Harry Boyte<\/a>, I believe<\/p>\nthat opportunities for people to contribute public goods have shrunk<\/p>\n
over the last century. Government is increasingly "rational"<\/p>\n
(in Weber’s sense): this means that important functions are divided<\/p>\n
into specialized tasks and assigned to experts, who are given minimal<\/p>\n
discretion. The government as a whole does good, but relatively few<\/p>\n
people can gain deep personal satisfaction from their own public service.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, the private sector grows ever more efficient and competitive.<\/p>\n
As a result, there are few niches for people who want to work in business<\/p>\n
for partly public purposes. (An example would be the demise of the<\/p>\n
old publishing houses, which were "for profit," but not<\/p>\n
very efficient about it; editors saw themselves mainly as friends<\/p>\n
of literature.)<\/p>\n
The loss of opportunities for public work is unfortunate, because<\/p>\n
we waste the talents and energies of millions of citizens. It also<\/p>\n
means that people lose the very special satisfaction that comes from<\/p>\n
creating public goods. And I believe that it partly explains the decline<\/p>\n
of other forms of citizenship, such as voting and reading the newspaper.<\/p>\n
People who don’t make public goods are less likely to participate<\/p>\n
in other ways.<\/p>\n
Now we face a national crisis, terrorism, and it seems worthwhile<\/p>\n
to look for opportunities to involve many citizens in significant<\/p>\n
public work. Only an expert on national security could tell us what<\/p>\n
jobs people are equipped to do. Spying on our fellow citizens is not<\/p>\n
a good idea (the damage to privacy and due process is too great).<\/p>\n
Thus I offer some very ill-informed ideas about some other roles that<\/p>\n
citizens might play. My main goal here is to provoke others to think<\/p>\n
of better ideas:<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\n- The military personnel who are doing peace-keeping and nation-building\n
work in Iraq are creating public goods. They are creative and improvisational,<\/p>\n
in the best tradition of public work. We should celebrate them as<\/p>\n
good citizens, and recognize the (non-martial) virtues that they are<\/p>\n
displaying—virtues that we also need in civilian life. Everyone<\/p>\n
wants Iraqis to play a larger role; but for the time being, let’s<\/p>\n
recognize that Americans are exemplifying citizenship in Iraq. (This<\/p>\n
is true even if the invasion was ill-advised or even illegal.) We<\/p>\n
also need ways to help veterans of Iraq to use their skills back home.<\/li>\n
- Citizens could deliberately learn strategic languages, such as Pashto\n
or Malay; read newspapers and websites in those languages; and then<\/p>\n
post their own translations of key excerpts online. Their audience<\/p>\n
would be US experts in foreign affairs, and also fellow citizens who<\/p>\n
are trying to understand a complex world. Clearly, volunteers would<\/p>\n
have to learn<\/em> these languages from someone. This suggests<\/p>\na great opportunity to employ immigrants as language teachers.<\/li>\n
- Citizens could assist in planning the emergency evacuation of major\n
cities. Big highways would be quickly jammed after a catastophe, so<\/p>\n
we need to figure out how to move large numbers of people through<\/p>\n
side streets. Citizens could collect data on the capacity of each<\/p>\n
street segment to carry heavy traffic. Fed into GIS software, these<\/p>\n
data would show alternative evacuation routes. <\/li>\n
- There are many ways for citizens to work together to conserve oil,\n
thereby reducing our dependence on middle eastern sources.<\/p>\n
I’m sure there are better ideas than these. It’s a shame that our<\/p>\n
creativity and dedication were not tapped soon after 9\/11, when<\/p>\n
people were desperate to serve. But it’s not too late.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Influenced by Harry Boyte, I believe that opportunities for people to contribute public goods have shrunk over the last century. Government is increasingly "rational" (in Weber’s sense): this means that important functions are divided into specialized tasks and assigned to experts, who are given minimal discretion. The government as a whole does good, but relatively […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4286","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-iraq-and-democratic-theory"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4286","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4286"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4286\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}