My father's vision of civic compassion was premised on rejecting the language of unity, as too "contaminated by propagandistic usage." If anything, his solution was the opposite—to engage respectfully, to imaginatively stand in the places of others, to inhabit worlds that initially seem strange and even threatening, to acknowledge one's inability to be as wise, as generous, or as open as pluralistic democracy requires. To resist the slide into cruelty is perhaps the most important educational goal of a people.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "My father's vision of civic compassion was premised on rejecting the language of unity, as too "contaminated by propagandistic usage." If anything, his solution was the opposite—to engage respectfully, to imaginatively stand in the places of others, to inhabit worlds that initially seem strange and even threatening, to acknowledge one's inability to be as wise, as generous, or as open as pluralistic democracy requires. To resist the slide into cruelty is perhaps the most important educational goal of a people." in the context of "Chapter 7: "Reclaiming History". Commenting on a quotation from Manfred Stanley's scholarly article "The Mystery of the Commons: On the Indispensability of Civic Rhetoric" (1983). The quotation says (in part): "Compassion is more concrete and a more reasonable expectation to have of people. Mutual estrangement, and stereotypical fantasy exist between the extremes of our class structure, between several ethnic and racial groups and between considerable numbers of males and females. This presents a major challenge for civic education, but it is not one of inducing some unrealistic and sentimental attitude of 'unity.'"" to mean that wisdom is timeless.