Citizenship Is Not Administration

Why Membership Requires Duties, Rites, and Civic Friendship

Arc III: The Carriers Of Meaning, 5/6

A citizen is not a customer.

That sounds obvious, then it may sound strange, and once that has passed, it becomes obvious again. Modern states have spent decades encouraging the confusion. The citizen is addressed as claimant, consumer, beneficiary, rights-bearer, data point, service user. Each term captures something real. None reaches the center. A customer receives a package. A citizen enters a common life.

That distinction matters because political peace depends on it. Where citizenship is treated as legal status plus benefits, belonging thins out. Where belonging thins out, solidarity weakens. Then the state compensates with procedure, supervision, and managed compliance. The result is a polity full of registered persons and thin civic trust, a country administered like a hotel and defended like a spreadsheet.

Belonging.

Bernard Lonergan gives the deeper grammar. In A Second Collection he writes that “Common commitments, finally, are the stuff of fidelity to one another, of loyalty to the group, of faith in divine providence and in the destiny of man; and without such commitments community has lost its heart and becomes just an aggregate.”¹ A legal aggregate can be counted, taxed, managed, and policed. It cannot yet be called a people in the fuller sense.

That is the burden of this essay. Citizenship is not exhausted by paperwork, rights administration, or access to state services. It means admission into a shared field of obligations, language, symbols, memory, and expectation. To speak of citizenship while severing it from that field is to speak of membership after the club, the feast, and the house have all been removed.

The Citizen Is Not A Customer

The customer asks what he is owed. The citizen must also ask what he owes.

A customer may depart when dissatisfied. A citizen bears with the burdens of a common world, not infinitely, not uncritically, but really. He pays taxes, serves on juries, defends institutions when they deserve defense, submits to law, corrects abuses, and restrains himself for the sake of goods no private contract could generate. Those duties only make sense inside a common life with enough moral thickness to render sacrifice intelligible.

Lonergan’s account of the human good is exact on this point. Individuals do not operate in isolation. Their actions are cooperative, patterned by roles and tasks, and situated within institutional frameworks such as “the family and manners (mores), society and education, the state and the law, the economy and technology, the church or sect.”² Citizenship, therefore, belongs within an order of cooperation already shaped by meanings, roles, and duties. It does not arise ex nihilo from a rights declaration.

The citizen is not the abstract individual with a government file attached. He is a person formed inside relationships, claims, inheritances, and expectations that precede him. Lonergan presses the social point in Insight, saying that a “person is no Leibnizian monad,” for he grows within prior bonds of affection, dependence, and shared life, and the “sense of belonging together provides the dynamic premise for common enterprise.”³

The passport still matters... but it cannot carry the whole burden of membership.

Law Needs Civic Friendship

Law can restrain conflict but cannot by itself create a people.

That is where civic friendship enters. This is easily sentimentalized, so it is worth being severe. Civic friendship does not mean universal affection or emotional warmth. It means the willingness to share a common world under common obligations with people who are neither kin nor intimate companions. It means enough mutual recognition that disagreement need not instantly become metaphysical war.

Lonergan’s definition of community is indispensable here when he asks “what is community[]” if not “just a number of men within a geographical frontier. It is an achievement of common meaning.”⁴ He then adds that common meaning becomes real “by will, especially by permanent dedication, in the love that makes families, in the loyalty that makes states, in the faith that makes religions.”⁵ Those lines say more about politics than many treatises. A state endures through loyalty, not sentimentally understood, but as willed participation in a common order of meaning.

Without that, law becomes a fence around a field no one loves. Fences matter. They do not plant crops.

Peterson reaches a related point from another angle. In We Who Wrestle with God, reflecting on Moses and Jethro, he writes that “An educated, responsible citizenry dispenses with slavish habits, adopts the mindset of true maturity, looks to the best of the past to guide the future, and forges its own fate.”⁶ That is a strong statement because it links citizenship to maturity, education, and responsibility rather than to passive inclusion. A people does not become free because the state leaves it alone. It becomes free when enough persons can govern themselves and one another under just forms.

That is civic friendship in adult terms. It can hardly be rendered low-resolution by calling it mere mood. It is more precisely moral competence shared widely enough to sustain public trust.

A Common World Before A Common State

Citizenship presupposes a common world.

That common world is carried by language, rites, memory, schools, symbols, law, and expectations of conduct. Your last four essays have already been moving toward this point. The school forms judgment. Language carries public truth. Ritual trains desire. Memory gives continuity. Citizenship is the political face of that deeper moral world.

Lonergan states the matter clearly in Method in Theology that “Common meaning is realized by decisions and choices, especially by permanent dedication, in the love that makes families, in the loyalty that makes states, in the faith that makes religions.”⁷ He continues: “it is only with respect to the available common meanings that the individual grows in experience, understanding, judgment.”⁸ One does not first become a fully formed autonomous self and then elect to join a polity. One grows into personhood inside available common meanings, and political membership is intelligible only within that prior field.

This is why neutrality cannot finally found citizenship. Procedure can regulate admission. It cannot generate shared meaning. Administration can process claims. It cannot teach what the anthem, the calendar, the memorial, the oath, the courtroom, the schoolhouse, and the family table are all for. Without those thicker carriers, citizenship becomes a shell. The state still stands, but the inner timbers begin to rot.

Peterson’s Rule I in Beyond Order touches the same issue with characteristic bluntness. “Social institutions are necessary,” he writes, because “sanity is knowing the rules of the social game, internalizing them, and following them.”⁹ He immediately adds that institutions are also insufficient, because inherited hierarchies need correction and creative renewal. That balance is useful here. Citizenship requires institutions sturdy enough to bind a people, but also living enough to be renewed without being dissolved.

A nation is not a vending machine. It is closer to a language or a liturgy, something into which one is initiated, corrected, and eventually entrusted.

Assimilation Requires Something Real

This is where the argument about assimilation becomes unavoidable.

Newcomers cannot assimilate into procedural emptiness. To ask for assimilation is already to claim that there is something real into which one may be incorporated, i.e., a common language, public manners, historical memory, moral expectations, civic rites, and a recognizable understanding of the common good. If these do not exist, or if they are treated as embarrassing residues, assimilation becomes a bureaucratic slogan for entry into administrative space.

That cannot hold.

The obligation, therefore, runs in two directions. Newcomers must enter something real. Hosts must still possess something coherent enough to hand on. A people cannot invite others into a home it has already gutted for resale. If all that remains is legal processing, then incorporation will be thin, and thin incorporation invites either privatized enclaves or administrative overreach.

Lonergan’s account of authenticity helps us here to regain out footing. He distinguishes the “minor authenticity” of the subject with respect to the tradition that nourishes him from the “major authenticity” by which history judges the tradition itself.¹⁰ This means host societies cannot simply worship themselves. Their inheritance too stands under judgment. Yet judgment is not liquidation. The tradition must be true enough to be handed on and living enough to admit correction.

Peterson, for his part, puts the reciprocal relation of state and citizen in unusually strong terms. “There is a necessarily reciprocal relation between state and citizen,” he writes, and “there is no manner in which the state is superordinate.”¹¹ He continues by insisting that the individual must sacrifice “atomized individuality to the tradition that constitutes maturity, and that unites us communally.”¹² That is especially useful here. It blocks two errors at once. The state is not supreme. The isolated individual is not sufficient. Maturity arrives through participation in a tradition capable of communal union.

That is also why assimilation cannot be reduced to bureaucratic tolerance. The issue is whether there remains a civic form substantial enough to make shared adulthood possible.

When Citizenship Becomes Procedure

When citizenship is reduced to administration, belonging becomes thin and supervision thickens.

Read that twice!

A procedural state can distribute documents, adjudicate claims, allocate benefits, and punish violations. Those are serious tasks. Yet if citizenship is conceived chiefly in those terms, the citizen slowly becomes a claimant before an apparatus rather than a participant in a common life. Once that occurs, solidarity weakens. The language of duty begins to sound archaic or oppressive. Shared symbols lose weight. Historical memory fragments. The state then compensates by increasing oversight, because what once held through culture and loyalty must now be held through process.

Lonergan describes the social basis of personal relations with helpful precision. In the cooperating community, he writes, persons are “bound together by their needs and by the common good of order,” by “commitments,” “roles,” and “tasks”; beyond feeling, “there is the substance of community,” a joining through “common experience,” “common or complementary insights,” “similar judgments of fact and of value,” and “parallel orientations in life.”¹³ Remove that substance, and public life does not become freer in the strong sense. It becomes brittle. People no longer know what they share, only what they may claim.

Then procedure swells like ivy over a crumbling wall.

Peterson offers a parallel diagnosis in his discussion of subsidiarity and distributed judgment. The healthy alternative to both tyranny and chaos, he says, is “decentralized and distributed hierarchical responsibility,” where “as much freedom and responsibility as possible should be devolved down the chain of command from highest to lowest.”¹⁴ That is relevant here because procedural citizenship moves in the opposite direction. It hollows out local responsibility and then asks higher systems to compensate. The result is dependence above and passivity below.

A polity can survive such strain for some time. It cannot flourish under it.

Peace Needs Embodied Membership

Civic peace depends on membership being culturally embodied, not merely legally processed. That means duties must be speakable. Symbols must be meaningful. Memory must be truthful. Rites must be intelligible. Friendship must be civic before it can become political peace.

Five things follow.

1. A citizen must be formed before he is processed. He must learn a language of public obligation, a grammar of loyalty, a discipline of self-restraint, a reverence for what deserves reverence, and a willingness to bear costs for goods he did not invent. Schools, families, churches, neighborhoods, and civic institutions all matter here, because the state arrives late. By the time a ministry tries to repair cohesion, the deeper work of membership has already succeeded or failed.

2. A polity must also know what it is asking people to join. Shared life cannot be built from pure abstraction. It needs concrete carriers such as holidays, memorials, courts, local loyalties, forms of public speech, historical memory, ordinary standards of decency. These are the hearthstones of citizenship (and a house without hearthstones soon feels like rented space).

3. Newcomers must then be invited into that real common life, not into emptiness and not into fantasy. Hosts must teach, exemplify, and preserve enough coherence for that invitation to mean something. Newcomers must accept the discipline of entry into a civic grammar not of their own making. Without both sides, admission may occur while membership does not.

4. Procedure must remain servant, not master. A state needs forms, records, offices, and courts. Yet once these become substitutes for solidarity, the common life starts to resemble a waiting room, that is, orderly, lit, impersonal, and spiritually vacant.

5. Finally, civic friendship must be recovered as a serious political good. Law can restrain enemies. A republic requires more than restrained enemies.

Peace. A country remains peaceful when its citizens are more than registered individuals under supervision. It remains peaceful when they still know what they share, what they owe, and why the common life is worth bearing together. That knowledge does not emerge from administration alone. It emerges from embodied membership, from the patient weaving of duties, rites, symbols, memory, and trust into a form of life that can still command loyalty without demanding servility.

Citizenship, then, is not a benefits package delivered by the state. It is a disciplined participation in a common world. Where that world remains intelligible, peace has a chance. Where it is forgotten, paperwork multiplies and fellowship recedes.

And no polity can file its way back to friendship.

1. Bernard Lonergan, A Second Collection (CWL 13), 5.

2. Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology (CWL 14), 48.

3. Bernard Lonergan, Insight (CWL 3), 238.

4. Bernard Lonergan, Collection (CWL 4), 226.

5. Ibid.

6. Jordan B. Peterson, We Who Wrestle with God, 379.

7. Lonergan, Method in Theology, 77.

8. Ibid.

9. Jordan B. Peterson, Beyond Order, 28.

10. Lonergan, Collection, 227; Method in Theology, 77.

11. Peterson, We Who Wrestle with God, 34.

12. Ibid.

13. Lonergan, Method in Theology, 50.

14. Peterson, We Who Wrestle with God, 380.