1. You were at Berkeley during the demonstrations of the sixties. What can we learn today, good or bad, from the sixties?
2.
It’s easy both to romanticise and denigrate the
sixties. But the one essential thing I come away with is the idea of a
participatory understanding of Politics. The wide range of Groups and People
who are now involved in Politics in America would otherwise have never reached
that level of political consciousness – that’s the legacy of the sixties.
3.
Power to the People?
4.
–Yes, and the decentralisation of Power, the
notion of Power as shared and of political activity as collaborative, and also
a kind of antihero understanding of Politics. People in the sixties,
particularly in the Student Movements, were very reluctant to repeat the old
notion of Politics as requiring a strong, single leader. Even though the
Student Movements produced their particular leaders, there was always a
reluctance to see them as anything more than temporarily useful.
5.
Do you see any signs of political creativity
today at the grass roots level?
6.
I do, much more than really gets through to
Television or Newspapers. There are occasional mentions of a grass roots
activist here or a movement there, but they all understate the pervasiveness of
the phenomenon. People do take matters into their own hands through innovative,
creative ways of developing Institutions or Practices that will meet a
particular concrete Need, whether it’s Public Utility rates, or Schools, or
Drug problems, or Law enforcement. Those things are going on all over the
country, all of the Time.
7.
But nothing you just mentioned seems to have
much of an Ideological purpose or passion.
8.
No, it hasn’t, and that has been something of a
weakness. People involved in grass roots activities tend to be concerned with a
specific concrete problem, with the result that there’s always a fragmentation
of these Groups, each pursuing a particular Agenda and each having a particular
purpose. It often becomes very difficult for People to unite on a large scale
to meet problems and attack Power structures that are more formidable than
strictly local ones.
9.
Do you think that the expectations raised by the
sixties, of democratic Participation and Power to the People, have been largely
frustrated?
10.
To some degree they have been. One thing that
has caused frustration, because it doesn’t receive the Press it needs to, is
the continuous, consistent growth of centralised Power in our Society. People
think of Ronald Reagan as an opponent of State Power, as someone who wanted to
get Government off our backs, and the rest of the campaign Rhetoric, but
actually one of the legacies of the Reagan era is a stronger State. The State
doesn’t do as much in terms of Regulation of the Economy, but in terms of
Defense, of the protection of American interests abroad, of its role in the
advancement of Technology, or of Law and Order – all of those involve
extensions of national Power. The Reagan era has brought a slimming down of the
State so that in some ways it’s more effective and less overextended than it had
been in the grand days of Lyndon Johnson and in the New Deal period.
11.
Is this for better or worse?
12.
I think it’s for worse because it’s been
accompanied by an incredible Apathy on the part of the American Electorate,
even in terms of the simple fact of Voting. It is a less alert, less involved
Electorate at the national level.
13.
So the national Government becomes stronger, but
the Participation, Knowledge, and Involvement of the People diminish.
14.
Absolutely. At the same time, it’s becoming much
more of a surveillance and control State in the way that it pries into
individual lives. I don’t mean to imply a sinister conspiracy theory. The most spectacular example of what I’m talking about in
recent years has been the AIDS problem, where the dimensions of the problem have
evoked a great amount of Information gathering, administering, calls for
testing, and an attempt to identify a particular Population, to extend
Government investigations into private lives and sexual conduct. The attempt to
handle, even if in a benevolent way, a clearly difficult problem means,
inevitably, an extension and expansion of State Control and State Power.
15.
But aren’t the conservatives trying to assert a
classic principle of the public Health, even though it may impinge upon the
Rights of the Individual?
16.
One might want to draw a clear line and say,
We’ll confine State Control to the question of AIDS. But clearly you can’t. As
you can see, for example, the question of testing for AIDS has also been
accompanied by the exertion of pressure for Drug testing, not only for
Government employees but also for private employees, and the extension of the State into the
private lives of students in high Schools and grammar Schools. Local
educational Authorities are clearly playing fast and loose with the Rights of
young People. The cause may appear to be a benevolent and generally praiseworthy
one of public Health, Drugs, or whatever the case may be, but it’s often the
Good causes that bring the Expansion of Power. It’s all accompanied by a
decline of Civic Culture.
17.
I grew up in East Texas, where Conservatism used
to be defined by a Fear, if not a Loathing, of Government. Now conservatives
pay deference to the State, and talk at times of President Reagan almost as if
he were a Sovereign, in the same way that Tories used to talk about George III.
18.
It’s unfortunately not just conservatives. The so-called neo-liberals also have an expanded view of the
State. The questions of State Power, Accountability, and Responsiveness are
very important questions that unfortunately don’t get the amount of attention
they should get because they’re very difficult to translate into concrete
questions. We fight over Deregulation and Regulation, or this policy or that
policy, but we don’t talk about the question of State Power itself.
19.
When you talk about the decline of the Civic
Culture, what do you mean?
20.
I certainly don’t mean highbrow Culture. I don’t
mean opera and Art galleries. Culture has to do with
taking care of things, that’s really what its Etymology is. It’s the root from which Agriculture comes.
21.
Nurturing the public Life.
22.
It’s more concretely the nurturing of People,
places, Things, and even Institutions. We understand that physical Environments
have to be taken care of. We’ve also come to understand that Cities have to be
taken care of. But what we haven’t understood quite so readily is that
Institutions require taking care of. They are practices and represent skills.
Skills not only have to be honed, they have to be transmitted, they have to be
looked after – even things as dry as procedures or institutional processes all
represent in important ways part of a Culture, a way of handling Things –
especially of handling Power.
23.
Are you seeing these practices threatened today?
24.
Very much so. There’s a disconnexion between the
practices of political Institutions and the tempos they require for handling
Affairs of the Public, and the tempos we associate with scientific,
technological, and entrepreneurial Innovation. The World of Technology is fast
tempo, changing rapidly, with an emphasis on the innovative and the novel.
What’s going to happen tomorrow becomes very important. But political
processes, like Marriage and Education, really depend upon a rhythm that’s less
frenetic, less innovative, and that demands some kind of Respect for how you’ve
been carrying on something. Clearly, there’s a danger that these things can
ossify and become rigid, but I don’t think that’s the issue at this point. The
problem is preserving them.
25.
It took a long time to create a Constitution,
and it took a long time to amend that Constitution. It took time to nurture the
change promoted by the political process. You’re saying that now the time it
takes Politics to transform Society is far longer than the Time it takes for
radical technological and scientific change.
26.
It’s the difference between deliberation and
decision-making. Deliberation, which is fundamental to Politics, takes Time.
But decision-making often alls for rapidity of Judgement, meeting a particular
problem promptly and efficiently. Deliberation is a slow-moving because you
have to consider different points of view, different interests, et cetera, et
cetera. That’s why Legislatures have been at the heart of what we’ve understood
Politics to be. We used to call them “deliberative Assemblies.” Now there’s a
problem. Every proposal for constitutional Reform invariably makes an attack
upon legislative Power. It’s seen as an anachronistic in terms of what’s
required for a high Tech, fast-moving, competitive, volatile, international
situation.
27.
What are the Consequences?
28.
The Consequences are twofold. One is that People
are always off-balance. The other thing is a paradox – change has a rigidity
about it, because you’re moving so quickly that the area in which you can see
Things is limited. You’re like a man trying to dance on a log in a stream.
You’re so preoccupied with dancing on the log that you don’t see the waterfall
ahead. The result is, You keep doing that same thing more frenetically, which
is to say, you’re in a groove. It’s that particular aspect of high-tech
Societies that isn’t so well understood – that they are rigid, and that change
itself, if pursued systematically, becomes a conservative phenomenon.
29.
The New England town hall of two hundred years
ago is a far cry from Wall Street with its junk bonds and golden parachutes,
and from Silicon Valley out here in California with its freeways and
Technologies that are changing the landscape almost overnight. That kind of
Democracy is really anachronistic, is it not?
30.
In one sense it is.
31.
Do we have a Democracy now?
32.
I think we don’t.
33.
We have a rather thinly concealed Power
structure of large public Institutions and private Corporations.
34.
The most important
development in the last twenty-five years has been the closer intertwining of
economic and political Power structures. The differences in the type of Person
who sits in one and sits in the other is not what it used to be. The kinds of
Skills needed in both domains are also increasingly the same.
35.
What do you mean? Give
me an example.
36.
Managerial skills,
managerial attitudes, managerial Ideology, are fundamental to both sets of
Institutions.
37.
So that the Interest of the Manager and the
Institution becomes paramount over the People to whom the Institution is
ultimately responsible.
38.
I don’t think Managerialism thinks in terms of
that kind of Responsibility. Managers may talk rhetorically about shareholders
and stockholders, but while bureaucrats do worry about the reaction of
Legislators, the average Citizen is not a significant category for them.
The collapse of the
distinction between public and private is a very important development in the
last century. One of the interesting aspects is this push toward so-called
privatisation of public functions, where private Corporations are now
encouraged to take over what used to be regarded as public functions –
Education, Medical care, Hospital care, Prisons.
39.
What does that say to you?
40.
Most people think
privatisation means a decentralisation of Government Power – that you’re
dismantling a State. [Accurate.] That’s absolutely Wrong. What it means is
an extension of Power, which now is not coming from the State, but from a
combination of public and private Powers. The best recent example is Drug
testing, where you begin to talk about public employees in sensitive
positions, and before long, private industry is into the same game, talking
about Drug testing its employees. The result is a common network of Control and
Surveillance pressing into the private lives of People.
41.
A structure of Government and private Institutions
that is interlocking intertwining and self-reinforcing.
42.
It becomes more difficult to bring legal Actions against
invasions of private lives. It’s one thing to challenge the Government on the
basis of the Bill of Rights, but it’s much more difficult to deal with private
forms of Power. [Accurate.] In terms of the extension of Control over
individual Lives, private concentrations of Power are as much of a problem now
as governmental Agencies.
43.
Is this what you meant when you wrote that every
one of this Country’s primary Institutions is antidemocratic in spirit, design,
and operation?
44.
It is.
45.
That’s a strong statement.
46.
Government Institutions,
Educational Institutions, Communications Institutions, Major Institutions of
Medica, Communications, major Institutions of the economic kind as well, and
large cultural Institutions, again something like the Media. They’re all hierarchical structures, and
Hierarchy means Inequality of Power. [Accurate.] Secondly,
I
think they’re fundamentally elitist in character, which is to say that each of them involves a definition of
who should lead or control that Institution, based upon criteria which can only
be met by a relative few. [Accurate.] [Steven Soderbergh & George Clooney.
Aaron Sorkin.] So it becomes a
way of excluding.
47.
Yet as you talk, I recall the criticisms of the
last ten of fifteen years that there’s been an excess of Democracy. We have too
much Democracy, too much Participation, growing in part out of the 1960s –
that’s a criticism from some sources.
48.
The notion of there being too much Democracy is
hogwash. Most of these are self-serving statements that signity the discomfort
of decision-makers. Many of these policy-oriented heads of Institutions see
Democracy as some of the Founders saw it, as an impediment to rational
decision-making. Democracy involves listening to a lot of discordant voices and
disparate Interests and conflicting points of view. It’s very tough to make a
decision in that context. Consultation drags on, and you feel like nothing’s
being done. That’s the complaint. There’s a real conflict between an efficiency
orientation, which is one understanding of Rationality, and a democratic
orientation, which is a deliberative understanding of Rationality as something
that’s composed of a lot of different contributions.
49.
A prominent writer said
last week that with a little less Democracy, we could have won the War in
Vietnam, and the whole History of the Period since would have been different.
50.
Yes – a little less Democracy, and I shudder to think of what
winning the War in Vietnam would have meant in terms of Executive Power, if
nothing else. Watergate and Vietnam are inseparable. I would find it
hard to see a successful effort in Vietnam that wouldn’t also have managed to
cover up Watergate. By the end of the sixties, the Vietnam War had become
preeminently an Executive War. Congress was a critical voice. A triumph would
have meant a further consolidation of Executive Power, not to mention a
vindication of military Power. The last thing American Power needs at this
point in our History is many more heady conquests, because everything that’s
happened since Vietnam, as well as Vietnam itself, indicates a realisation,
slow and difficult, of the limitations upon Power.
51.
But these critics are saying that the United
States has become a pitiful, helpless giant in the World. We can’t accomplish
what we want to because of an excess of Democracy and too little Executive
Power. You obviously disagree with that.
52.
I disagree profoundly with the sense in which
they understand Power. They think of successful American Power as broadly
coterminous with the Globe itself, it not with interstellar Space. In this vision of Power, which John Kennedy, among
others, enunciated in the early sixties and Lyndon Johnson not long thereafter,
Power is seen as infinitely expandable. There is a heady, technological
understanding of Power as infinitely reproducible in ways that allow you to
surpass all sorts of barriers that hitherto a Power had to recognise and stay
within. But the World is too small for that understanding of Power. It’s
impossible for fallible, frail human beings to handle those magnitudes of
Power.
The question of
limitations on American Power has to do with what kind of Society we really
have in mind and what kind of collective Identity we want as a People. In the first half
of the twentieth century through the Vietnam War, our Identity as a People lay
with the Expansion of Power, World supremacy, and primacy among Nations. That
vision has been very difficult to surrender.
53.
But President Kennedy and President Johnson both
thought that they were engaged in a Moral enterprise in Vietnam, in the shouldering
of a great burden for the Freedom and Well-Being of other Nations and Peoples,
not as just an Expansion of military or technological Power.
54.
A lot of Crimes have been committed in the name
of Morality.
55.
– the “seven deadly Virtues.”
56.
Yes indeed. American statesmen have combined deep
Moral convictions and aggressive Expansion of Power – they’ve seen those not as
incompatible, but as mutually reinforcing.
57.
Certainly one Consequence of it was this long
train of executive abuses that you talk about – from Vietnam, to Watergate,
which was really Richard Nixon’s effort to silence the critics of the War in
Vietnam, to the Iran-Contra expansion of White House National Security Power.
There does seem to be an unsavory creature that grows deep beneath the rock of
Power.
58.
I don’t think it’s connected to this other
problem we were talking about – the problem of the future of Democracy. The
commitment to Power that has characterised American since World War II has been
very popular with ordinary citizens. Vietnam was clearly a turning point, but
Grenada showed us that you could also still get vast outpourings of popular
enthusiasm for that display of American Power. In some
ways, extension of American Power was a compensation for the growing sense of
futility and helplessness ordinary People feel in relation to their own Lives. The Powers that
confront us in ordinary Life, Powers of Business Corporations, or Government
Agencies, for example, have made it very difficult for People to believe that
they could control their own destinies – but lo
and behold, here they were, the Citizens of what everybody told them was the
greatest Power that had ever existed in the History of Mankind, now controlling
an entire Globe. So what get denied in one quarter can find a certain kind of
satisfaction or sense of fulfillment in this other area.
59.
I never met a President
who didn’t mean well.
60.
No, I suppose that’s true.
61.
I remember Lyndon
Johnson looking out the window after seeing demonstrators on Television, and
saying, “What are they doing this to me? I’m the Commander in Chief.” Our
Presidents began to confuse the State with the Self.
62.
In Lyndon Johnson’s case, Elitism confounded
itself with Populism, seeing itself not just as itself but as a grander Ego, as
representing the whole Collectivity. That somehow adds a justification that
wouldn’t be there if it were merely personal-seeking or personal
aggrandisement.
63.
This is why the founders put checks on Power.
They did not believe that one man alone should presume to speak for the State
or that he should have untrammeled license to accomplish his purpose. Do you
think the checks on executive Power are breaking down?
64.
Well, I wouldn’t put myself in the position of
suggesting that it was all better once upon a time. I don’t think it was. Even
the Founders are equivocal. If we consider the Founders as including not just
Madison, who probably believed what you said, but also Hamilton, who really
didn’t, but who thought in much more grandiose terms about the Expansion of
strong Executive Power and an affirmative Foreign Policy and a strong Defense
Establishment, we see the same ambiguity running through American History, from
the Founders’ days to our own. We want Power to be restrained, but we also
think in terms of glory and have patriotic notions of a strong America, an
America that is fully the equal, if not the superior, of any Country in the
World. It’s an old American ambiguity.
65.
You quote Madison, who said that if every
Athenian were Socrates, the Athenian Assembly would still be a Mob.
66.
I think it’s saying that no matter how wise your
deliberative Assembly might appear, because it is an assemblage of human
beings, it is still subject to all the frailties of Human Nature.
67.
Do you agree with that?
68.
Not really. The Founders, in their own secular
way, were much more Calvinistic about Human Nature, which they distrusted.
That’s one of the reasons that they believed in Checks and Balances.
Commitments to Democracy involve a much more positive, optimistic view of human
beings. The Founders’ distrust of Human Nature is bound up, to a certain
extent, which Majority rule in legislative Assemblies that were doing things
that the Founders disapprouved of – interfering with Business contracts and
Currency, for example.
69.
Irving Kristol says that we are all democrats,
but we have a fear of Democracy that goes back to the beginning. Do you think
that’s so?
70.
No, I think that one of the most important
developments in this Country in the last thirty years has been the steady erosion
of Faith in democratic Values. I’ve always drawn a distinction between liberal
Values and democratic Values. Liberal Values are Values that are basically
suspicious of Democracy. Liberal Values stress the importance of constitutional
guarantees, bills of Rights, legal procedures, due process, and so on, as
protections against democratic Legislatures of popular Movements. Liberalism
has become the home base in which you can agree that you have to have a certain
amount of legitimacy to Government that can only come from popular Elections –
but that’s the end of a serious commitment to equal Rights and Sharing. The
Movement away from democratic Values toward liberal Values is very pronounced.
We talk about it in terms of Meritocracy, rewarding those who deserve more
because of their Skills. But this is ultimately a way of hollowing out the
content of Democracy. It’s not that we’re really all democrats today who
distrust Democracy. I think we distrust it, and that therefore we aren’t
democrats.
71.
How does your idea of Democracy differ from
those liberal Values?
72.
Democracy does include a strong emphasis upon
Rights. But that orientation isn’t really enough. Democracy really does come
down to People trying to cooperate, to make common decisions in contexts where
there’s great diversity and strong conflict. The problem is not to come to the most
rationally justifiable decision as an economist might take it. It’s a problem of trying to come to a decision in which there
are conflicting legitimate claims. Democracy involves a capacity to deal with
differences, and to respect them – and this is a different understanding of
what Power is about, and what the ends of Power are.
73.
Explain that to me, because I hear you saying
that we’ve got to learn how to get along well together, even though we differ
ethnically, culturally, religiously, historically, geographically,
psychologically, politically, and ideologically.
74.
That’s really, fundamentally, what a political
Culture is about. The differences are becoming more pronounced more pronounced,
not less pronounced. Twenty-five years ago we used to worry about mass
conformity and the homogeneity of American Life.
75.
The Organisation Man.
76.
Yes. But the influx of such different ethnic and
cultural Groups into our Society over the last fifteen years has obviously
injected Cultures, Languages, Religions and Outlooks, not to mention Skin
Colours, that are so at variance with what we thought was an American Society
that the categories we’ve used to think about ourselves politically are really
anachronistic now. The strength of Democracy has been its capacity to confront
difference and to cherish it, not just to think about it as an impediment to
rational decision-making. The problem of handling diversity is really what
makes Democracy not just a choice but almost an urgency in the coming future.
77.
How do we do it, then?
78.
We do it by doing. That is to say, we do it by
Communities, Groupings, Associations, and Structures that enable People to come
together to handle problems.
79.
That’s what de Tocqueville saw. He wrote about
the volunteer associations of Life he saw here.
80.
Yes he did. But de Tocqueville’s other Work on
French Society before the French Revolution is in some ways much more revealing
of what that means, because what he talked about there was practical, concrete
activity – Buildings, Schools, Churches, the whole range of things that occupy
People in ordinary Life. What happened was the development of a modernising
State, an attempt at a rational Bureaucracy, using experts with scientific
Skills, and resulting in the gradual intrusion of that bureaucratic Structure
into the functions that had been handled prior to that Time by local Councils,
provincial Estates – our equivalent State Legislatures. What caused the
disintegration of that participatory Culture was the gradual creation of a
vacuum in which the local Committees, local Structures, and local practices
began to dissolve and be taken over by central Powers. What’s crucial in all
this is the transference of functions from the locality to a centralised Power.
That’s what really destroyed French political Culture before the Revolution
destroyed the old regime.
81.
You seem to be calling for a much more intensive
Participation at the local level by Citizens, in all forms of political decision-making
at the very Time, to take your own diagnosis, that the impetus of Society
toward larger, more hierarchical, more remote, and more powerful Organisations.
Aren’t those two fundamentally at odds with each other?
82.
Absolutely. There’s a growing realisation of the
frailties, inadequacies, dangers, and inefficiencies of that centralised,
hierarchical, meritocratic Structure.
83.
So what happens then?
84.
We have to think in more complicated terms. I
don’t think it’s a question of going back to small-scale Structures. It
involves rethinking the scales of central Structures. Clearly, there are some
things one needs central structures for. You can’t run Foreign Policy on a
modeal of the Articlea of Confederation, and you can’t run a whole range of
other things except by centralised Institutions. But the question becomes not
whether we have central Institutions, but what kinds of gradations we have in
between.
In saying that, I’m simply recapitulating
the fundamental schema from which the Americans began themselves. We did have a
Federal System, which meant something very important. It was an attempt, for
the first time, to create a complicated political system – not just a national
Government or a central Government, but a Structure of independent autonomous
States which would be viable centers of political Life, and which would handle
a great many functions.
The American
political system is the most complicated system in the World, but it’s
complicated in the Right way. It’s a complication of centralisation, in terms
of decentralising things, and it’s a complication of decentralisation, in
realising the centralised things that have to be done, whether it’s Foreign
Policy or Military Policy or Trade Policy. Clearly, you need both. The problem
is the movement away from a federal, decentralised system to an increasingly,
almost hopelessly, overcentralised system, so that the whole emphasis has
fallen in the one direction.
85.
You sound like Reagan.
86.
I know. I’ve been accused of that several times.
The difference is that Reaganism stands for the revitalisation of Power on
another level. Reagan talks about voluntary Associations and voluntary Citizen
efforts, but that’s a soft solution, because it implies that it’s ad hoc. I’m
talking about much more serious Structures of cooperation and collaboration,
much more serious attacks upon centralised State systems. Paradoxically, one of
the unintended legacies of Reagan has been to make respectable, at least at a
rhetorical level, the vitality of Localism. I don’t think he’s meant it – but
the Rhetoric has served that end.
87.
Why do you think he doesn’t mean it?
88.
Reaganism has been a combination of two
elements, one of which is window dressing-
89.
–myth-making.
90.
Yes, right. And the other is not. Reaganism is a
combination of a very strong push toward high Technology and strong State –
aggressive Foreign Policy, strong Defense, and the rest of it. But it’s also
been nostalgic in terms of nineteenth-century, or even eighteenth-century,
Values about Home, Church, Family, and that sort of thing. It’s that peculiar
combination of technological Progressivism, in terms of the political State,
and a regressive view toward Ethics, Morality, Piety, and Family. It’s that
American proclivity toward wanting to find yourself sanctified by some set of Values
that you know very well cannot come from what you’re actually into. In other
words, defense, high Tech, and a strong Corporate system can’t generate the
kinds of Values that really makes us comfortable and that really suggest that
the Power we have is Good and that we deserve it.
But if, on the other hand, we say we’re the most Moral People on Earth,
we have more Churches, we have stronger Family Values, and we have more simple
Virtues than anybody who has ever lived, then the Power that we’ve accumulated
in this other area suddenly appears to be legitimate. The guilty conscience
exists, and in its place comes now the sense that we have a mission that our
Poewr is sanctified.
91.
How do you explain this longing of Americans for
the past?
92.
I think about it mostly as the paradoxical
counterpoint to a People who also believe in the importance of constant change
and to a Society in which mobility is possible. American is the land where
anything’s possible. New frontiers are always there. So Americans find Security in appealing to
biblical Myths or Myths of the Founding or Myths about American Virtue, of our
Cities on the hill or whatever the metaphor might be. The Progressivism
to which the Society is committed doesn’t generate Values that makes People
feel Good about what they’ve done. They’ve got to find other modes of
justification.
93.
Even as we leave the garden, we want to go home.
It’s the mobility of American Society that is destructive of many of the things
that conservatives honour. Family Life, Community stability, Neighbourhood –
all of those human relations that require Time are rent asunder by the rapid
change that is remaking our Society.
94.
American conservatives don’t seem to realise
that the Corporate boardroom, where change is a constant feature of Conversation,
goes along with this nostalgia for religious Values that don’t make any sense
in terms of what they’re doing six days a week.
95.
I think I have an understanding of it. This year
President Reagan vetoed the Bill providing for sixty days’ notice to workers
who are laid off. That to me was a conservative bill. Sixty days’ notice is a
fair requirement if you want to give Families Time to prepare, if you want to
give Schools Time to get ready for shock, and if you want to give men and women
who are breadwinners a chance to relocate. That is a conservative measure, not
a liberal measure. But the Freedom of Capital, the Freedom of Property, took
precedence over the Moral requirements of traditional Relationships.
96.
I think that’s right.
97.
Conservatives always seem to opt for the Freedom
of Capital over the Freedom of Individuals.
98.
I don’t want to discount their good Faith, but
there is a very tortured relation between the progressive, technologically
innovative side of Conservatism and its commitment to Values that its own
efforts are undercutting. All you need to do is look at the Society, and you’ll
see casualties of all kinds. You’ll see Cities that are unlivable, in which the
cultural Life is on the edge of extinction, in which there’s Class conflict,
sharp cleavages, and distinctions of Rich and Poor which are beginning to
become mind-boggling. There isn’t much to compensate for that kind of
destructiveness, except the promise of rising Standards of Living – which isn’t
insubstantial, of course. But that doesn’t go very far, because this innovative
Society we’re committed to has clearly developed a superfluous Population for
whom there may be no Work, or for whom, if there is Work, it isn’t terribly
meaningful, and it doesn’t have much of a future to it. As a Society, we don’t
really know what to do with that surplus Population. It’s a surplus more than
in the sense of People huddling in ghettos or being on Welfare. It’s got to do
with the substantial number of People who may very well be employed, but who are
so marginal and whose fate is so insecure that it becomes very difficult to
develop Life plans and Life projects with any assurance that there’s a point to
sacrificing for the morrow.
99.
What happens to a Society when it has People who
are so easily wasted?
100.
It
leads ultimately to cynicism because there’s a progressive realisation that you
can’t do anything about it, that fundamentally, the Poor are with us forever.
[Accurate.]
101.
Something happens to your own Myth when that
occurs.
102.
And your own Moral justifications become very
insecure at that point.
103.
I drove around Los Angeles last night, in the
sections where the Gangs have been much in the News and in the affluent
sections, places like Beverly Hills. Going through these affluent
Neighbourhoods, I was struck with the signs, one after another, that said, “security
system,” “armed response security system,” “armed weapons security system,”
“armed guards.” More and more People are retreating behind armed walls.
104.
I think it’s symptomatic of a very difficult
situation, not only here, but elsewhere. You see it represented even in the
high-rise, expensive apartment. The higher the floor you live on, the greater
the chances for clean Air. It’s clear that the Society has problems even
assuring the sort of ordinary access to Air and Water that we used to take for
granted not so long ago. The Politics of survival is becoming much more intense
and much more bitter, in significant ways.
105.
Do we need a Revolution?
106.
We need a radical
reconsideration of some fundamental assumptions – but violent Revolution is as
anachronistic as New England town Meetings, maybe more so. Modern Societies are
so fragile that the notion of overthrow makes no sense except if one has an
unlimited appetite for Barbarism. Ultimately, I’m driven back to the
possibilities of Education to help ease our way into a better kind of World.
107.
You speak of Education. What are the skills of
Citizensihp and how do we gain them? How do we teach them?
108.
I don’t think we approach them the way they’re
currently being approached. The famous Bell Report of a few years ago, which
talks about Education for excellence, is really based on a regressive
understanding of Education, in which the question is primarily, How can we keep American
competitive in an international political Economy? [Barack Obama. Hillary
Clinton.] which translates into, How can we create an educational system in
which students are prepared for jobs after they graduate? [Barack Obama.]
The report is concerned with primary and secondary Education, but more
basically, it is concerned with technological Competition. Secondly, it’s very
much concerned with Discipline and Control in the classrooms. There are a great many
measures for tightening up the screw on Students, [Accurate.] tightening up
Teacher evaluation, [Accurate.] and centralising questions of Teacher
Accountability and Teacher performance. [Accurate.] There’s a vast
centralisation Control Ethic inside that report.
But above all, the
report thinks of a Student primarily as a potential producer. [Steven
Soderbergh & Harvey Weinstein. Amy Pascal & Aaron Sorkin.] It’s
a Producer’s understanding of Education. I’m a little suspicious of
contemporary educational Reform proposals, because the Business Community is so
enthusiastic about them. [USC] They can see, of course, a way in which public
Funds get used to create Job training for private Industry.
109.
But if you want to empower People to function in
an economic order, don’t you give them a vocational skill that they can use to
their advantage?
110.
To a degree. I wouldn’t undersell it. But the
point is, What are you doing? You’re piling the question of Job training onto
the whole educational Structure, and something’s got to be excluded. There’s
only so much Time in a School day and only so many subjects you can teach. The
more you usurp that Time by a practically oriented Curriculum, the more you
squeeze Things out. The first Things that tend to go are Art and Music, then
Literature courses. The question of what it
means to be empowered is at the heart of the whole issue of educational Reform.
But it’s being faced
only as a Job issue, not as a question of what it means for Students to be
systematically deprived of the kind of Knowledge, Sensibility, and
Understanding that can come from so-called soft subjects like Literature,
Philosophy, History, and some of the softer Social Sciences. Those subjects
teach People not Job skills, but how to interpret their Experience, how to
interpret what’s happening to them. [Accurate.] What’s the Meaning of this?
What’s the Meaning of that? And what Literature, History, Philosophy - and Politics
- give you an understanding of is a Relationship of Power in ways that aren’t
handled by more scientific Understanding. They give you an Understanding of how
Power relates to personal Hopes and Fears and vulnerabilities. [Accurate.] People without
that Understanding are powerless to understand what’s happening to them, [Accurate.]
powerless to relate to People, [Accurate.] powerless to understand
the true dimensions of what it means to be without Power, [Accurate.] or what
it means to be dependent, [Accurate.] or in some kind of nonautonomous
Relationship. [Accurate.] The
History of American Education over the last twenty-five years has been a
History of the steadily declining deprivation of Students of that form of
Sensibility and Understanding, which, because it doesn’t translate directly
into Job skills, appears to be ornamental or impotent.
111.
Does this place you squarely on the side of
Secretary Bennett, who’s arguing for Values of Western Civilisation being at
the core of everyone’s Education?
112.
It does to a degree that I think Humanities are
important. But Secretary Bennett is hopelessly parochial in his understanding
of what the origin and source of Values are. Secretary Bennett believes that
Greek and Biblical Ideas are important to the Western tradition, but we know
that those Ideas are importantly derived from Near Eastern and Egyptian and
other sources. The Myth of “Western” Values preserves a particular
understanding of Values that simply isn’t true even to the origins of those
Values. What’s important in Values are Values themselves, not so much the
sources of them. So I’m on the side of those who say that you really have to
enlarge Students’ Understanding of different Cultures and of different range of
Values – for example, Values that are more sensitive to the concerns of women
and Minorities. You don’t depreciate the Value of cultureal norms by admitting
Values that don’t seem to belong to the Greek or Roman or even the Biblical
tradition, understood in a certain way.
113.
What philosophical principle leads you to that
conclusion?
114.
It’s the absolutely fundamental Value and
richness of Diversity as a source of the expansion of the human Imagination and
the human Sensibility and the capacity to sympathise and empathise with others.
115.
But we know we’re different. Isn’t the great
task, as we move to the twenty-first century, to find ways that, being
different, we can nonetheless collaborate in the building of a Society that has
room for everybody?
116.
We can’t take that step until we honestly
acknowledge how deep-seated the differences are. I don’t mean to suggest by
“deep-seated” that our differences necessarily separate us, but that these
diversities are utterly serious and have to do with the various ways of
Cultures understand the World, and what it means to be civil and Moral and
decent and pious and whatever the Value may be. Until we make that first strong
commitment to understanding the primal significance of diversity, we can’t
really move to the level of trying to find areas of commonality.
117.
And that’s a political Art?
118.
Absolutely a political Art – the political Art
is about commonness and difference.
119.
–how to actively collaborate, not just isolate
yourself from People who are different economically, ethnically, and
religiously.
120.
America has had a problem with how it handles
difference. We treat difference as if it arose from interest Groups. That
implies that if you can simply let People into the economic mainstream, or
allow them to get their slice of the pie, the problem is solved. But that’s
such a superficial way of exploiting the enormous vitalities that are locked up
inside difference. It’s also a way of denying oneself
the kind of self-criticism that’s only possible once you recognise how really
limited your own range of Values is. Bennett and others simply cannot conceive
of Western Values as parochial. They simply don’t understand the possibility.
121.
I hear so little talk of Civic Virtue. What’s
happened to political Language to our Time?
122.
Political Language has become increasingly technocratic,
dominated by economic modes of Understanding. The cost-benefit analysis
approach to public policy issues has become endemic, because it’s a handy, easy
way of seeming to deal with our problems. [Steven Soderbergh.] The
trouble is you can’t reduce lots of important Things to those kinds of
categories.
123.
You’re saying we talk about Money and Economics.
124.
We talk about Money and scarce Resources and
having to make choices in balancing Pollution Costs as against Production
Costs. That way of thinking, which is very seductive and compelling, leaves no
way of talking about what is fundamental to a civic Language, which is, Why
should I contribute, sacrifice, and cooperate in a particular way that’s not going
to advance my interests and may even ask me to sacrifice some of those
interests?
125.
–for the Common Good.
126.
Well, for the Common Good or for others whom I
may not know personally or who may be an abstract category to me.
127.
So for all the talk about Morality today, we’re
really getting more economic talk than genuine Moral discourse?
128.
There’s not much doubt about it. Economic talk
is powerful and becomes more powerful when People are economically insecure,
because then, economic talk is talk of salvation in a way that People are
really concerned about. They’re concerned about Jobs, about futures, about
their Families, and about their Life plans. A Language which seems to be able
to make promises about the alleviation of those anxieties then becomes
tremendously magnetic and fascinating. People are ready to go along with those
who can manipulate that Language.
129.
The inscription above the main entrance of the
[UT-Austin], my alma mater, says, “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall
make you free.” A few years ago a student ran for the Student body Presidency on
the one single platform of changing “Ye shall know the truth and the truth
shall make you free,” to “Money talks.” It is the idiom of our Time.
Here in Los
Angeles, there’s concern about the loss of the Language of Print, the Language
of Time and History – which it’s said is being replaced by a video Language. Do
you see evidence that that’s happening, and is it having an effect on the Moral
discourse of Politics?
130.
Los Angeles is special, although I don’t know
that it’s unrepresentative. What’s special about it is the concentration of
cinematic Language and Culture. The political consequences have been
devastating. I don’t find a Civic Culture in Los Angeles. I find a very uneasy
kind of Politics, which subsists because there has been thus far a quite
brilliant State Economy, and seemingly room enough for all. Because of the
Economy, the highly fragmented character of this area with its really diverse
ethnic Groups and social Groupings has been blurred to a large degree. But the
cost of this is an inability to deal with problems that require long-run
solutions. Those problems are clearly pressing in on this area.
131.
It seems to me you’ve really put your finger on
it here. How do we as a Society, given our talk about Economics and our
Self-Interest, solve the problems that otherwise will make our planet
uninhabitable?
132.
Inherent in the American scheme of Things are
tendencies which make it very, very difficult to mount long-run solutions.
Interest group Politics is clearly one way of undercutting that possibility,
because you always have to compromise policies. Think of the difficulty we’ve
had in finding an acid rain policy, even though the information suggests that
the problem is urgent.
There are other things involved, too. The Power of
Corporations to block long-run solutions to environmental concerns is also
accompanied by the fact that the same Corporations are paradoxically engaged in
the kind of technological Innovations that create a large number of problems –
so they’ve got the combination of political clout sufficient to block long-run
Action at the same time that they’re generating the very difficulties that
those long-run solutions are trying to deal with. I’m not simply trying to lay
blame at the Corporate door, but to say that their structural difficulties are
really very profound at this point.
One could also talk about the difficulties of a political party system
that’s unable to generate policies that are much more than ad hoc solutions to
ad hoc problems, so that problems calling for a coherent political will are
beyond the capacity of our system at this point. Without radical reconstitution
of a civil Culture that understands and is willing to commit itself to such
solutions, I don’t see any way that we’re going to deal with those problems,
except in ways that are more authoritarian than we really would want to
countenance.
133.
Don’t we need to begin by developing a political
Language that we can share? Language sets the limit of what we talk about and think
about.
134.
We do have some beginnings along those lines. We
really have made some progress in environmental concerns and with certain kinds
of Health problems. Those areas involve a Language of taking care of Things, a
Language of concern, a Language of thinking in terms of long-run
preoccupations, and so the beginnings of a Civic Discourse are there in embryo,
in those areas and in many others, including Education.
135.
What are the questions we must ask as we move
toward the year 2000?
136.
The central question for
me is the question of collective Identity. What do we think we want to stand
for, as a People? That’s what the preoccupation with a democratic Culture is
all about. What I think we want to stand for is not Expansion of American Power
and not the endless economic and technological Innovation that I think we’re
committed to whether we want to be or not. Do we want to see ourselves
identified with notions of Cooperation, Diversity, Respect and Encouragement,
and of different kinds of Sensibilities and Cultures? Or do we want to see
ourselves instead as the technological Power of the World?
Collective Identity
is something that the Founders tried to deal with in the Preamble to the
Constitution.
137.
“We, the People of the United States, in order
to –“
138.
“- in order to,” yes. Justice is part of it, and
so is Defense, of course. It’s a first stab at an Understanding of ourselves
and how we wanted to present ourselves to the World.
139.
Is it romantic to think that each of us, High
and Low, Black and White, Male and Female, has an Opportunity to contribute to
the answer to that question?
140.
Oh, I think we do,
because fundamentally, a democratic Culture comes down not to big, highfaluting
Institutions or policies, but ultimately, to how we treat each other in our ordinary
range of Relationships and Conversations.
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