Is Anyone Actually Apathetic?

Canada is up against growing challenges at home and around the world. Are we up to the challenge, or will we check out?

Billy feels that politicians don’t care about his strong preference for MORE TREATS. Photo by Favian Ortiz on Unsplash

As far as politics is concerned, I rarely meet people who are truly apathetic. That’s good news, though I’ll get to the bad news in a moment. Staring down the many and growing challenges we face right now, it’s a good time to have an engaged citizenry. But here we meet the bad news. People may not be apathetic, but they’re alienated, and that may be worse.

Often when we hear someone talk about political apathy the speaker is referring to a state in which people don’t care about politics. They’re just not interested in it. But scratch the surface and you’ll find this isn’t true. Call it the reverse Maltese Falcon (spoiler alert); beneath the outer layer, the layer of appearance, we find substance. We find gold instead of lead.

If a citizen stays home instead of casting a ballot on Election Day or decides to hit the links on the weekend instead of attending a protest, we might conclude they don’t care about politics. But there’s more to it than that. If we think of apathy as a lack of interest in politics, and if we think of politics as a shared undertaking in which we sort out how we will live together — who gets what, when, and how? — we soon see there are few who aren’t interested in our shared life and how they fit.

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You can experiment with this yourself. The next time you come across someone you take to be apathetic, ask them if they care about politics. You might get a ‘no’ in response, or ‘not really’. That’s the surface. Keep digging. Ask them next if they care about the state of the roads, the price of gas, tuition costs, healthcare wait times, tax rates, local parks, their public pension, what we sell to other countries and to what use they put it, how much control they have over their workplace, or even the flag. You’ll find that people tend to have thoughts, opinions, preferences, and feelings. Often, they’ll have strong ones. People care about such things, and more. But they’re detached from politics. The connection between what they care about is severed from their desire and capacity to do something about it.

The separation of individuals from political life is more about alienation than apathy, though the former may certainly induce the latter. If apathy leads to a withdrawal from public concerns, to the removal and isolation that characterizes alienation, then we might say the two are thoroughly bound up together. But the fundamental problem here is apathy, and that is what we must address first, and soon. I’m not sure who imagines the coming years will be easier than the preceding ones, the pandemic notwithstanding, but I’ll take the under. And for our collective good, we ought to take all the help we can get. It’s time to recruit.

Bringing people on board requires us to understand why they aren’t here in the first place. We political animals separate from political life for many (intersecting and overlapping) reasons, but a few take precedence. If someone isn’t socialized into politics, they might not think taking part is even an option. Beyond socialization, people may lack the material resources and skills they need or feel they need to take part in politics. It’s a vicious cycle.

If a person can’t afford the time or money to get involved — and politics takes both — they’re less likely to try. Moreover, elite institutions only go so far in including people in any deep sense. While political parties and organizations may love volunteers, for many, substantive engagement in shaping the world around them seems impossible or pointless. If political elites prefer to run the show themselves, which they often do, then why bother getting involved? If no one is listening, why bother speaking?

As I wrote in Too Dumb for Democracy?, in liberal societies, the state and government tend to ask very little of people, at least as far as politics is concerned. You’re meant to be a part of the market society first, a consumer and producer, and a political being second, if at all. Every few years, you’re implored, lightly, to vote, but then everyone goes back to their respective corner. You’re asked to pay your taxes, obey the law, and do your job, more or less, and otherwise you’re left alone. You’re certainly not often invited in any substantive way to take part in self-governance. You come to doubt whether you’re welcome or whether your participation would matter if you were.

We need to rebuild civic capacity and redistribute opportunities to engage in political life. Not only are these goods in and of themselves, respectful of the inherent moral worth of each person, but they’re also essential to building a country that can withstand internal and external challenges. In the face of contemporary crises and uncertainties, we’re starting to wonder whether we’ve let our national muscles atrophy, anxious that when we find ourselves needing to meet the occasion, we won’t be up to snuff. Those are reasonable concerns, and we should take them seriously.

Addressing political apathy starts with bringing people into political life deeply and substantively. The state and both private and public organizations ought to support those who wish to take part with material resources and by reserving the time it takes to do such work. Those with power must listen to those they exist to serve and must take their preferences seriously even when they clash with elite and entrenched preferences.

The probability of us bringing everyone into politics is low; the chances that we can dramatically increase participation rates in both shallow and deep engagement are much better. More to the point, however, the return on investment earned by engaging more of the population is politics will be robust and, equal and opposite to the cost of leaving them out. The way forward, then, is as necessary as it is obvious.