Illuminating Pathways to Civic Purpose

A multitiered sculpture entitled The Illuminated Crowd adorns a popular street in Montreal. The sculpture depicts a diverse group of people confronting a new idea. The people on the foremost tier, where the sunlight shines brightest, are best positioned to see and appreciate the idea for what it is. There is a collective attention among them, with all eyes concentrating on the spectacle ahead. Yet, the view forward is increasingly obscured for people standing on the lower tiers. Heavy shadows gradually swell and eventually blanket those positioned furthest behind, leaving them seemingly disorganized, disengaged, and directionless. The spread of new scientific insights bears a resemblance to the narrative embodied by this sculpture. New ideas rarely penetrate society deeply enough to impact all of its members uniformly. Even seemingly well-known strategies for promoting greater happiness, health, and longevity are not embraced or enacted by everyone. Indeed, there are discernible impediments, both personal and structural in nature, that influence how and by whom new ideas are accessed, construed, and utilized. Thus, whenever scholars advance promising new ideas, a parallel need emerges to consider the barriers that prevent it from being fully actualized by all potential beneficiaries. In what follows, I attend to this need in the context of Malin, Ballard, and Damon’s target article [this issue], by first acknowledging the insights they advance and then considering some potential impediments to the proliferation of those insights. I take this approach not to leverage opposition to the ideas they put forward but instead to add further dimensionality to them in hopes of broadening their impact.