Fall has arrived here in Milwaukee, and the quilts have come out of the closet.
My mother took up quilting later in life, and I have several of her quilts. One that is made of scraps from many different other projects is especially dear to me. I can identify dresses she wore and shirts she made for my father. I also suspect, knowing my mother, that she welcomed other people’s leftover fabric when they didn’t know what else to do with it.
Regardless of fabric and pattern, quilts all have a similar essence: Different pieces of fabric are pieced and sewn together for the quilt top, and that top is then attached – hand-quilted, machine-quilted, or simply tacked – to a backing with some sort of layer in between to give the quilt its body and warmth. The finished quilt brings new life to often old pieces. A different whole emerges.
Democracy is like quilting. We are all different pieces of different fabrics of different shapes and sizes – and we piece ourselves together to make something different and bigger. We each make a contribution.
Danielle Allen, in her recent book Justice by Means of Democracy, identifies “difference without domination” as an essential design principle for democracy. This third design principle joins two more familiar ones: the protection of negative and positive liberties (in shorthand, “freedom from” and “freedom to”) and political equality.
Difference without domination. There are strong echoes here of Iris Marion Young’s meticulous but passionate laying out of a vision of justice that encompasses and embraces difference, a justice that recognizes difference and the contributions of difference as essential for justice – and for democracy.
Allen’s prescription for how to move toward difference without domination – what she terms a “connected society” – is “an associational ecosystem that maximizes bridging ties.”
This is civity.
Civity is relationships across difference where respect and empathy create horizontality, the counter to domination. In the quilt of democracy, relationships are the threads, the stitching that binds the pieces into a whole.
Vivek Murthy, U.S. Surgeon General and author of Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World, arrives at this same place via another path. His focus is loneliness and social isolation; his frame is public health. In addition to harmful effects on individuals, he diagnoses “a spiral of disconnection that’s contributing to the unraveling of civil society today.”
Murthy’s prescription, drawing from the work of peacebuilder John Paul Lederach, “is to promote a mutual sense of belonging,” which is rooted in people feeling seen.
This is civity.
A civity culture of respect (“I see you”) and empathy (“I hear you”) weaves webs of connection across differences to transform Us vs. Them to “We All Belong.”
All of us, ALL of the pieces of We the People are part of our quilt. And it is the threads of relationship connecting us that make the quilt strong and lasting. By spinning and strengthening those threads – civity – we transform the pieces into a more perfect Union.