Civic voluntarism substitutes feeling effective for actually changing institutions.

Evidence

Being a volunteer meant not only convincing oneself that good citizenship was possible, but convincing other people as well, and creating public contexts in which regular people could get together to work on community projects. It meant convincing people that good citizenship is possible today, right now, in the society as it is, not in some dreamworld. Rather than try to change the institutions that kept them feeling powerless (because that could require too much depressing discussion), volunteers tried to change their feelings. Good citizenship was primarily a matter of feeling good about the community and nation, and showing one’s neighbors that people care and can be e¡ective; cultivating the feeling of having an impact'' was, in an important way, the same for them as hav(ing)² an impact.”As a refrain went, “if everyone cared…” Working on feelings was, itself, the goal. — Nina Eliasoph, “Close to home”, 82

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The collapse of ‘having an impact’ into ‘having an impact’ feeling — where working on feelings IS the goal — redefines a whole mode of civic engagement in one counterintuitive stroke. This is paradigm-shifting material about how political powerlessness is metabolized.
• XREF: Connects strongly to the evasive-function account and to 2001/Parable-of-the-Sower themes of voluntarism as displaced politics, and to the ADDENDUM piece on trees-as-infrastructure where local doing substitutes for systemic change. — connects to: Democratic institutions presuppose the civic spirit they are meant to create. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 702; Civic effort targets feelings of futility more than its causes — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics: how Americans…, 285
• SEED: Article angle: civic participation as emotional self-regulation — the case that modern volunteerism functions to quiet the anxiety of powerlessness rather than to produce change, with the ‘if everyone cared’ refrain as its creed.
• corroborated: 5 independent passages support this claim — Nina Eliasoph, “Close to home”: The work of avoiding…, 82

Related

• Civic effort targets feelings of futility more than its causes (similarity 0.85)
• Volunteers deliberately shrink concerns into unpolitical tasks to sustain a message of hope (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• Democratic institutions presuppose the civic spirit they are meant to create. #corroborates (0.78) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 702
• Civic effort targets feelings of futility more than its causes #corroborates (0.72) — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics, 285