{"id":2687,"date":"2018-02-11T15:51:41","date_gmt":"2018-02-11T23:51:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.annefocke.net\/?p=2687"},"modified":"2018-02-13T10:36:10","modified_gmt":"2018-02-13T18:36:10","slug":"creative-tension-individual-interests-vs-the-common-good","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.annefocke.net\/?p=2687","title":{"rendered":"Creative Tension \u2013 Individual interests vs. the common good"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The principle of [the United States] seems to be to make private interests harmonize with the general interest. A sort of refined and intelligent selfishness seems to be the pivot on which the whole machine turns…. But up to what extent can the two principles of individual well-being and the general good in fact be merged?…This is something which only the future will show. \u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u2014 Alexis de Tocqueville, 1831<\/em><\/p>\n

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Introduction<\/span><\/h2>\n

There\u2019s a high likelihood Tocqueville\u2019s question will never be settled definitively \u2013 not now, nearly 200 years into Toqueville\u2019s \u201cfuture,\u201d and not two hundred years into our future. I can\u2019t imagine a time when one group of human beings won\u2019t be tugging another toward one of these principles and away from the other. It\u2019s a tension that\u2019s probably best not settled, one we should constantly question and struggle to answer in new ways.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve borrowed the Toqueville quote from \u201cCivil Society and Its Discontents,\u201d an article by Bruce Sievers published in 2004 by Grantmakers in the Arts.1<\/sup> At the time, I was co-editor of GIA\u2019s periodical, the GIA Reader<\/em>, and had the opportunity to work with Bruce on this and other pieces for the Reader<\/em>. Working with him was the best introduction I could have had to the crucial role that civil society plays, or should<\/em> play, in our world. Civil society, the common good, the commons, and many concepts and understandings spinning around these ideas continue to play a central role in my thinking.<\/p>\n

The essays that Bruce wrote for GIA were among the precursors to his 2010 book, Civil Society, Philanthropy and the Fate of the Commons<\/em>.2<\/sup> As it was being published, the book provided the structure for a series of five conversations I organized with friends and colleagues Wier Harman, Carol Lewis, and Ted Lord. In mid-2010 after the five sessions were over, I considered \u201cserializing\u201d the notes so the ideas we wrestled with in conversation could be shared with others.<\/p>\n

To try out my plan, I drafted a few pieces intended to provide a general context, without discussing the conversations. That would come next, I thought. I only got as far as three pieces before being swept up in other work, which has been a common fate of my writing over the years. Recently, I\u2019ve gone back to the few I wrote and to my notes from the conversations themselves, knowing that a greater understanding of civil society is at least as important now as it was then. One piece follows here, and a second, \u201dCan we stay in the same room?<\/a>\u201d was posted on this site earlier.<\/p>\n

January 2018<\/em><\/p>\n

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Creative Tension <\/span>
\nIndividual interests vs. the common good<\/span><\/h2>\n

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January 2011<\/em><\/p>\n

One evening in the fall 2004, a notice slid under my apartment\u2019s front door notifying residents that the board of my condo association had just fired the building\u2019s live-in managers, a couple who had shared responsibility for managing and maintaining this 80-unit residential building for about ten years. They were already out of a job and a home. That day, the notice read, had been their last.<\/p>\n

In addition, the board had decided to change the association\u2019s long-time practice of hiring resident managers. Instead we would now contract with a commercial property management firm and, in fact, a particular company had already been selected. A central argument for the change seemed to be, in essence, \u201ckeeping up with the Joneses.\u201d Other condominiums in our neighborhood used commercial firms; resident managers were simply unprofessional, the board\u2019s argument went, and was probably devaluing our individual investments.<\/p>\n

Many of us who were owners were stunned. The managers had received no notice and the board gave them ten days to move out. (Activist owners managed to extend the allotted time to a month.)<\/p>\n

Rancor and strife erupted and prevailed openly for months. Charges of secrecy, calls for due process, accusations of inappropriate use of power were countered by claims that it was all for our own good and, besides, it was a personnel matter that had to be confidential. Concerns for maintaining the value of the property clashed with concerns for open process and justice for the managers as human beings. In one way of understanding it, upper floors (with larger apartments, higher property values, and votes that counted more) seemed pitted against we on the lower floors. Some decried the loss of democratic process and of community and shared values. The imbroglio was intense and exhausting, and the bruises continue under the surface today, six years later.<\/p>\n

This very local turmoil in my building played out in tandem with the 2004 national presidential campaign, then in high gear \u2013 on the radio, TV, and internet, in newspapers and in discussions at work and among friends. Angry debates about the Iraq War (barely a year old), the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, the PATRIOT Act, and the voting controversies and irregularities of four years earlier \u2013 all colored the campaigns. Strident claims seemed barely connected to fact.<\/p>\n

For a few days, with the Republican convention on my kitchen radio and meetings of a rump group of disaffected condo owners in the apartment next door, I retreated to my home office to meet a publishing deadline. At the time, I was executive director of Grantmakers in the Arts and co-editor of its periodical, the GIA Reader<\/em>. Much of my role as editor was essentially interactive, communicating with writers and thinkers whose ideas subsequently reached GIA members and others through the publication. Aspects of the editorial work, though, required concentration and focus; the space and time for this was often easier to find outside the office.<\/p>\n

One of the essays I worked on at home that fall, with the backdrop of both local and national dramas, was \u201cCivil Society and Its Discontents: Philanthropy\u2019s Civic Mission,\u201d by Bruce Sievers.<\/p>\n

Sievers\u2019 piece opened with a quote from Alexis de Tocqueville (Sing Sing<\/em>, 1831):<\/p>\n

The principle of the republics of antiquity was to sacrifice private interests to the general good. In that sense one could say that they were virtuous. The principle of [the United States] seems to be to make private interests harmonize with the general interest. A sort of refined and intelligent selfishness seems to be the pivot on which the whole machine turns…. But up to what extent can the two principles of individual well-being and the general good in fact be merged?…This is something which only the future will show.<\/span> <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Later in the essay, Sievers describes what characterizes civil society and distinguishes it from both commerce and government:<\/p>\n

[The world] we inhabit when we are acting in civil society is very different from those of other spheres of social life: the economy and the state. Each of these three worlds has its set of goals, expectations, norms, and incentives. In the economic world, we think and act as producers, consumers, and investors; in the political world, we play the roles of voters, lawmakers, and public administrators. In the world of civil society, we become community members, volunteers, and civic actors. <\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

What particularly characterizes [civil society] is pluralism, distinctive social values, and a creative tension between individual interests and the commons. It is the sphere in which private visions of the public good play out in interaction with one another to shape the social agenda. Participating in civil society involves the pursuit of a mixture of public and private goals, of social problem-solving and individual expression. <\/em><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yikes! \u201cCreative tension\u201d hardly states it strongly enough. The words in the essay and the worlds I inhabited beyond my desk began to get mixed up with each other. Sievers, for instance, referred to looking within civil society \u201cfor the sources of a familiar institutional gridlock in which it becomes easy to obstruct actions aimed at achieving public purposes but extremely difficult to take positive steps forward to accomplish them.\u201d It doesn\u2019t take more of an institution than a small condo association to see that gridlock in action.<\/p>\n

Later in the essay Sievers writes:<\/p>\n

It is…the erosion of essential civic values \u2013 the steep decline in public trust, diminishing belief in the efficacy of civic action, increasing fractiousness of public debate, and diminishing bonds of common civic identity \u2013 that poses the fundamental threat and that prevents the solution of large social problems. We are back to Tocqueville and his worry about reconciling the principles of \u201cindividual well-being and the general good\u201d in the American experiment.<\/span> <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Although Sievers focused on the specific role that philanthropy can play in strengthening civil society, I paid as much attention to what the essay taught me about democracy and the principles of civil society. I was struck by the thought that somehow these abstractly philosophical ideas had an essential relevance to both the immediately local and the far-reaching national debates unfolding around me. But it was as though each of the three worlds \u2013 the local, national, and theoretical \u2013 existed on parallel planes that didn\u2019t overlap in ways I could get my mind around in a practical way.<\/p>\n

Big ideas \u2013 like those of Tocqueville and Sievers on civil society \u2013 help me adjust my understanding of what happens on the ground where I live, but they leave me unsettled until I figure out how to adjust my actions in response to them.<\/p>\n

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Coda\u00a0<\/span><\/h2>\n

The \u201cerosion of essential civic values\u201d that Sievers mentions seems to be occurring at an ever faster rate. Daily\u2026hourly\u2026we are urged to write this congressman, show up for that action, resist another dreadful bill, proposed legislation, or executive decision. Given the rise of ever-more powerful individual interests, how do we also begin to shore up public trust, dilute the fractiousness of our public debate, and strengthen a common sense of civic identity? Without it, we stand to lose the creative tension between private interests and the general good that\u00a0Tocqueville called the\u00a0“pivot on which the whole machine turns.”<\/p>\n

January 2018<\/em><\/p>\n

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Notes<\/span><\/p>\n

1 \u00a0\u201cCivil Society and its Discontents,\u201d Bruce R. Sievers, GIA Reader<\/em>, Autumn 2004.<\/p>\n

2 \u00a0Civil Society, Philanthropy and the Fate of the Commons<\/a>,<\/em> Bruce R. Sievers, University Press of New England, 2010.<\/p>\n

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