column on public v. private

When I go to our regional church gatherings, my mind tends to wander. This time, it settled on the decline of the public sphere as compared to the private sphere. I keep hearing about how a person from business is well-suited to the political arena. Years ago, Graham Allison noted that private and public administration are alike in all unimportant respects. The complexity and number of stakeholders alone in the public sphere, the public interest instead of profit combine to make it a different, daunting difference.

The inability of Springfield to arrive at a budget is illustrative of the issue. Private groups have tried to raise some money to deal with the ankle breaking hazard that mark the Gordon Moore tennis courts, when the state’s budget woes stopped a major grant in its tracks. We seem to have little trouble financing wars, but other public needs go begging. Indeed, we seem to wish to rely on private charity instead of making programs of public justice that could eliminate the need for private charity, such as the venerable Social Security program. St Louis has many ruined husks of structures. At the same time, it was willing to help raise one billion dollars for a football stadium.

We seem to expect governmental programs to be poorly run. We also seem to ignore when private institutions are poorly run. I have heard almost no complaint about the recent spate of enormous fines being paid by banks for bringing to the entire economy to its knees in 2008.

The public space used to be an emblem of pride. Look at the quality of older governmental structures, be it city halls, county courthouses, or other civic ventures. Astounding public parks were created, be it Rock Springs Park in Alton or the magnificence of Forest Park and its institutions across the river. We are all witnesses to a concerted effort to “privatize” public life, in education for instance.  One of the many things I admire of the WWII generation was its concern with institution building.

I am not sure if cyberspace is a public sphere or a mere aggregation of private expression. Its lack of civility would make me think that it lacks the courtesy the public sphere requires to mediate and lessen divisions. “Enclave culture” talks about diversity, but its structural response is the creation of separate groupings that emphasize being against other grouping more than being for a particular grouping: what one is not more than what we are. The focus on the private seems to have a correlative increase in complaining and blame. As it grows, it has the corresponding, surprising, decline of taking personal responsibility for one’s actions.

We see it in churches constantly. We bring a market orientation to worship: what does it do for me? We speak of mere preferences as principles. Religious denominations lose members, and folks are more willing to shop for churches than they once were. One hears about being spiritual but not religious quite frequently. It is as if the very notion of an organization has been rendered suspect.

We live in tension between two poles. One is cohesion, togetherness, centripetal forces. The other is the individual, fission, centrifugal forces. Some years ago, the sociologist Robert Putnam wrote Bowling Alone. He spoke of the collapse of community in the face of public participation in political and social life declining in area after area, from voting to membership in groups such as Rotary. Part of it is the amount of hours we work and the many demands placed on us. Oscar Wilde said that “the trouble of socialism is that it took up too many evenings.” It may well be time for us to take some evenings to get clarity on the weights of the public and private sphere in this new century.