The midterm elections are coming up and at least some of the rhetoric seems to anticipate civil war. Before you invest in a new survivalist shelter, consider this: The turnout in Texas’s primary elections soared to almost 18 percent.
“Soared” is not facetious. The 2022 turnout was the best in the last six midterms.
Why, in a state where we’re so wound up we’re talking about drilling militias on the courthouse square, do 80-plus percent of the registered voters stay home?
The problem, oddly enough, involves reverence.
Paul Woodruff, a philosopher at the University of Texas, pointed that out in his book Reverence more than 20 years ago.
Woodruff noticed that a lot of people who argue about politics don’t vote. These people are interested in the bottom line. They understand that one vote is highly unlikely to make a difference. So they advocate and donate — but spare themselves the wait at the polls.
What’s missing, in Woodruff’s view, is the cardinal virtue of reverence.
Voting is a ceremony. It is an expression of reverence — not for our government or our laws, not for anything manmade, but for the very idea that ordinary people are more important than the juggernauts who seem to rule them.
If you’re just worried about the bottom line, you skip the lines. If you have a sense that the democracy is about something larger, you commit yourself to the ceremonies, great and small, that honor it. You have reverence for that mysterious, hard-to-define, beautiful thing — and you show it.
As the campaign heats up, I’d like to see people talking a little less about civil war and little more about reverence. Obviously, the people who are shouting and threatening care about something. Reverence is a way of thinking about that care to see how it stacks up.
• Source: Paul Woodruff, Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue; Oxford University Press, 2001.
I’m going to look for that book. I know Paul Woodruff’s translations of Sophocles well.
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