Andrew Goodhart

This post by @haugejostein makes a basic mistake I teach in my undergrad classes: it conflates/confuses “democracy” with “other good things we want democracy *to produce*.”

There has been a lot written about the heroism aboard the @Flydubai flight this week. I keep thinking about it. I've flown the Dubai-TLV route so many times. I just returned from seven months living in Israel with my husband and four kids. I have had the great joy of living and conducting research in many parts of the world. I do a ton of surveys and ethnographic work looking at the interaction between formal and informal rules. This was the first time I brought my children with me for an extended period. Seeing another society through their experiences made me notice things I might otherwise have missed. One was the remarkable sense of *agency* among young Israelis. At my daughter’s sixth-grade graduation this past spring, the students ran the ceremony. They organized it, performed skits, spoke, and invited their teachers and principal to say a few words. The adults weren’t running the show. The kids were. It was a small thing, but I saw versions this kind of thing everywhere. Young people have considerable independence. With that independence comes responsibility. With that responsbility comes accountabily. Young people are given space to figure things out. You are expected to help. You are expected to act. My teens were around teens who had greater freedoms and more responsibilities. These norms can sometimes be maddening. I spent hours on the Ayalon highway each day and discovered that everyone believes they are the pilot of the plane. Everyone has an opinion. There is a lot arguing. Everyone thinks they can solve the problem better than the person currently solving it. As a professor, I found these academic norms to be refreshing. It reminded me of what i loved most about being a professor: disagreement with delight. Increasingly, in the U.S, colleagues are more likely to shun you than disagree with you. But there is another side to it. When someone falls, people run toward them. When there is an accident, people get out of their cars to help. When something goes wrong, bystanders become participants. People don’t sit on their hands. It is a country of problem solvers. Everyone feels they have the right--if not obligation--to contribute something Philip Howard, whose work has deeply influenced my thinking about governance, calls one of the pathologies of modern institutional life in the US the “rule of nobody.” These are systems in which responsibility becomes so dispersed that people stop exercising judgment and stop feeling empowered to act. Israel felt like its opposite. I dn't want to romaticize Israeli society. It is clearly has social, political, religious, and ethnic divisions. But beneath those divisions these seems to be a striking degree of social cohesion. There is a persistent assumption that what happens around you is, in some measure, your responsibility. And perhaps that helps explain something that can otherwise seem surprising -that despite war, political conflict, and deep social divisions, Israelis consistently report unusually high levels of life satisfaction. They have high birthrates. Living there sometimes reminded me of something I remember from America growing up: the expectation that ordinary people were capable of handling things, helping one another, and solving problems without waiting for someone in authority to tell them what to do. So when I saw what happened aboard that Flydubai flight, I was moved but I wasn’t entirely surprised. Agency without responsibility can become entitlement. Responsibility without agency can become resignation. A healthy society needs both. When something goes wrong, you don’t assume someone else will take care of it. You get up and help.