Learning to Live in Democracy

Written by Melvin Singh, Senior Analyst, SFU Centre for Dialogue

When democracies begin to fray, we usually look first to institutions. Are elections fair? Are courts independent? Are the plethora of safeguards holding? These are the right questions, but they are not the only ones. 

This focus on institutions quietly assumes something about the people living inside them: that citizens have the capacity to tolerate disagreement, evaluate competing claims, and remain in relationship with the people whose views they reject. Safe to say, these are not capacities that appear automatically (or magically). Alongside reinforcing our institutions, it’s important to pay attention to the culture those systems depend on - the everyday habits and capacities that make democratic life possible, especially under strain.

As a Senior Analyst at Simon Fraser University’s Centre for Dialogue, my work sits closely to questions of dialogue and democracy. At the same time, through my graduate studies in SFU’s MEd in Contemplative Inquiry, I’ve been paying more attention to how I meet discomfort, where I tense up, where I rush to certainty, where I quietly want out. Those two lines of attention have started to overlap, like a low-grade hum.

For instance, at a workshop for the ongoing refresh of our guide Beyond Inclusion: Equity in Public Engagement,  someone posed a question that stuck with me: what do we do about the parts of us that don’t actually want to be inclusive? Not in principle, but in practice. How do we deal with the defensive parts, the tired parts, the parts that are irritated or the ones that know the right language but still resist the work?

I remember thinking out loud that many of the people I’ve seen show up as genuinely inclusive over time weren’t just well-informed or empathetic. They had also done a lot of inner work. They have some capacity to notice themselves before reacting, to stay present when they feel uncomfortable, defensive, or unsure. Sometimes it feels like we focus hard on the inclusion part without paying much attention to the inner and relational capacities required to sustain it - like trying to design something on Canva using Windows 95. 

Political thinkers have warned about the gap in democratic capacities for decades. Hannah Arendt worried about the erosion of judgment: our ability to think and discern reality together in the public sphere. Timothy Snyder has written about how democratic decline often begins when everyday civic habits start to decay: truth telling, institutional responsibility, and a shared sense of reality.

It feels connected to what some refer to as small-d democracy. Not Democracy as an idea or a system, but democracy as a living experience: how we handle disagreement, how we relate across difference, how we behave when we feel threatened or blamed or uncertain, how we respond when the ground beneath us feels unstable. In a recent op-ed on strengthening Canadian democracy, my colleague Robin Prest joins democratic leaders across Canada to recommend not only structural changes, but also efforts to foster “democracy fitness” - the everyday civic capacities that allow people to engage across differences and participate in shared problem-solving. Similarly, a Danish initiative called Democracy Fitness treats democratic participation like a muscle: proposing exercises that help groups practice listening, disagreement, and speaking up in everyday civic life. The metaphor is useful because it suggests democracy isn’t only something we design, rather it’s something we practice…or forget to.

One practice we can learn from contemplative inquiry is an attention to the moment before reaction takes over, before irritation turns into contempt, before fear hardens into certainty and before disagreement slips into dehumanization. The moment is small but defining.

From a contemplative education perspective these aren’t moral achievements, they’re ongoing practices. They involve noticing how quickly the body reacts, how fast the mind reaches for certainty, how easily we turn people into symbols. For me this has meant seeing more clearly how my participation in shared life is shaped not just by my values, but by my nervous system, my habits, how I relate to others and the stories I carry without noticing. It’suncomfortable, which is also… kind of the point.

These capacities - listening, emotional regulation, humility, curiosity, the ability to stay with tension/ ”pausing” - are often described as “soft skills.” In a time of democratic regression/decline, I’m not sure “soft” is the right word anymore. If the very fabric of democratic culture depends on them, they may actually be among the hardest civic skills we have.

I want to be careful here, because “inner work” can get weaponized. The burden too often slides onto people who have already carried more than their share, particularly Indigenous people and marginalized communities living with the ongoing impacts of systemic violence and all the wonderful -ism’s that come with it. Many have been forced to practice restraint, resilience, and relational responsibility at risk of dire consequences. If anything, the work I’m pointing to belongs most urgently to those of us who benefit from democratic systems yet struggle to sit with accountability, uncertainty, or loss of control without reacting defensively.

Now, the “pause” isn’t entirely abstract. Sometimes it’s as simple as slowing a conversation so people have a moment to notice their reactions before speaking. In classrooms it might look like a few minutes of reflective writing before discussion. In dialogue spaces it often comes down to how the room is held, whether people listen before responding, whether disagreement is allowed to sit for a while, whether the emotional temperature is acknowledged. These are small design choices, but they create the conditions for reaction to soften into reflection. What that pause might make possible is fairly ordinary: a student staying engaged in a difficult seminar discussion without immediately sorting people into moral camps; a citizen, or someone with a large online platform, recognizing that attention is power and being careful about sharing political content that simply confirms their outrage; a public servant protecting institutional responsibility even when political winds shift; advocacy groups pursuing justice without slipping into the same dehumanization that corrodes democratic culture; facilitators helping people stay in the room long enough for complexity to emerge. None of this is heroic, but it may be part of how democratic culture either strengthens or erodes over time.

If we invest in upholding the external structures of democracy, we must also strengthen the inner and relational capacities that allow those structures to hold, especially in moments of fear, stress, and decline. History keeps reminding us that democratic backsliding doesn’t begin only with broken institutions; it begins when people lose the ability to live with difference and uncertainty without reaching for the worst versions of themselves.