More than Merely Listening

I am deeply grateful to Laurie Johnston for the care and seriousness with which she approached the French experience of the cahiers de doléances, and for situating them within a broader reflection on democracy, populism, and human dignity (“Grievance Politics, French Style,” January).

What struck me most in her article is not the attention paid to my own journey, but the question it leaves open: What becomes of a democracy when citizens speak with sincerity and effort, and institutions fail to respond?

The tragedy of the doléances is not that they expressed anger, but that they expressed trust. People wrote because they believed their words might matter. When those words were archived, forgotten, or treated as a communication issue rather than as a democratic resource, something essential was broken.

My conviction—shared by many mayors, local officials, and citizens—is that democracy cannot survive if it is reduced to elections alone. It must be practiced, learned, and organized locally, through durable spaces of deliberation and collective intelligence. Listening is not merely a moral stance; it is an institutional responsibility.

It is in this spirit that we are currently working to establish what we call Communal General Assemblies (États généraux communaux): open, ongoing local frameworks in which citizens are not simply consulted, but invited to debate, formulate, prioritize, and collectively follow proposals over time. This is not conceived as a one-off participatory exercise, but as a form of democratic infrastructure—designed for the long term—capable of linking citizens’ voices to public action.

The French experience is not unique. Across many democracies, the distance between citizens and power continues to grow. The challenge before us is therefore not simply to “listen to grievances,” but to design democratic processes that give them continuity, visibility, and political consequence.

If the doléances teach us anything, it’s that ordinary citizens, when taken seriously, are capable of articulating thoughtful, convergent, and constructive demands. The real question is whether our institutions are ready to trust them.

Fabrice Dalongeville,
Mayor of Auger-Saint-Vincent
France

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Necessary Humility

As a retired surgeon who trained at St. Vincent’s Hospital in the early eighties when HIV overwhelmed Greenwich Village, the nation, and the world, I am now involved with firearm-injury prevention, another public-health epidemic. I was very interested in Jason Blakely’s discussion of Macedo and Lee’s In Covid’s Wake, a postmortem of our country’s COVID response (“What the Experts Got Wrong,” October).

I thoroughly agree that the embrace of an authoritarian approach triggered by overestimating the mortality rate was, like the war on terror, a mistake with long-lasting effects. One effect missing from this excellent discussion was the destruction of trust in the medical and public-health establishment. Without trust, civilized society becomes more dangerous and possibly nonfunctional. Trust in institutions, government, media, religious authority, and technocracy is at a historic low.

As Blakely argues, a lack of intellectual humility (hubris) coupled with fear (“an overabundance of caution”) must still be acknowledged and changed. Public-health experts need to be “checked and balanced,” but I choked when Blakely proposed that congresspeople, politicians—the least trusted professional class—are the best representatives of the “interests and perspectives of ordinary people.” I couldn’t disagree with that more.

“We believe that our own tribe needs to introspect, admit its biases and shortcomings, and strive to do better.” Necessary to rebuilding trust is to always remember the importance of intellectual humility. Easier said than done. As I was taught in medical school in the seventies, half of what we “know” is wrong, and we don’t know which half. The devil as always is in the details, but the first step is honest acknowledgement of our mistakes and ignorance.

Edward T. Chory, MD
Lancaster, Pa.

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In Kant’s Defense

I wish to thank you for publishing the text of the talk delivered by Sohrab Ahmari and the four responses to it (“The Future of Christian Democracy,” December). It was refreshing to see differences in outlook expressed in a constructive manner.

It should be pointed out, though, that Ahmari falls into the trap of perpetuating a mistaken and caricatured view of Kant’s ethics when he says that Kant’s view of morality is that it “should be ‘hard.’” In fact, Kant did not categorically contrast morality to nature and inclination, as the paragraph implies.

Ahmari ends the paragraph with well known verses he attributes to “the poet Schelling”: “I’d serve my friends, but alas, I do so with pleasure, / And so I am often worried by the fact that I am not virtuous.” In fact, the verses are Friedrich Schiller’s and not Schelling’s, who in any case was a philosopher and not a poet. Ahmari is not the first to have mistaken these verses for an earnest representation of Kantian ethics. On the contrary, they are Schiller’s representation of the caricature of Kant.

J. M. Baker Jr.
Malvern, Pa.    

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Impossible to Pigeonhole

It is interesting that theologians and others are still debating where Hans Urs von Balthasar fits on the theological spectrum (“Raising the Bastions,” Anne M. Carpenter, January). I remember thirty years ago when I was studying systematic theology in graduate school and we students were trying to discern the same thing. Apparently, his theological stance is as mystifying today for some as it was then. But it is all a tempest in a teapot, because God and Jesus will never be pigeonholed!

Deacon Bartholomew Merella
Bowie, Md.