For People Who Believe in the Power of Thinking Together
Our Questions of Civic Proportions Newsletter features the questions, ideas, and good work that lend extra power to the civic-minded.
Political Thinking for Everyday Citizens
Quotes to Think By: Dr. King and the Dire Need for Creative Extremists
“The question is not if we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice?
…The nation and the world are in need of creative extremists”
Questions of Civic Proportions: What Can We Make of a World on Fire?
There’s one phrase that keeps shouting at me over all the images of the protests. The phrase comes from Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book, Between the World and Me (2015).
Reflecting on his childhood, Coates describes what it was like growing up as a black boy in the United States. The phrase that haunts me today appears in that account. Coates says he learned to be “powerfully afraid.”
Quotes to Think By: Tom Nichols and Our Coming Unmoored from Facts
“Anti-intellectualism is itself a means of short-circuiting democracy, because a stable democracy in any culture relies on the public actually understanding the implications of its own choices.”
Repeat the Question: What if nothing unusual happened in the 2016 Election?
This question comes by way of a recent book by Ezra Klein, Why We’re Polarized. The introduction introduces this question through a conversation between two political scientists. Klein shares the conversation in the introduction titled, “What Didn’t Happen.”
Questions of Civic Proportions: What can we do to fight all the baloney?
Gullibility kills. That’s the last line of Carl Sagan’s essay, “The Fine Art of Baloney Detection.” When it comes to baloney, we’re at Code Red.
Quotes to Think By: Timothy Snyder’s Lessons from the Twentieth Century
“Life is political, not because the world cares about how you feel, but because the world reacts to what you do. The minor choices we make are themselves a kind of vote, making it more or less likely that free and fair elections will be held in the future. In the politics of the everyday, our words and gestures, or their absence, count very much.”
Questions of Civic Proportions: Where will your mind wander?
I haven’t read Ryan Holiday’s recent book, but I’ve started to suspect that this is the right time for it. The title is “Stillness is the Key.”
Quotes to Think By: Octavia Butler’s Rules for Predicting the Future
“I mean there’s no single answer that will solve all of our future problems. There’s no magic bullet. Instead there are thousands of answers — at least. You can be one of them if you choose to be”
We can judge our progress by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers, our willingness to embrace what is true rather than what feels good.
—Carl Sagan