What is "civil society"?
Jay Fenello
Anyone watching the President of the
World Bank on C-Span may be wondering
about his references to "civil society"?
Here's what someone in the know has said:
"Civil society is supposed to be the counterpart
to business and government in policy making networks
(cynical intepretation: the US and EU got really
scared by Seattle)."
Here's more . . .
http://www.civsoc.com/issues.htm#issue1
Full cultural citizenship, full participation in a liberal democratic civil
society, requires citizens to undergo a certain difficult and often painful
process of individualization. Citizens must learn to see both self and
other as free and equal individuals, as individuals who stand apart from,
or who are not exhaustively described by, the attributes they possess as
members of particularistic ethnic, religious or class-based communities. To
persuade citizens to undergo this process of individualization, special
cultural resources are needed. Among them are moral ideals that define as
praiseworthy the participation in this individualizing process. Two such
moral ideals proper to modernist liberal civic culture are the ideals of
authenticity and autonomy. Authenticity -- roughly, the mandate to become
"who one really is," and autonomy -- roughly, the mandate to "be one's own
person," have shaped personal life in the West for over three hundred
years. To the extent that these moral ideals have been effective, they have
produced citizens whose individualized identities have made them capable of
full participation in civil society. However, the credibility of these
moral ideals is entirely dependent upon notions of human identity --
notions like "real self" and "free will" influenced by Enlightenment
culture. To the extent that Enlightenment conceptions of reason and
knowledge are called into question, the moral ideals of authenticity and
autonomy lose their persuasive power. A civil society cannot exist without
the cultural means necessary to reproduce its members. If the ideals of
authenticity and autonomy are no longer effective in producing the kind of
individualized identities required for full cultural citizenship, new
ideals must replace them. But what form will these new moral ideals take?
How will personal life in the post-Enlightenment West be transformed by
these new ideals?
Respectfully,
Jay Fenello,
New Media Strategies
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http://www.fenello.com 770-392-9480
Aligning with Purpose(sm) ... for a Better World
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"If we want to change the world, we have to
begin by changing ourselves" -- Deepak Chopra