hand does not magically produce the right outcome for society, for it’s simply not concerned with things like morality, social good, or even human flourishing.

When Smith wrote about the Invisible Hand, he was talking about one very specific phenomenon: the fact that a functioning, complex system emerges out of the economically self-interested actions of independent individuals. But he didn’t say we should prioritize the self over all else. He didn’t say we should abandon our beliefs or our moral code. But that’s what we’ve done.

Look, the Invisible Hand falls apart rather quickly when you start thinking about things like right and wrong and the question of human flourishing. Do people really know what’s good for them? Is it true that people consciously, purposefully pursue their actual self-interest? What does that even mean? People could just as easily be pursuing a false perceived self-interest as the real thing, right? What we have learned in the modern era is that it’s rather unusual for an individual to even know what to do (i.e. what’s in his/her self-interest) let alone to do it. This is why capitalism cannot be unbound by some moral philosophical or spiritual code.

We’ve gone so far in the worship of individualism that our culture has taken on the tone of a sad narcissist. While we worship celebrities, billionaires, and entrepreneurs with cultlike fervor, we do nothing in the face of the 500,000 people sleeping in the streets each night, or the 80,000 unaccounted for children, or the 90,000 people dying from drug overdose…. We do nothing to address big systemic threats like climate change or our massive, rapidly growing national indebtedness. For these are problems that cannot be solved by the individual, the economy, or the Invisible Hand. They demand things like morality, sacrifice, and collective action—stuff our culture just cannot seem to do.

What, then, should we do? The historical antidote to the problem of selfishness has been the idea of citizenship.

When you look up the word “citizenship” in the dictionary you get a rather boring answer. Merriam-Webster defines it as “the status of being a citizen, membership in a community, and/or the quality of an individual’s response to membership in a community.” Well, we know one thing for sure, it’s not “the status of being a citizen” that makes patriots willing to die for their country. Nor is it mere “membership in a community” that inspires the Medal of Honor winner to sacrifice himself on the grenade to save his compatriots. No, there’s something far more profound going-on with “citizenship.” The dictionary definition gives us just one little clue to the deeper meaning in the phrase “the quality of an individual’s response to membership in a community.” It’s that “quality of an individual’s response” that makes “citizenship” one of the great ideas of humanity.

“Citizenship” is an idea like “justice” or “love” in that it’s something we know and understand without necessarily being able to define precisely with words. We know intuitively that it means more than just overt political acts like voting or jury service. We know that it’s a kind of sacrifice and can manifest in the ultimate form as in our military examples above. We know it’s about rights and the responsibilities that come along with them. There’s something about just being a human that allows us to understand what “citizenship” really means. Perhaps it’s that we really are social and political animals as the philosophers say.

I believe that “citizenship” means all this and more. At its core, it’s a moral notion that proscribes, in a comprehensive, idealized way, how an individual should live life. There are 4 duties for a modern citizen:

To become an effective member of society, you have to do a lot of personal development work. This is all about education, discipline, and establishing the habits of success.

To keep your financial house in order you have to learn how to add value to the world, develop a healthy relationship with money, and establish the habits of prosperity.

To make authentic contributions to your community you have learn how to approach all your work in the world with the spirit of service and be willing to subordinate your interests to those of your community when necessary.

To accept all the responsibilities of democratic life you have to do things like: obey the law, educate yourself on the important public policy issues of the day, really get to know the elected officials / political candidates in your community / sphere of influence (you don’t have enough time to know everyone but you do for your neighborhood and district), vote, serve on juries (ideally, without complaining or trying to lie to get of it), serve on public commissions and non-profit boards, run for office….

To close, I’d like to bring us back to 1776, for do you know what else was published that year? Volume I of Edward Gibbon’s “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.”

With Jefferson and Smith, we got the foundations for modern life—the twin pillars of political and economic freedom. With Gibbon, we get the warning. In the thousands of pages of his masterpiece, Gibbon gives all sorts of “practical” historical reasons, like the pressures from the barbarian invasions, but his real point is this: the Roman Empire failed because the Roman people lost all touch with their great moral code that challenged and inspired individuals to serve their community before themselves.

Let’s not make the same mistake.

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