Possible column on the Decline of the Idea of the Public

This week, I took a day of continuing education and spent it in the library for Eden Seminary at Webster University. The next day, I took a vacation day to hike in a state park.  Both moved me to think about the decline of the very idea of public in our time. Travel to any county. If they have an older courthouse, it was a stately building to evidence pride in the public’s work and public service. Often, newer public buildings look cheap by comparison or strictly utilitarian at best. We have grown loath to even speak of the public interest but see the marketplace as the font of all wisdom. Instead of seeing where we are in the same boat, it is the nostrum of every person for oneself.

The very idea of public insists that some things deserve to be shared. The costs for those shared services are spread across the board as well. They should be distributed fairly, no matter who you are in terms of social status. In an opportunity society we embrace the notion of individual talent and work. We neglect that the playing field is not level, and some have vast advantages over others in their starting point.  Public goods try to pry open the doors of opportunity more broadly.

Free public education is one of the glories of the American system. Libraries at one time were the preserve of the wealthy. Benjamin Franklin wanted to increase access to learning, so he developed a lending library system for Philadelphia. I can’t afford all the volumes that I would like to prepare sermons and Bible studies, let alone, a collection of essays I am preparing, but libraries open up a vast storehouse of knowledge to us all,

We moved education from private tutors, privately paid, to a system of free public education for the student, when the cost was spread across the board. I went to a state university, Maryland (now in the Big Ten). When I was there, most of the cost was shared by Maryland taxpayers. That has dwindled to a much smaller level. State schools are less expensive than private ones, but the burden for individuals has skyrocketed.

During the move to an industrial system, our country started to develop public parks in distinction to the gardens of Versailles, for instance, for the private enjoyment of royalty. Even cemeteries developed from churchyards to afford the community a restful place to consider their own mortality and a park-like space to inter a body with respect through the ages. When I lived in Indiana, the system was designed so that everyone was within a roughly 30 mile drive to a state park. So often, when I visit a public park, one encounters work done 80 years ago by the Civilian Conservation Corps. Desperately poor young people were set to work to improve the quality of life for us all. What a gift to be given some open space, a place to enjoy nature, a place to picnic outside, a place to be, albeit briefly, to be unplugged from the connected, wired world.

Throughout our history, we have mediated between individual competition and social and public groups to further our pursuit of happiness, public and private. We have tried to tie the public interest to self-interest, as Kennedy said; a rising tide lifts all boats. The public can be a least common denominator approach, but it can also help us aspire to purposes greater than individual acquisition and self-interest. The public can showcase our lives at their best, if we so choose. Nothing demonstrates our commitment to being a people, a nation as the quality of the work we do toge