Shift from Spectator to Engaged Citizen
with Citizen University’s Eric Liu
What if being a good citizen has less to do with politics and more to do with how we show up for one another?
To kick off Season 5 of How We Future, Lisa is talking with civic leader, author, and Citizen University co-founder Eric Liu about his new book, Live Like a Citizen: 8 Ways to Change Your Mindset and Our Country.
The conversation explores why civic life needs joy, grief, love, imagination, and practice more than facts and policy solutions. Eric shares a practice called Power Walk, which helps people take stock of the civic decisions embedded in the places around them. He also explains how Civic Saturdays became a way for people to gather, reflect, and reconnect after the 2016 election.
In this episode, Eric and Lisa discuss:
The story of Rosa Chang and the transformation of an overlooked space beneath the Brooklyn Bridge
Why joining a club might be one of the simplest ways to fight isolation and reclaim civic agency
How civic imagination can be used for both pro-social and antisocial purposes
Why building a better future requires both imagination and commitment
Ultimately, this episode is an invitation to stop being spectators of the future and start practicing citizenship wherever we are.
A few ideas to take with you
Take a power walk.
Walk around your neighborhood with fresh eyes. What do you notice? Why is it that way?
Join something.
Find a club, community group, neighborhood organization, library program, or other place where you can show up repeatedly and build relationships.
Practice civic joy.
Choose to animate the things that give us life even when things are hard.
Imagine and Act.
Turn your picture of a better future into collective choices, habits, and commitments.
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Eric Liu: You have to have a certain amount of civic faith that when enough of us in enough places make that choice to show up and join, make that choice to see each other, to listen, to feel one another, to sense one another in all these ways, that that can change the civic culture of my place, and that sets off not a top-down, but a horizontal contagion of culture change. That's how any shift in American life has ever really happened.
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Lisa Kay Solomon: I'm Lisa Kay Solomon, and this is How We Future, where I talk to some of my favorite changemakers about shaping tomorrow, starting today.
This season on How We Future, we're dedicating our conversations to a single season-long theme focused on civic futures. Over the coming episodes, I'll be speaking with extraordinary people who are actively building brighter futures for our communities, our families, our sports teams, our neighbors, and our next generation. We're intentionally launching the season right in the middle of a contentious election season, and that's entirely by design.
Over the next few months, there will be no escaping the onslaught of political messages designed to divide us and fracture our attention. Rather than retreat from that noise or get sucked into endless negativity, we wanted to bring our signature philosophy of hope, hype, and gratitude directly to this moment. I can't think of a better person to kick off this new chapter than my friend and civic hero, Eric Liu. Eric is the co-founder and CEO of Citizen University and the author of several essential books on democracy and civic life. His newest book, Live Like a Citizen: 8 Ways to Change Your Mindset in Our Country, comes out on October 13th.
In our conversation, we cover everything from the quiet power of a neighborhood walk to the vital role of joy and love in democracy and why, in a self-governing society, there is ultimately no they, only us. We hope this episode inspires you to look at your own community through a lens of agency, action, and possibility. Thanks so much for joining us for Season Five. Let's get into it with Eric Liu.
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I'm really thrilled to be welcoming you as our first guest of the How We Future Season Five Focus on Civic Futures. This conversation with you and the conversations that we're going to continue to have are really inspired by your work.
I'm thrilled to be having this conversation just before your new book comes out, Live Like a Citizen, because I feel like the whole season is bringing those ideas to life. I'll just say it's no coincidence that this is happening before the school year, or just as the school year is starting, just as this next level of election cycles is heating up, which doesn't always tend to lead to our best selves, and just an opportunity to share some of your incredible wisdom, work, ideas, in order to give people new options for how to show up every day, even if they're not going to be an elected official.
I'll just say one more thing before we get into it for all the preambles. I just want to say when I finished reading your new book, I had a feeling, which I don't have too often, which is I started to clap. [laughter] I started to clap. I'm by myself, I'm reading this PDF, and I was like, "This is everything." If there's a standing ovation for a book, I gave it to you. Eric Liu, thank you so much for being here.
Eric: Oh, Lisa Kay Solomon, you are a gift, and I'm really grateful to get to be in this conversation and this podcast itself. Your work more broadly on futures thinking and civic futures in particular is equally an inspiration to me. It's infused and informed the way that I think about what I do, but also what we can all do and how we can make this idea of futures and futures thinking seem not like a luxury good for a privileged few, but actually the very essence of what it means to live fully in everyday life, whether civically or otherwise. I appreciate you.
Lisa: Oh, thank you. It really does. It feels like so many of the great things we're trying to promote. I want, in this conversation, to both toggle some abstract ideas around how we can make civics more inviting and also some practical opportunities for people. As I said in the beginning, this is a moment of renewal. I always think of September, October as actually the beginning of the year, even though we know it's not, but it always feels like the beginning because maybe we're all set on academic cycles.
Let's maybe start with your new book, Live Like a Citizen. It's your, I think, ninth book, so prolific. Tell me about this book because it feels very personal, very relevant. I know you've been working on it for a while, but it feels like you've been working on it for a lifetime.
Eric: Yes. Thank you for that. The subtitle of this book, Live Like a Citizen, is eight ways to change your mindset and our country. Those eight ways organize the book. The book is structured around eight elemental verbs, ways of being and ways of living that we have forgotten as Americans, as humans, how to do in this age of hyperpolarization and massive inequality, and tech dehumanizing us in different ways, and just a culture that is flattening us left and right all the time. The book is about how to see, how to listen, how to feel, how to join, how to fight, how to change, how to imagine, and how to commit. It's not a typical civics book.
It's certainly not a politics book in the sense of being about the midterms or Trump or electoral politics. It is about that base layer of choice-making and habits that each of us has, in fact, the power to recommit to. Not in just some overly idealistic, utopian self-help way, but rather in a deeply philosophical view that any kind of renewal of a complex, multiracial, multi-faith, continental-scale democracy cannot actually happen from the top down. It has to happen from the bottom up and the inside out. That is slow, often invisible work that doesn't move at the speed of the internet. This book is really a reminder to us both that matters, but also how it is that we can actually inhabit those new old habits.
Lisa: It's a beautiful description. I found myself really leaning into the book. The book, it's so often, I think, with civics that we go to this like homeroom murmur, finger coming out, like eat your beets kind of civic orientation. This book really is an invitation to live better, like live better with yourself, with others.
Eric: The way I approach this is none of us really likes the way we're living right now in the United States and beyond, but this book is focused on the US. None of us likes this strain and stress of living in an age where the middle is evaporating, and everybody's clamoring to get on the few remaining lifeboats of the economy. Nobody likes this kind of way in which social media norms of treating each other with disdain and torching each other and then walking away without consequence bleeds into our everyday lives and relationships. None of us actually wanted this. Yet none of us naturally, easily feels that we know what to do to get out of this.
The book is a response to that need, and our work at Citizen University more broadly is a response to that need. I think in terms of invitation, not to come try out my cool thing called civics, but an invitation to each of us to face ourselves and face each other and choose a different, better way to live together. It is the case, as we've said in different settings, Lisa, that one of our colleagues, Heather Van Benthuysen, who used to lead civics education for the Chicago Public Schools, when she was in that role, she did something very un-K-12, which was she put a simple question as the animating impetus for all of their work in that department in CPS.
The question was: how shall we live together? It was not about three branches of government. It was not about the 14th Amendment. It was not about local government and aldermen. It was: how shall we live together? That's both a philosophical question and a super practical one. I think what we're trying to do is both invite, but to your work, imagine a better way of living together. Not me living my best life, taking care of myself and my needs, but how do we make a community actually sustain itself in a way where we all get to thrive?
Lisa: Yes. I think that is such a wonderful way to frame it. I found myself throughout the book really hearing your passion for opening up people's minds that we can do better and that there are ways that don't require a PhD in civics or even to be an activist to do it, but just even the way that we turn towards each other, the way that we take in what's around us differently, and how powerful that can be. So much, Eric, of the work I've heard you share and wanted to be a part of is breaking down the like, they versus us, this like, "Oh, they're making decisions," or "I have no power over this" and recognizing something that I learned in my very first job where I was actually working on a political campaign.
I was 21 years old, working for Harris Wofford from Pennsylvania, and I didn't know anything. I went to DC, and a friend of mine said, "Listen, if you want to learn how to be an awesome copier and faxer," which was a thing at the time, stay in DC, "but if you want to really learn how this works, go out on the campaign and really work with the candidate." I was like, "Great, no problem. They'll teach me how to do this." I realized, "No they," like, you are the they. I think so much of this book is inviting us to show up differently for ourselves in spite of what's coming at us and to do it in very grounded and very doable ways.
Eric: Yes, I agree with that. In addition to this, they versus us that we often say in our work at Citizen University: there is no they in a self-governing society. Even though, when you ask most people on the street or neighbors or whatever, when you ask them what I believe is the elemental question of all civic learning and ideas and power, which is who decides? Who decides that there should be a data center here? Who decides that AI should be regulated in this way? Who decides that the effective marginal tax rate should be lowered on this or that? Who decides how we deal with immigration or healthcare or whatever it might be?
Most people's default answer is they. Some indistinct blob out there: "I can't believe they decided to put a data center here or to--" Et cetera. That is a reflection both of that person's civic illiteracy, but also, in a way that's not judging or blaming, it's a reflection of the fact that so many people have been cut out of the process of decision-making. We do feel like it's an indistinct blob. It's not, "Why should I get literate about a thing in which I'm not going to be invited or heard or respected if I am heard? Decisions are just going to get made according to what a relatively powerful few want to do."
It's a big thing to push against, this they versus us, but it is still the fact that in a self-governing democratic society, there really is no they. There are just different permutations and combinations of us and different degrees to which we will get involved in these different combinations of us. That could be a community board. It could be elective office. It could be a volunteer association. It could be your neighborhood supper club, whatever it is. I think the other distinction I would make that is parallel to they, us, goes back to the spirit of this book, which is I versus we.
All those eight verbs that I name, the progression from how to see, how to listen, how to feel, all the way to the latter ones, how to imagine and how to commit is, in a way, a progression from stuff that begins with how you, as an individual, make choices to both perceive things but also how you move in the world, but that those choices that each of us makes are themselves contagious, and society becomes how you behave. That over time, these verbs do become more collective because ultimately, this isn't just an I job. This isn't just the thing where if I work on me and I do my inner work, then everything's going to be okay.
No. Your inner work is necessary, but not sufficient, and that the point of working on how you see and how you curb your biases and how you check your reflexes is so that when you enter the we, we can work more effectively together and we can live together in a healthier way, including fighting with each other, which is inevitable in a diverse community of any scale, whether family or a nation. I don't think of this as civic self-help. I think of it as civic mutual aid and how we help each other into a better way of living.
Lisa: Which is so much more resilient and so much more sustainable than some of the messages that we get out. Earlier in Season Four, we had Bob Johansen on from Institute for the Future. He talks about reframing this Bonnie world that we're in, brittle, anxious, nonlinear, incomprehensible. I think about the brittleness a lot. He says, "The thing is, when something's brittle, and it breaks, it shatters. It doesn't just break." I think your invitation is for us to be, as he would say, more bendable, but more just reinforced, more in those little ways as in the big ways as well.
I want to get specific for folks so that they really understand. I love the way that you talk about that these verbs were not just random, that they're really built on a progression. When I read your book, and so often, Eric, when I take in your material, and I'm a part of the larger conversations that we're in, I think this is what the homeroom should be about. We tend to put civics off to as a single discipline. This is really what advisory is about.
This is, I think, the things that we can't practice enough. It needs to be everywhere, not just in one place, and experiential so that we get better at the practices. Each one of these things, you break down and practice. I always think you can't become expert without practicing. That's really how I hope people take in this book and then go deeper into your work about, wait a minute, this is an invitation to practice differently.
Eric: I think about where your home base is at Stanford, and I think about that practice, that approach to practice is true at the D school among people who are learning, teaching, and practicing design thinking in different domains, whether consumer products and commercial work or civic and cultural work. It's true on the basketball court where you and others have organized athletes, and then on the gridiron, and all soccer fields and baseball diamonds, where what it means to live together and what it means to live like a citizen is literally what it means to be a teammate, what it means to have a common purpose, navigate differences, and learn to create something that is greater than the sum of its parts.
It's true of the actual little rehearsal rooms of your drama clubs and your chamber music groups and orchestras on campus there. If you get outside the hallowed halls of a campus like Stanford or even outside the still-hallowed precincts of Palo Alto or whatever it might be, in any community, every space is an opportunity to practice what we're talking about here. That can be in a homeless shelter. That can be in a public library. That can be waiting at a bus stop.
This is a matter of mindfulness that doesn't, as you say, put this stuff into a little box for second period civics or for this supplement, like a vitamin that I will take separate from my actual daily intake. This is our daily intake. Again, to your point, this isn't stuff just for experts. This is just how we, wherever we might be, in whatever setting we are, choose to approach each other in the world.
Lisa: Yes. That's maybe a great place to start off to talk about some of the specific practices within the chapters, and starting with how to see. You talk about just opening up and paying attention to the environment around you, maybe getting back to that question: who decides, why is it like this way? I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the power walk that you mentioned in that first chapter, and maybe share a little bit about its background, and maybe invite people to consider taking a power walk for themselves.
Eric: Yes. The Power Walk is a project of ours at Citizen University where we've created a simple downloadable field guide on our website that anybody, hopefully with more than one person, small group, large group, can use as you actually take a walk around the place where you live. Let me rewind. How this project came to be and why, and I'll explain more why we created it, was I was once interviewed after I'd written a book about civic power. In the interview, the reporter asked, "I'm a parent, I have a young child, how would I talk to them about civic power? How do you teach them these concepts about what it means to understand power and to be able to practice it in your community?"
My reflexive answer was, "Take a walk." Take a walk with that child and have your eyes wide open. As you walk, ask yourself why. Why is it that there are bus stops up to this point and then no more? Why is it that this part of the neighborhood has healthy food choices, but that part is all junk food and fast food? Why is it that this lot has been empty for years and nobody's doing anything with it? Things that we just walk past every day and are just part of the wallpaper, our mental wallpaper, to really see them anew and ask why.
When you ask why, you realize that every single aspect of our built environment is the external deposit of a prior set of choices and allocations or omissions about how civic power should flow and will be distributed in a community. You start pulling that thread, and if you start asking, "Why is it like this?" Inevitably, you will get to, "Who decided? Who owns this lot? Why isn't the city doing anything about this? Who at the city actually says something about what to do with an empty lot like this?" That insight in an interview, which was spontaneous, turned into this broader project where we thought at Citizen University, let's actually give people this field guide. It has a bunch of prompts and a bunch of questions. It's not heavy; it's not like political science, but it is about mindful noticing that then take you one or two steps into, if you want to understand more, here's where you could go deeper. The point in the power walk is with a group of people walk around and notice what you notice, and notice what you haven't been noticing all these months, years, decades, whatever it might be.
In my book, I tell about this remarkable woman in Lower Manhattan named Rosa Chang, who for years would walk from where she lived in Chinatown through this dead zone that was under the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge on the Manhattan side between Chinatown, South Street Seaport, City Hall Plaza; there was just this kind of no man's land. She would walk through it every day on the way to work or something else. Then at a certain point, she stopped in her tracks there and just looked around. She's like, "Why is it like this?" She looked around at these vaulting arches in this space under the Brooklyn Bridge and noticed that there were these areas where these archways had been bricked up.
She was like, "Huh, why wouldn't they open those up? That could be really interesting." She saw these huge columns and pillars like, "Huh, you can project things onto that. This could be a lively arts and farmers' market." On one area where there used to be a skate park before 9/11, before they shut things and fenced things off, she just started asking why. As an individual with no particular connections or power in the community, she started asking why, and she got this little bee in her bonnet. Then she started asking neighbors, and someone said, "I don't know. Go to a community board meeting."
She joined her community board, and then she asked why. Then she got the community board to say, "Hey, maybe we should turn the space into something, not just leftover negative space." Then she started to have this idea of what if we turned it into a thing and called it Gotham Park? Then she became like a Pied Piper. She started getting people not just from the community board, but the city council and other neighbors. She talked to the NYPD, who had their surplus cars parked there. She talked to the Department of Transportation that had equipment. She just got on fire with this idea.
This wasn't just about how to see now; this was also, more deeply, Lisa, a concrete example of what you practice, preach, and teach all the time, which is how to unlock your civic imagination. It's not like she sat there and thought, "I want to imagine something." It just started with a little spark that was a question, and then as she persisted, now she did have superhuman persistence in her curiosity. She later said she had a naiveté that was her superpower because she wasn't so knowledgeable about the inner working city government where she would have self-censored or preemptively said, "Ah, what's the point? It'll take them years to even answer my email," or whatever.
She just went in assuming, I'm a citizen, I'm a member of the community, I have an idea, someone's going to want to hear this. She is the story that we created the Power Walk project with The New York Times. They published this field guide with us, and when we launched this, they did a story on Rosa, both a print story and a video story to show you now what Gotham Park is becoming. Spoiler: it has become a reality. She managed to get $50 million from the city government, and now they're in the process of just transforming this space.
It is a blossoming of civic imagination, but it was made possible in the first place by a choice to see. That's the key, to not just be mindlessly treating a zone as wallpaper while your mind is somewhere else, or you're staring at your phone and not noticing what's around you. I think that choice to see, in this case, transformed a place, and that choice is available to every one of us.
Lisa: Yes. It's so powerful. Reminds me a little bit of another conversation we had with Jennifer Dolsky when we focused on leading with purpose, and she talks about, first of all, that one of the most important things is have courage. Not only did she say, "Why is this space the way this space," but then the courage to say that out loud and be like, "Wait a minute, I'm going to investigate this a little bit more." Then, as you were saying, the commitment to keep going, the naiveté. I feel like that all the time. I was not supposed to be a civic futurist, and yet, it's like right there, it keeps coming back. I just can't stop working on it.
Eric: To give yourself even more credit, not only were you not supposed to be one, you imagined this role into being. There weren't a lot of people who call themselves civic futurists. You're a futurist; that was a thing that was out there, but civic futurists was not a term that I'd heard a whole lot before I met my friend Lisa Kay Solomon. I think [laughs] you have helped define a thing into being, and that itself in this realm is, again, a specific act of civic imagination.
Lisa: It was really fun going into inspiration and how we support and help each other become even better versions of ourselves for our communities. I think it's worth noting, Eric, that the idea for The Future is Happening, which you talk about, which I'm so grateful for in the chapter on how to imagine, came from a conversation that I saw you have with the mayor of St. Paul about some of the work he was doing there to really bring in the community, even a choice, for example, this just blew my mind of like when a baby is born in the community, they automatically have a savings account set up for them, and in order to get out of that savings account, you actually need to go through the red tape.
That's the red tape, not to start it. I was like, "Yes, it's like a brief--" Or starting a town hall with a beautiful recital, again, bringing in the arts. I remember sitting next to our shared friend, Russell Shaw, who at the time was the head of Georgetown Day School, and I was like, "We got to do something about this. We have to share these stories broadly. We need to put this in the world so that people have more positive stories to take a look at." He was like, "Yes. You know what, Lisa? You do it, I'll be there." I was like, "Okay." [laughter] Fast forward, not even a year later, we had 120 people at the Stanford D School organized around civic imagination, and it was really focused on--
Eric: [crosstalk] From all different kinds of fields, all different kinds of work, some that would call themselves civic, some that might not, but they were all doing work that was activating collectives into re-imagining and changing their place, their domain, their field, their work with real concrete, tangible projects, ideas, and consequences.
Lisa: Oh, it was very special. When you said that you would come and you gave one of your beautiful civic sermons based off of another one of my favorite books, Become America, right behind there, which is so spectacular, it was just chills, and maybe that's actually a good segue to another chapter, which I loved, loved so much on how to feel. When I went out inspired by that conversation I heard with you and the mayor, I was like, "This is so joyful. I know this feels like a hard time, but this is good stuff. This is like, wow. Let's start a town hall with a recital."
When I imagined The Future is Happening, I really imagined it to be putting positive, joyful futures out in the world in tangible and concrete ways. I'll be honest, I faced a lot of pushback. "Lisa, don't you know democracy's on fire? Lisa, why are you looking at window dressings when we need to do some core blocking and tackling?" I just remember trying to hold firm to say, "Listen, that is all important, and I'm so grateful that people are working on that, but we have to inspire a vision better than just reacting." That requires feeling something.
That requires feeling hope and joy and connection with each other. This was one of my favorite chapters in the book, where you really go into detail about why this isn't woo-woo but essential. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about why feelings are so important and maybe even how that has been a central design criteria in designing some of your programs like Civic Saturdays, which are really designed to feel collectively.
Eric: Yes. Thanks, Lisa. I think this chapter on how to feel is so central for me too, because I think there's so much in conversations about politics and about civic community life, forget about the national stuff, just even where you live, wherever you may live, that you're tempted sometimes to think, "These are policy questions that are about evidence and about facts, and there are concrete solutions, and we might differ on those, but I can persuade you with reason of the superiority of my proposed policy structural reform." That's how a lot of people approach politics, particularly in the realms where we work, which is people who care about civics.
They start thinking this is a technocratic matter. My whole life experience, forget about my political experience, but just my life experience in the arts, my life experience experiencing a lot of grief and suffering and death and family and beyond puts me in a different center. From that center, I've really come to believe that, as I say in the book, all politics is pain relief. [chuckles] It doesn't matter what your party is, what the issue is. In a democratic society, politics is about sensing what hurts and then some people proposing, demanding, suggesting ways to remedy the pain.
Now, the pain can be real; it can be imagined; it can be valid; it can be invalid; you might scorn it, or you might feel it deeply; it doesn't matter. There's no objective truth to the pain. This is an emotional reality. One of the things that we've got to remember in any kind of civic effort is that humans are not rational calculating machines in which our brains drive and the rest of us is just a meat vehicle to move our brains around. We are, in the first place, emotional, irrational, feeling-sensing creatures, and a democracy just amplifies that to the nth degree.
That's true of angry populism. It's true of hopeful reformers. It's true of people who are cynical and checked out. Those are all emotions. They may have some rational basis to them or nugget to them, but those are emotions first. We can't possibly make change happen in a community if we cut ourselves off from that in other people and if we cut ourselves off from that in ourselves. This chapter in particular focus on three dimensions of feeling in civic life. Civic joy, yes, as you emphasize, but also civic grief. Those two are correlates. Each is a reflection or a measure of the other.
The degree of the meaningfulness of a civic joy is in direct proportion to the depths of a civic grief that you or a community have previously felt. In the converse, too. Civic grief, what feels like you've lost as a person or as a community, is in direct proportion to what you thought you once had or what you, in fact, did once have. What enables you to treat these things not as two things to be walled off from one another, and each of them really scary to unpack or open up, is the third dimension of civic feeling that I write about here, which is civic love. This, to your question, is not woo-woo. This is like the elemental thing in a community.
We get in the United States to actually make a place better if we practice loving our neighbor. That's not true in a lot of parts of the world. You can love your neighbor and still things are going to suck, and still the tyrant is going to do this or that, or still the level of corruption is so corrosive that you're beyond just your immediate neighbor and family. Your capacity for civic love is essentially an irrelevance.
In the United States, actually, still, we can, by activating at every fractal scale and starting with the closest scale of those who we can, at human scale, see and touch and sense their body language back to us, practice a civic love of people, of place, of hope, and of ideas that we share that can enable us to keep crossing that bridge between civic joy and civic grief so that we don't get stuck in a civic grief that just curdles into grievance, but we also don't get bubbled off into a civic joy that is so pollyanna and out of touch with what's going on in the world that you can get the response of, "Why are you indulging in that when shit's on fire?"
No, it's precisely when stuff's on fire that you actually need to recommit to a civic joy that is grounded in knowing just how bad things can be and how much pain there is, but insisting with life force that the only way to live is to seek what gives us life and not only to stew in the bitterness of what's gone.
Lisa: Oh, that's so beautifully said. There's so many great sentences, paragraphs, and I just want to read this part, which just really touched me. You say, "Why joy? It may seem, in a time of despair and dystopian prophecy, that joy is a luxury for a few and that talking about joy is insensitive and out of touch, but civic joy is not Pollyannaish disregard for all that is hard. It is the determination in the face of all that is hard and fear-inducing to animate the things that give us life."
I love that because, as you say, humans are filled with emotion. That's what makes us uniquely wonderful. Sometimes when I see a lot of emotion happening, I think, "Thank God we're not robots. Yes, let's lean in." Also, why design, I think, is such an essential part of this, and at least the way I think about design is making choices, yes, that deliver functional utility, but really about emotional engagement. I think so often we forget about that emotional engagement part and how critical that is.
Eric: We live in a technocratic age, Lisa, and you are a catalyst and an outlier at a larger institution, Stanford, that is at the epicenter of a hyper-technocratic way of thinking about the world. The titans of the AI economy are, for the most part, people who are cut off from feeling and their own feelings and the feelings of others. I tip my hat to their capacity for technocratic technological innovation. I shudder a bit, more than a bit, at the degree of world-changing power that is being wielded by people who think the world actually is about having meat machines to move our brains around and disregard these currents of pain, hope, loss, fear, love, joy, need that actually make communities work.
I think this is part of the insistence that I have in a time like this. This isn't just a bashing of Silicon Valley. I'm a baseball guy. Baseball has become increasingly data-oriented, technocratic, drilling down on very specific elements and sub-elements of a swing or of a pitch and of spin rates of a pitch and all that stuff in a way that actually makes feel disappear. Life is art and science.
Life is not only science, but even science is art and science. [laughs] Science has as much feel and intuition as anything else. I think we've got to-- Again, this is not just about people who care about civics and government and politics. This is about a way of living in a time where we are rapidly being dehumanized and letting what is distinctly human evaporate in all our institutions.
Lisa: Beautifully said. I certainly feel it being here in Silicon Valley, in the heart of it. I moved here almost 30 years ago, maybe 26, 27. Wow, how things have changed here. I want to maybe invite you, Eric, to talk about how another moment of real feeling and energy and worry led to the creation of Civic Saturdays and a way for people to connect.
For those that are new to Civic Saturdays, maybe you can describe what they are and just how it came to be and how it's grown, because it's one of the most inspiring responses and manifestations of imagination and so much of what you talk about in this book and, frankly, so much of what we're trying to do in this podcast around trying to further hope, hype in the form of energy and connection and gratitude. I just think it is just such a beautiful embodiment of bringing out the best in us.
Eric: I will say this, and I do-- Let's put a pin. I want to come back to something, which is imagination, and civic imagination can also be activated to bring out the worst in us.
Lisa: For sure.
Eric: Let's do return to that. Civic Saturdays are a program that we started at Citizen University 10 years ago now, shortly after the 2016 election. These gatherings are essentially a civic analog to a faith gathering. It has the vibe and the flow and the arc and the feel of a service, a church or synagogue or mosque, but it is not those things. It is oriented around what you might think of as the ligamenture of our civic faith, what it takes in the United States to sustain this experiment that was born of a set of ideas, not of a myth about common blood or common soil or whatever.
Just a set of ideas, ideas of equality and liberty and justice that we have never fully lived up to and that, if just let to sit there, we can very quickly get cynical about. Oh, nice ideas, but we've never achieved them. What those ideas call us to do in something that is something for me, like a spiritual calling, is to animate them and to close the gap between that great civic creed that we as Americans inherit and our actual deeds every day and our actual deeds over history. Closing the creed-deed gap was the point of Civic Saturdays.
You do that, again, not by having a seminar or having it be a PowerPoint presentation, but by creating a collective ritual where you will sing together, where you can have moments to turn to strangers and ask hard questions and be moved by each other's presence and by being seen by another. Where there are readings of texts drawn from throughout our collective history that are civic scripture. They're not biblical or Torah texts, but they are Lincoln or Susan B. Anthony or Langston Hughes or whoever it might be, and that someone gives a civic sermon at these gatherings to make sense of the community in that moment and the times.
We started these in 2016, just right after the 2016 presidential election, which my late wife, Jená Cane, who was the co-founder of Citizen University, was a theater artist by training and by nature. We had been sketching what it could look like to create a new ritual that was like a civic analog to a faith gathering. We'd been sketching that in the summer and early fall of 2016 and thinking we would launch this the next year, in 2017. After the election happened and it was such a surprise to everybody, including those who cheered the results, but certainly to those who did not cheer the results; it was so upending.
There was so much shock, grief, not only grief that, "Oh, this guy won," but grief, a moment of taking stock of all the relationships that had been torn and fractured during that contentious campaign season that we realized the morning after the election that we didn't have several months to slowly plan this and roll out Civic Saturdays. We needed to do it that Saturday. We just scrambled and called our friends at Elliott Bay Books here in Seattle, the great iconic independent bookstore. Four days later, we organized this first gathering in their basement reading room and hoped that with such short notice, maybe a couple dozen people would show up.
Over 220 showed up and crammed that little basement reading room because people were feeling and hurting and did not want to be alone in all of that confusion, dread, surprise, uncertainty, all of it. That was the birth of Civic Saturdays. For the first couple of years, my team and I, Jená and I, and others at Citizen University, led these throughout Seattle. Then we got invited to lead these in other parts of the country and pretty quickly realized that's super not scalable, me and Jená running around and doing this. We created a civic seminary program, a fellowship program to train people from around the US to lead these Civic Saturday gatherings in their own communities.
Many years later now, we've trained many hundreds of people in communities that are large and small, urban and rural, red and blue, to lead these in all kinds of spaces: houses of worship, libraries, schools, parks, street corners, all over the place. That was the birth of the thing, but it did start, to your initial question, with a true commitment to sensing what was out there, and then a combination of my desire to use civic ritual in this way and Jená's deep knowledge as a theater person of how to create a collective experience in which you were not just audience, but you were participant and co-creator of the feeling and of the experience.
Yes, that's what we tried to set in motion. It's been very gratifying. This isn't even one of our core programs anymore. We've put on our website: essentially, we've put-- You can now basically do Civic Saturday in a box. We've put a little guide on how to do these in your own community now. People are just running with this in a way that is really gratifying.
Lisa: I found it transformational even just to hear about it and then participate in some virtual ones during COVID. What an opportunity. I really hope for parents listening to this and for educators listening to this, Eric, you know I have a dream that every high schooler has to create their own civic sermon before they graduate. That is my dream. It is so integrative. It is so inviting of the polymath of art and science and discernment and critical thinking and creative ways. Again, I'll reference Become America is filled with sermons that you gave shortly after you started that.
I reread them. They are beautiful. They make me feel better. I will share, actually, that I borrowed on some of that. I gave my first sermon in my synagogue a couple weeks ago. I haven't done one since my bat mitzvah. It was extraordinary. I loved the process. I loved the invitation. I loved even the vulnerability to be seen in front of my community, some of whom knew me, many of whom didn't, to share all of me. I just, again, return to a belief that it is such an opportunity to lean into much of what you talk about in the book, all the verbs, but just a chance to really empower all of us.
Eric: Lisa, and I had an opportunity to listen to some of that sermon, and I think what is so beautiful about it is not just that you did it in the first one since your bat mitzvah, but that people often think that, oh, something that's called a civic sermon or any kind of talk like that in a civic setting, that what you're primarily doing is talking. What the work was for you to get to that point before you stood there and began delivering those words was actually that was a deep exercise in listening. You had been listening to your heart. You'd been listening to your fellow congregants. You'd been listening to the community and trying to make sense of a thing. To make sense means to use your senses.
You were tuning in to the pain, the fear, the hope, the mix of it all right now. To be at your synagogue, to be in any Jewish community in the United States right now, what it means to grapple with all these things. You were sensing and listening, and then you had to do the work of synthesizing that in your own heart before you could vocalize it. That's the spirit of a Civic Saturday. That's the spirit of any kind of, like, this isn't just like, "Oh, sage on the stage dropping nuggets of wisdom." This is a circulatory system. Yes, that's an important role to be when you're up there; you're the heart pumping stuff through the system. Yes, I think you really embody that-
Lisa: Oh.
Eric: -in that moment.
Lisa: That means so much to me. Thank you. In preparing for it, I did something that you talk about in the book too, which I loved, which is this idea of, like, I had conversations with people. I didn't just listen to myself, but I took in my, as you said, civic hevruta. I now have a regular learning partner, a rabbi--
Eric: Which is paired textual study, right?
Lisa: Yes, right, exactly. It's basically having someone from which to bounce off of a reading or something to go deeper on it, to discuss it, to share surface area, share questions, curiosities. Again, just another thing that we can think about around how do we make this more engaging and interactive and not something that is removed or memorized? Though it was really a powerful process, and maybe even more committed to bring this forward.
Eric: You put it exactly right. In a time of overwhelm, which we are in, the default setting for most people is either to tune out or just to become passive spectators of the chaos, the reality TV show, the whatever that's happening around us. The simplest way to break out of that negative feedback loop of disempowerment is to join a club or start one if you're so moved, and to think about that not as some huge lift, but just a choice. It is an emotional choice to decide I'm going to get out of isolation, get off my screens. I'm going to go to a place that is face-to-face and has a bunch of strangers.
I'm going to commit to repeated interaction with them because that's what separates a club from these other forms of joining. I think that is so basic and elemental. This is not a new thought. This was Alexis de Tocqueville's observation when he came here 200 years ago and saw what made this young republic work was not the laws and constitution so much. It was this deep art of association that people had. We've lost that. I think the good news is that we can easily regain that.
I think actually this is a good segue to the part that I want to do, where our conversation isn't only on the bright side, but to recognize that the things that you and I care about, almost all those verbs: see, listen, join, feel, all the way to imagine and commit, can be put to antisocial uses, can be put to exclusionary uses. Civic imagination itself, civic imagination, like civic power, they're both like fire or physics, which is, they are utterly neutral as to what uses they'll be put to. You can use fire to warm people and keep them from dying, or you can use it to obliterate them and burn down their entire village. So it is with civic power, and so it is with civic imagination.
I think part of what we who want to put these capacities to prosocial use have a doubled obligation to face and recognize and understand how those who are putting them to antisocial use are doing it. Not to put her head in the sand, not to be la-la everything. If I just manifest goodness, it'll appear, but to reckon. This goes back to the civic joy stuff. The Civil Rights Movement was one of the greatest embodiments of civic joy in American history, not because it was cut off from the brutal realities of Jim Crow and the brutal legacies of slavery, but because it faced them squarely and lived them and felt them in their bones and their skin and, in the case of John Lewis, in their skulls.
That deep knowledge of the darkness in the human heart, that deep knowledge of the darkness in all our present-day institutions was what actually enabled people to recommit to life and light. I think civic imagination requires us to recognize that right now in the United States, there are people who are imagining with great discipline an America that has fewer Jews and fewer Asian people. They are imagining an America where women are not so public in their leadership and where they're more in the private realm at home. There are people right now trying to imagine a society where the child of immigrants, which I am, doesn't really get to claim birthright citizenship as a matter of law, social norm, or just as a matter of course.
These forms of civic imagination are potentially just as potent as any other. I think being awakened in a way to what is happening around us, not as spectators, but as case studies, what's unfolding around us right now is a lot of people putting their imagination into action. If you want to see a better way of living together, you too have to put your imagination into action and convert that instinct and that spirit into collective choice-making, collective habit-forming, and collective commitment at a fractal scale that starts with the human. I think that's what you do, that's what I do, and that's what we do together in all of our work that we've done jointly.
Lisa: That is really what the book is about, story after story of people that are doing that work in cities, in rural areas, with communities that they were part of, with new communities that they grew. I envision, Eric, as you were doing this book, you must have had this huge war room of stories, and where do they fit? I marvel at how you are attuned to the people doing this work and how so much of your work is not just honoring them but facilitating connections with others in order to amplify it and share it and to put points on what better could look like.
I think so often, and I learned this from one of my favorite books on change from Chip and Dan Heath, who wrote the book Switch; they talk about, among other things, what often shows up as resistance or even laziness is confusion. I think what you are doing, and what I try to do, is to map out better and to do it as an invitation, with joy, with love, that it can be better. It's what I call optimistic offense. Let's play optimistic offense. Not defensive, dystopian response. Let's live better in ways that we can do. Maybe I'll just make a couple connections here.
I think it's one of the reasons why I love the How to Join chapter so much because it really breaks it down to a very small atom, which is to say, you don't have to solve this by your-- You just find somewhere to start to get involved. So often, I think when we see the symptoms of not joining, when we see loneliness, despair, now, in many ways, we're conditioned to be like, "Oh, you need to see a therapist," or "You need to do this," or "You need to fix yourself." I am not saying and overly simplifying that the need for those services are not important. Of course they are.
I think a lot can be better when you just remind yourself that you can join something to feel like the best version of yourself, to be curious, to be with others. I think that's why I love that chapter so much and why I really wanted to highlight it now, because again, we are at the beginning of a year. You can join. You can join whatever you want. It's out there. You don't have to do all the heavy lifting of starting something. You can if you want to, but there are people out there that can't wait to meet you and just taking a first step to practice these practices by joining.
Eric: I have to just add, there is a leap of faith involved in this work because it is not easy or intuitive to make the connection between what happens, as you say, at an atomic scale versus at a large structural scale. How am I joining a club, whether it's a book club, a rotary club, a neighborhood club, whatever, in Akron or Shreveport or Muskogee or Poughkeepsie? Wherever it may be, and these are all places where we have people doing work in the US. How do you connect the dots between doing that and changing our country?
The answer is you have to have a certain amount of civic faith that when enough of us in enough places like those and thousands of others around the United States in our towns make that choice to show up and join, make that choice to see each other, to listen, to feel one another, to sense one another in all these ways, that that can change the civic culture of my place, and that sets off not a top-down but a horizontal contagion of culture change. That's how any shift in American life has ever really happened. That's not visible at first, but if you just keep committing to the people in your place, I assure you that you will set off a cascade over time of this positive culture change in our civic life.
Lisa: I couldn't have said it better myself. I couldn't have asked for a better opening to the season. Eric, you'll be delighted to know that we are going to be featuring more and more of those stories. Our dear friend, Shamichael Hallman, how his invitation to join is Meet Me at the Library. Evan Weissman: his invitation is to go and make it fun and joyful, having--
Eric: Warm Cookies of the Revolution, yes.
Lisa: Warm Cookies of the Revolution, Stitch 'n Bitch.
Eric: Which he calls a civic health club.
Lisa: Yes, incredible. Incredible. Our friends, Eric Reveno, Joe Kennedy doing their work with student athletes and coaches. We just want to make this more available to more people, starting with this fabulous invitation. I really hope everybody don't just buy one book; buy many books. I already have a queue of administrators I'm sending it to. I've already pre-ordered. I can't wait.
Maybe, Eric, I'll end with another favorite quote from your book, which was in the How to Imagine chapter, where you say, "But again, you and I are the authors of what comes next. We are the players of this game. We decide by how we imagine and act whether to build Planet Earth's first mass, multiracial, multi-faith democratic republic that lasts." I would say, and have a really good time doing it. [laughter] I thank you so much for being on How We Future.
Eric: Thank you, Lisa.
Lisa: You are a gift.
Eric: I'm so honored to help kick off this season, and congratulations on how just durable and beautiful this whole podcast and the broader community have become. Congrats.
[music]
Lisa: Thanks for listening to this conversation with Eric Liu. It's so easy to look at the world around us and think that someone else is responsible for deciding what happens next. Eric reminds us that we are all responsible for making the world a better place. That can start with something as simple as paying attention to your neighborhood, joining a club, listening to someone you don't know, or imagining what could be different and then taking one small step toward it.
Also this season, we're changing our How We Future Substack to feature a unique visual image inspired by the conversation, along with actionable resources. Please sign up and share with others. It's free and just might be the most welcoming email you get during these rocky times. Of course, we'd love to know what you think. I'm Lisa Kay Solomon. I'm so excited to launch this Civic Future season with you.
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