 |
Essays
on Civic Renewal
National
Commission on Civic Renewal First Plenary Session, continued
Comments
from Senior Advisory Council
Contents
Panel
One: Americans' Civic and Moral Beliefs
Panel
Two: Social Trust and Civic Engagement
Panel Three: Race, Ethnicity, and Civic
Cohesion
Panel Four: National Community and Civil
Society
Comments from Senior Advisory Council
Comments
From Senior Advisory Council
Amy Gutmann
Harry Boyte
Carmen Sirianni
Amitai Etzioni
Chris Gates
Dennis Thompson
Georgia Sorenson
Will Marshall
Os Guiness
Don Eberly
Adam Meyerson
GALSTON:
Let's now enter into the last section of our proceedings today.
Let me just say that we have an extraordinarily distinguished
Senior Advisory Council, and the entire Commission is grateful.
I'll have the opportunity to draw on your wisdom personally. But
I wanted to give the members of the Senior Advisory Council who
have been here today an opportunity to make brief statements of
advice or reaction to the Commission itself. By "brief"—I
know this is going to seem very unfair, but there's nothing else
I can do—I mean something on the order of two minutes apiece.
This is not a command performance; you may pass. But I'd like
to offer this opportunity.
AMY
GUTMANN:
If there's any enemy of civic renewal, it's cynicism, and one
of the things that was wonderful about today's session was the
almost total lack of cynicism among our presenters or witnesses
and the members of the Commission. But cynicism is fairly . .
. In the public discourse that we see about our problems, there
is a high degree of underlying cynicism expressed. And I would
just make two points, non-cynical points, that may be simple in
a sense but that I think speak to what's wrong, what this Commission
could do in its spirit for civic renewal against cynicism. So
they may seem like self-evident truths. My favorite cartoon is
a cartoon of a little boy tugging on the coattails of Thomas Jefferson
and saying, "If you take these truths to be self-evident, then
why do you keep harping on them so much?" It may be good to harp
on them. We may have to harp on some self-evident truths. Two
come to my mind as a consequence of this.
The first
is the real problem of a lack of civility in a lot of our civic
engagements. That is, you get simplicity through sound-bites rather
than facing up to the complexity of our problems and our competing
values that are at stake. And many of our witnesses spoke in non-relativist
terms about the important values underlying civic renewal. But
the problems of civic renewal are not simple, and I think one
of the things this Commission can do is speak, not in sound-bites,
to the complexity of those problems, and the values, the values
that underlie those complexities and how we can navigate those
values.
Secondly,
feeding the cynicism, and again the other enemy of civic renewal,
to which several people have spoken eloquently, is segregation,
whether it be economic, ethnic, racial, or religious—the
idea that our interests are purely separate or somehow that we
should segregate into these competing groups rather than that
there is synergy among us, and that we really do have some very
common values and some common projects to navigate our disagreements.
We're not all going to agree. So I would just recommend, in listening
to this, that we focus on civility and the synergy among us, rather
than cynicism and segregation.
HARRY
BOYTE: I'm with the Center for Democracy and Citizenship
at the University of Minnesota. And for the last decade, we've
been working on the premise that America is a vast laboratory
of civic experiment whose lessons, and especially the broader
lessons, haven't really been harvested for, especially by academic
discussion of politics and democracy and civic engagement.
As Bill
Schambra mentioned, one of our initiatives and partnerships has
been with the Cooperative Extension System. And this work has
returned us to a large concept. So I want to make a specific point
about the Cooperative Extension System, and a larger part about
the citizenship, and then make a couple of recommendations.
Mary Mintz,
who was the first extension sociologist—she was at Louisiana
State in the '20s and '30s—worried about poor communities
being drawn away from what's happening there and wanting to go
to the big city. She developed something called the Community
Organization Movement and Extension. It was closely associated
with terms like "public work" and the "commonwealth." Mary Mintz
said, "So-called social workers cannot hammer a community into
shape. It must grow of its own volition. Always, if a community
grows, it must do so from the inside, from some force within itself,
just as everything in nature grows. It must push its roots down
deep into its own soil." Now, Mary Mintz and extension workers
in the South worked in hundreds and hundreds of poor communities
as what they called a leavening force. In our terms, it's a catalytic
notion of government work. And in addition to models like the
GI Bill, there is a rich tradition of government work as catalyzing
public work of the citizens.
Now, "public
work of the citizens" in our terms suggests notions of cooperative
effort by citizens, a mix of people, that produces something of
lasting public significance. It's very closely associated with
the tradition of the commonwealth, which was once a vibrant language
in America, and notions of productive citizenship which simply
have a residual echoing effect, but once was the heart of citizenship.
It supplements, it doesn't detract from, but it supplements, notions
of the citizen as a voter or a volunteer or an advocate or an
activist. A citizen, in this term, is a producer, someone who
helps to create the country. And that notion of citizenship, which
was also embodied on a large scale in something like the Civilian
Conservation Corps, and today is embodied in something like the
Youth Conservation Corps in Milwaukee, which directly descends
from that tradition, has several civic benefits that seem to me
extraordinarily important.
It draws
attention to product. A great deal of civic discussion these days
focuses on process, but what is actually produced to public use,
public things? It creates a way to bridge cultural and racial
and economic divides that otherwise you can't adjudicate simply
by preaching that people should understand each other. But when
people have common work to do, people can work together with people
they don't like, that make them uncomfortable, that they disagree
with. It develops certain capacities that only work develops,
a sense of discipline. One of the strong stories of the CCC veterans
we've interviewed is they talked about developing a sense of a
love of work and also a patriotism, a sense of citizenship, but
a kind of boldness and confidence and sense that they own the
country and they own the places they helped to create. It also
draws attention to traditions of academic work and professional
practice and government that have really largely been eclipsed
in a culture which, from both the marketplace and the professional
side, has come to think of work as something that specialists
do, especially work in the public benefit—something that
professionals do, or something that's best left to the marketplace.
My recommendations
for the Commission are fourfold on this tradition of public work.
One, that we need work in reviving, in making visible, what I
think most broadly is called a commonwealth understanding of American
citizenship. This was a favorite word of Theodore Roosevelt as
well as populists like Floyd Olson. And the histories, the specific
histories . . . I mean, at the Center, we've been struck by the
variety of institutions which actually used the term "public work
for the commonwealth" in the '30s and '40s. And the '50s was a
pivotal decade.
Secondly,
that there be an inventory of public work experiences and projects
and examples around the country.
Thirdly,
that the positive roles of government, in catalyzing and providing
tools for public work, be analyzed, and some strong examples be
lifted up.
And fourthly,
I think if we're really talking about changing the human service
and educational and government worlds and foundation worlds to
become attentive to public work, questions of evaluation in an
information and service society are really critical. And I think
we need a strong, bracing, serious discussion of how do you evaluate
initiatives and efforts and foundation work that catalyzes and
supports public work.
CARMEN
SIRIANNI: I'm Carmen Sirianni, I teach at the Heller
School at Brandeis University, and I'm the editor-in-chief of
a national collaborative project on civic education and the Civic
Practices Network, that looks at some of the examples out there
today that we might learn a lot from. Let me make two brief points.
One is about complexity, and one is about social learning—both
of them over, let's say, a period of the last 30 or 40 years.
This debate—and
certainly a lot of the public attention began with the kind of
analysis that Bob Putnam laid out—is that maybe we have developed
a deficit in our civic capacity, social capital, etc. Critics
come back and say, "Well, maybe that's true and maybe not. Things
in Philadelphia, etc., and other places show that it's not." And
I tend to agree with the optimists overall in terms of the quantity.
But a number of people have pointed this out—Elaine [Chao]
earlier, Anna Faith Jones—we may be in a period, and I believe
we are, on a whole range of dimension of problems, where the complexity
of the problems is outrunning, or has been outrunning, the civic
capacities that we need to engage people in productive problem-solving,
and to engage civic associations with elected officials in constructive
problem-solving. We may not have a deficit in participation, but
we may have a deficit, even if the optimists are fully right.
We still need to be involved in kind of reinventing our civic
associations in a variety of ways.
On the issue
of federal control and local involvement, I want to follow up
on what Theda was saying but also Bill Schambra. Take the environment.
In the 1960s, we had no local civic capacities to speak of, to
respond to the environmental crisis. And we had extremely crude
tools at the federal level to respond—we didn't know how
these things would work. We had very, very little capacity at
the state and local government level to regulate, and we had very
little willingness by state and local officials to engage citizens.
The federal
government comes along in response to the environmental movement,
etc., and number 1, mandates citizen participation—which
in fact didn't work very well, at least for a decade. But lo and
behold, there are many people involved in those programs, from
the League of Women Voters to the Sierra Club to all kinds of
people, who, over a period of a decade, and in collaboration with
federal officials, learned how to do it better. They developed
more collaborative models, developed more of what DeWitt John
calls a "civic environmentalism," which is now one of the core
recommendations of a report to Congress by the National Academy
of Public Administration—a very very coherent set of things.
Now maybe
Congress will learn how to do that, and maybe state governments
will learn better, and maybe they won't. But it's not because
what the federal government tried to do early on was necessarily
so wrong. And, in fact, I think that virtually everybody who has
studied civic environmentalism . . . and have a tremendous flowering
of all kinds of forums at the local level. Many of them are not
part of a national association. But they wouldn't be there if
the federal government hadn't come in and said, "You clean up
your act or we're going to punish you."
Nixon supported
that. The first administrator at EPA, William Ruckelshaus, who
believed in participatory democracy, nevertheless took a punishment-oriented
approach, and it was only in response to those kinds of strong
pressures that at the local level, multiple actors said, "We have
to start doing this differently." And in fact, they've been learning
for the last decade or more how to do it differently. And the
idea that there's some kind of a deficit—there's tremendous
growth of social capital in that arena, and a tremendous amount
of social learning. Will it be enough? I don't know. But I certainly
hate to see what happened in that arena denigrated in some way
by some kind of global cynicism and, you know, the erosion of
our social capital. It's simply not true in the environmental
arena.
AMITAI
ETZIONI:
I work for the Communitarian Network. First, Bill, I must thank
you for a wonderful, wonderful day. I rarely stay to the end of
meetings, and it was so much to learn, I've stayed here.
Three brief
suggestions. One may sound scholastic but I don't mean it this
way. I think we need a quick collection of definitions of the
civic society. Some people, as we see from the kit, suggest that
civic society is a society in which people talk to each other
nicely. I think that's certainly useful. Some see it a little
more broadly, as including voluntary association—the de Tocqueville
point. And there's another large variety of definitions.
The one
which I would like to call specific attention to is, Do we include
in the definition or not what I would call the good society—a
society which upholds core values. Sometimes when you read the
text, people weave in and out, from talking civilly to voting
regularly to going to meetings to maintaining the moral infrastructure.
I'm not interested here in definitions for their own sake. If
that is going to be included, terrific; then you will have to
attend to the moral infrastructure—what is the state of the
family and place of worship and the communities, not only voluntary
association. Or you may conclude by recommending there be another
commission on the good society. But in either case, I think we
should not simply overlook the various notions of what different
people think is our most urgent agenda.
Second,
this wonderful panel we just had, I think really carries us forward
about this relationship between the various levels of society.
Now, I think we need more discussion of how far devolution has
to go. There are some people who argued that devolution means
moving things from one government to fifty governments, and that's
where it should end. That may not necessarily reduce the number
of bureaucrats, civil service regulations, or even increase civic
integrity. Do we need to move farther, to local government, or
better yet, to community and development corporations and such?
I think that true devolution means returning to the communities,
and not shifting things between various levels of government.
There is
a wonderful way of studying this: the Public Health Service has
worked on all these levels. There are some things they do that
have to go through the state; they will not touch anybody below
the state level. Other things they do with local governments,
and other things they do very much with local groups. Which one
is more civic? I would suggest the last one. But that's exactly
in this discussion, including the question, Which functions have
to be devolved how far?
And last,
I'm second to none on the importance of community, and I very
very much agree that we should not do harm and that often they're
doing quite well on their own and better. But let me close with
a quick analogue. If you had somebody tied down to a hospital
bed for 30 years, some kind of crazy treatment, and obviously
his muscles would atrophy, and then one day you said, "My God,
the best therapy is for the person to walk on their own," you
couldn't go up to his bed and say, "Okay, get up and start walking."
So if it's true that for at least a generation, we had this bureaucratic
project, there are some communities that atrophied—actually
quite a few of them, I would say half of them. And before they
can walk again, at least we have to take out the harm left behind.
So some of the things suggested, which I would call enabling and
priming communities again, I think have to be considered only
if you take seriously the notion that we caused so much harm to
some neighborhoods and part of the country. But the ultimate purpose
should be that all communities should be fully able and resourced
to do things on their own. I think it is a wonderful thing.
CHRIS
GATES:
I'm Chris Gates, I'm president of the National Civic League, and
we have been working in this field as well, in the vineyards of
civic renewal, for the last few years. And Bill Bradley has just
joined our board as the new chair of our organization, and we
will continue to be active and to partner around these efforts.
I think
it would be easy after today's conversation to be discouraged
and to think that we face an incredible dilemma and potentially
insurmountable dilemma. But I think it's important for us to remember
the words of Bill Schambra, Anna Faith Jones, Bob Woodson, Elaine
Chao, some of the people who have really tried to force us to
focus back on the activity that's going on in America's communities.
I think it's easy for commissions like this, and all of us who
are in this business—it's easy for us to forget the real
simple and fundamental fact, and that is that societal change
doesn't occur in Washington, D.C.; it's codified in Washington,
DC And societal change actually occurs on blocks in neighborhoods
in communities all across this country. And the truth is that
a new model of citizenship and a new model of democracy is emerging
as we speak, in America's neighborhoods and in America's communities.
It's a much more muscular model of community, a much more muscular
model of citizenship and democracy than we've had in the past
where citizens have really taken up on the ties, a call to the
communitarian movement, to become more involved in their own democracy
and not be the passive actors that they once were. And this movement
exists. It's out there, it's real, but it is completely off the
screen of our political parties, of the media, and of the powers
that be. And if you want to take a different twist on the elite
conversation, you can say that the debate that's going on between
the elites in this country is an irrelevant debate because it's
about an old model, and it doesn't reflect what's really going
on in our communities.
So I guess
I would urge us, as we move forward in this project, to have the
conversation that we have through the lens of community, and to
think about real people dealing with real challenges in their
lives. And if you do that, it gives you a different take. For
instance, on this last conversation that we had about the role
of government in society. When you talk to real people in communities
that are working to solve problems, this debate is theoretical
and it sort of doesn't matter to them, because they say, "Well,
of course we need government. Government helps us do things."
Can government be the same kind of government it once was? "Well,
of course not; it's got to be a very different kind of government.
But it shouldn't just go away. We need something there, but it's
got to be a different form because everybody recognizes it can't
do business as it used to do business." But they have that conversation
and then move on and don't sort of continue that debate.
And I think,
in the same way, we need to not get stuck in some of the false
theoretical choices between representative democracy or direct
democracy, and recognize that the answers are really starting
to emerge, and what we need to know about civic renewal in this
society can probably be taught to us by thousands of neighborhood
activists that are already out there. We've created something
under John Gardner's leadership called the Alliance for National
Renewal, and we have 175 organizations that are now members of
that. We have a home page that . . . the purpose of our home page
is to simply tell stories, sort of real-life stories of people
who have turned communities around, with a name and an e-mail
address and a phone number of a person at the bottom of it. And
very shortly, this thing has gone from getting a hundred hits
a week to 7,000 hits a week to, at last measure, 10,000 hits a
week. And that's incredibly encouraging, because that tells us
that people are out there looking for real-life examples of how
to make things better. And I think as we do that at this level
with this big, broad national commission, that what we really
need to do is focus on what's going on in America's communities.
DENNIS
THOMPSON: I've been worrying
for 25 years, since I wrote my book on the democratic citizen,
about the theories and principles involved in citizen participation
and political morality. My advice to the Commission, though, is
to be untheoretical, indeed unprincipled. Now, to some degree,
that follows in the spirit of what you were just saying. But,
in fact, I think even the approach that says we should look at
localities, that's where the real things are going on, can be
a theory, and may not be actually the right answer to particular
problems. I think just as the national Progressive idea, when
it becomes an ideology, is also a theory that can lead you astray,
especially if you're a commission and want to produce results
that people are going to pay attention to.
So I would
say, first of all, don't get hung up on debates between federalism
and localities, national versus local. A more pragmatic approach,
as Senator Nunn suggested, may be appropriate and something you
could all agree on.
Second,
I would say, look at case studies, pilot programs, local and national.
National organizations can think small, too, and national legislation
can be small in scale even though it spreads out across the country.
Which ones work, which ones don't?
Another
implication that follows from this: Pay more attention to prescription
rather than diagnosis. Philosophers and social scientists both
like to look at deep causes. What really explains the variance
in particular problems may not be—it may be, in fact, the
most important cause—breakdown in families, racism, social
inequality—but it's not necessarily the factor in society
which we can get a handle on and which, as a Commission, you can
recommend to do something about. Maybe something much smaller—civic
education in the schools (that's big enough), or Americorps, or
some small project where you'll get a lot of public intellectuals
saying, "That doesn't go to the deeper causes in society." And
they'll be right—it doesn't. But that may be exactly the
reason that it might succeed.
And finally,
that means treating some of the symptoms (to carry this medical
analogy) may be more important than trying to cure the disease—maybe
the most we can do. But often, if you cure the symptoms. . . .
I go back to something Amy [Gutmann] said at the beginning. Contrary
to my colleague, Michael Sandel, who thinks that we miss the point
when we worry about civility in discourse (and I agree, that's
not the deeper cause—-that we've lost control of our lives
to the multinational corporations may be a deeper cause), but
one good place to start would be to start as you all did today,
talking civilly to one another. And that doesn't mean not being
confrontational. As certainly one of the co-chairs showed us today,
you can be civil and actually quite pointed and sharp. It seems
that's not a bad place to start. [laughter] That's also a good
technique—I left it uncertain as to which chair.
In any case,
those sorts of ways of thinking small and being unprincipled,
if you like, may be the best prescription for moving ahead on
a project that I think couldn't be more important than this Commission.
GEORGIA
SORENSON: I'm Georgia Sorenson from the University
of Maryland and I'm the director of the Academy of Leadership.
And just two quick points, Bill. Thank you very much for inviting
me. Even though this is my field and I thought I knew it all,
I've really learned a lot today, and thank you so much for the
opportunity.
One thing
I absolutely do know, having worked with undergraduates for 17
years, is that they are not cynical. And I think that we as 50-year-old
elite academics—you know, I include myself, obviously—might
label it cynical, but it is not cynical. And so I would invite
the Commission to work and speak and invite young people into
the dialogue, because they have a perspective that's really quite
different.
Secondly,
I've been working with a group of 50 leadership scholars, the
country's most eminent leadership scholars, for about four years,
and these include people like James MacGregor Burns and Barbara
Kellerman and Warren Bennis and John Gardner and folks like that.
But we also have a complementary group of practitioners, people
in the community, and we've been doing this dialogue for about
three years. And I would have to concur with Chris from the National
Civic League that there's a lot going on beneath the screen.
The thing
that I found most interesting today was that, as Dr. Bennett said,
that social scientists don't agree and we're not going to agree
today. And even the idea that associational life is declining
or increasing, or it's below the screen or above the screen—I
don't know that we're going to be able to have a full and complete
answer, certainly not today.
But the
part I found interesting is not so much where the ideas collide,
but where that space in between offered a question. And I thought
that Billy Shore asked a very interesting question of Professor
Rahn, which had to do with the nature of the associations in terms
of their demographics, their variables, their culture, and trying
to understand whether we have a rich life or increasing life or
not. And I think that if we looked at associations just briefly,
I would think we would find either there are the charismatic types
that have short-term solutions and short-term energy involved,
which are very exciting to do, or the longer-term ones often are
very old and dead organizations that don't have leadership cultures.
They don't share leadership; usually no one wants to be leader,
and so the same leader is there forever. There are no opportunities
for learning and reflection, there's no personal growth, and there's
often no social change. Who would want to give up the short amount
of family time that we have every night to go do something like
that?
So, you
know—this might be unpopular—but I think it's very important
to look at the nature and the culture of associational life, because
I think there's a lot to do, a lot of good work there we could
do. I think if there was an exciting organization that was interested
in developing my leadership, that supported young people, that
had young people involved, that made social change that you could
see in your neighborhood, I think people would show up all the
time.
So I would
like the Commission to not do the broad-scale analysis but also
look deeply into the nature of the questions that are just being
raised here for the first time. And I commend you for that.
WILL
MARSHALL: My name's Will Marshall,
president of the Progressive Policy Institute. Bill, I came a
little late this morning, so I missed what I think was a crisp
articulation of the mission or charge that this Commission has,
so I have a suggestion that may not be on track. You can tell
me if it isn't.
To point
this discussion in a very concrete direction, it seems to me that
the last discussion was very useful. I probably tilt in Theda's
direction in my reading of the history, but I arrive at conclusions
that are probably more congenial to Bill Schambra, and that is
that that we are faced with a real issue of power here. And if
we want to see a civic renewal, we have to come to grips with
who's got control, who defines problems, who's got control of
the resources we apply to problems, who's got the authority and
the standing to lead these discussions. And so that leads me to
the question of how we begin to reverse the presumption that the
federal government and federal programs or rules are sort of the
default mechanism for public problem-solving in this country—how
we begin to challenge that view, which is pretty deeply embedded,
particularly here, as lots of people have mentioned.
I think
if we begin to do that in a systematic way, looking at the real
questions that are on the table for debate in the country, you
know, we would ask very concrete questions about institutional
change; we would be very quickly led to Senator Nunn's question
about decentralization of power, devolution. But we'd also be
led toward the more profound question of how you redefine public
sector enterprises more thoroughly. That is, how you get them
away from which level of government is supposed to respond, how
you create a new kind of hybrids of public, civic, and governmental
activism, that give more space and authority to local problem-solvers
and local institutions and community institutions in grappling
with our common problems.
So it just
strikes me that we need to focus on the hand-off here, how we
transfer power and responsibility and accountability from one
layer of problem-solvers to another. And that inescapably gets
you to the question of redefining government's role. And the prism
through which I think we can do that in a very concrete way is
to look at the questions we face in welfare, look at the questions
we face in urban empowerment, housing, community development,
environmental programs which are aging and need to be revamped.
We have a whole set of very concrete questions as to how we redesign
public sector systems to admit a more civic enterprise. And I
think that would help us just to bring this down to the very concrete
level of detail that would ensue in some useful product.
OS
GUINESS: Three quick comments. The first one would
be in that line. I hope that the report has a sense of the international
context, because in my view we can see all around the world, for
example, the associational revolution. And many Americans don't
set the problem in the challenges of being free societies under
the pressure of modernity. I think also this report would be enormously
of interest to other countries wrestling with this, and in my
view America is more of interest to the world today after the
Soviet Union than ever, although many Americans have less confidence
that that's actually so. So that's one thing.
I know that
the report has to be American and practical and specific and local,
but I hope the international dimension's there. Saying that, I'd
like to second Amitai's point. My experience talking about this,
the ground floor is just instability. Where we've mostly been
today, on volunteering and trust and participation, that, to me,
is done on the second floor, and really what Amitai's talking
about, the notion of a good society—whatever word you want
to use, a free society sustaining its freedom, or whatever—we
have to end up at that level or we fall a long way short and we'll
turn a lot of people off who think there's not much in this. So
I hope it really goes the whole way in expressing that.
The third
thing, in connection with that—and again, all of these have
been scheduled today but I don't think addressed—is the role
of religion. And I don't think we've done justice to that today
except in passing comments. Whether it's viewed positively behind
most of the great American reforms, let alone things like volunteerism,
we cannot talk about renewing civic society without addressing
centrally the constructive role of religion. Equally, the negative
role. Because in my view, if Tocqueville came 50 years after the
framers disestablished things, and religion and the other Republicans
kind of wrestling with the implications of disestablishment, with
the exploding voluntarism, we are wrestling with a new day today.
And all the religion and public life debates which are still not
resolved in terms of how religion should enter public life, I
think that part needs to be addressed centrally or you're blocking
off a very key avenue of renewal and aggravating a key source
of friction.
DON
EBERLY: Thank you, first of
all, Bill, for having me. My name is Don Eberly and I'm here today
representing the Civil Society Project, which is really just a
mechanism that I have used to write about and gab about these
things for a few years. I'm also involved in creating civic initiatives.
I founded the National Fatherhood Initiative, which is applying
a civic model for promoting behavioral and attitudinal and value
changes largely outside the political process.
One of my
points would be that National Commission recognize and embrace
the importance of social movements as an American phenomenon,
as a way of applying civil society models to treating, in a sense,
civil society problems. And there are many out there—the
character education movement, the fatherhood movement, the new
communities movement, a new marriage movement of sorts that's
beginning to form, and a manners movement. One could talk about
many more. I think these movements are unique in that they're
not just local, nor are they of the government. They are in the
civic sector and they're somehow linked, and they're shifting
consciousness and attitudes and so forth.
To add a
third mode to the point made by Amitai (and I speak as a guy who
was presumptuous enough to write a book and call it Restoring
the Good Society), I think we are talking a lot here about preparing
a language whereby we can talk about shared moral ends. The contradictions
that we talked about this morning, I think, are so critical to
understand and to try to wrestle with, and I would hope that the
National Commission can perhaps lend some recommendations to leadership
in all sectors, not just political leadership, in all major sectors
and all major institutions as to how to deal increasingly with
these various gaps. The one gap talked about this morning between
what we think about ourselves versus society. Another gap that's
very striking to me is the set of aspirations that we now articulate
so plainly in national public opinion polls, and yet our inability
to understand what it is we might have to trade off by way of
an excessive individualism, boundless freedoms, etc.
And I use
to illustrate the point: I talk to students a lot, and I say,
"How many of you would support me if I was a candidate and talking
about the good society, civility, connection, community, and so
on and so forth?" And they're ready to elect me. And then I start
talking about "Would you elect me if I were talking about rules
and institutions and authority?"—and mind you, I'm not talking
about the government imposing these things, I'm talking about
us as people, in a sense, re-embracing the need for mediating
institutions if we're going to work on these problems of civic
space, and what values really do generally regulate our lives
in what situations, in what spaces and so forth. I think that's
critical to talk about. And I think it yields a form of leadership
that the country is still waiting for in all sectors including
politics, when it's more oriented toward deliberation and facilitating
discussion. Because if we're going to combine these things, we
have to have discussion and there has to be a participation as
we search for consensus.
On the point
of federalism, I think we're still in the early stages of federalism.
As a debate, I would want to suggest that it not be mostly about
efficiency. There's been an awful lot of discussion about that,
and that's about fragmentation versus centralization and so forth.
Very important discussions; we all want an efficient government.
But as I look at the world today, I can think of a lot of reasons
why I would want to centralize some functions. You know, nations
live by their myths; they live by their sort of moral story. You
know, this is still a nation and as nationhood, the nation-state
is under enough pressure. I don't think we should have in mind
to simply devolve every function, and I think instead we should
be thinking, especially in the realm of politics, how to articulate
philosophical moral ends, where there's a place for people across
the political spectrum. I think that's an important distinction
to draw.
We didn't
talk much about culture—I think probably because this is
the most difficult area. We have embraced utilitarian values in
a sensate culture. And I think we've got to look at specific cultural
means to recover a story, a language of cultural values that are
really required for democratic people. Religion in public life,
as Os mentioned, needs more work, and he's better at talking about
that than I. I would probably put in a plug for a little bit more
interest in and attention to perhaps the primary institutions,
the means by which we come by the capacity to care, to be altruistic,
the little platoons namely, and especially the family. And I think
this is an important area. Perhaps it's given too much treatment
or not enough treatment at the right time, but we've got to have
a new non-partisan, non-ideological way of talking about it with
each other in the context of family, because as others among your
Commissioners have written more effectively than anyone else,
these are the seedbeds of public virtue. And I think their capacity
to be competent citizens is very much affected by the health of
these institutions.
ADAM
MEYERSON:
I think I'm last, so as Henry VIII said to one of his wives, "I
won't keep you too long." I'm Adam Meyerson of the Heritage Foundation,
editor of Policy Review: Journal of American Citizenship. Three
brief questions: What are the principal obstacles to civic renewal,
obstacles that we can do something about now? What are the principal
institutions we need to encourage more civic renewal, institutions
such as Chris Gates' Web site? And, echoing Harry Boyte, what
are the most important evaluation systems we need to know what
works and what isn't working?
GALSTON:
Thank you. And let me extend my personal thanks for the wisdom
and the forbearance of each and every member of the Commission.
It's been a long march today, but I hope you believe that we are
well launched. Thank you very much; see you in the spring. We
stand adjourned.
Back to Panel Four.
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