Educating for the Vacant Middle: The Virtues of the Educated Amateur
2nd August 2023
In Democracy on Trial, Jean Elshtain stresses the need for what she calls “democratic dispositions,” which include a willingness, or perhaps even eagerness, to act with others toward shared purposes, to compromise, to converse, and to understand one’s unique life as embedded in a skein of relationships that help constitute one’s distinctive personhood. The maintenance of these dispositions is a necessary condition, it seems, for preserving the civic virtues of “sobriety, rectitude, hard work, and familial and community obligations.”
What Elshtain calls democratic dispositions are, by my way of thinking, habits that temper and moderate democracy rather than express its inherent nature. The “savage instincts of democracy,” to use Tocqueville’s phrase, tend toward despotism rather than freedom, toward barbarism rather than toward civility. Unchecked democratic instincts encourage people to withdraw into an intensely private sphere and to see the world from the narrow perspective of their own self-interest, crudely understood. Disconnected from public obligations, having come to think of individualism as a virtue, the democrat sees only his own small world of family and close associates, and then the abstractions of nation or humanity. The rich world of political and civil associations in between these two extremes are invisible to him.