Like many arguments, it began obliquely, in the lull after a good dinner. I was drying dishes and listening to my son, 19 years old and living in Chicago, recount an incident involving a friend who had been hit by a van while she was riding her bike, the point of the story being the callous and belligerent behavior of the policeman who arrived at the scene. My son is a good storyteller, and there was headshaking all around. But when he went on to issue a blanket indictment of Chicago cops, I, whose firsthand experience of their ministrations is zero, mildly dissented on principle.
In retrospect, that is when the argument started, though at the time we simply seemed to be talking. We moved to the subject of police brutality in general, and I waxed indignant over the way some groups had seized on a single recent incident in New York—vile, yes, but truly representative of the day-to-day conduct of the force?–to suggest that the much-ballyhooed reduction of crime under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani had in fact been accomplished by widespread brutality and a systematic disregard for civil liberties. These critics, I said, warming to my theme, were the same crowd who raised an outcry over the city’s campaign against the “squeegeemen,” those window-washers whose unsolicited attention—and often intimidating tactics—many drivers in New York had come to loathe.
I said this with a tone that assumed consensus—assumed, that is, the evident intransigence, ideological beyond persuasion, of those who resisted even this modest gesture toward a renewal of civility.
But “those” people of whom I had spoken with a certain contempt turned out to include both my son and my older daughter, who is also living in Chicago. At the mention of the squeegeemen, they became icy and furious at the same time. It was a shame, they said sarcastically, that law-abiding citizens on their way to work had their equanimity disturbed by the presence of such riffraff. Too bad the city couldn’t arrange to get the poor out of sight altogether.
The argument had raged for quite a while when my son, in his parting shot as he went out the door, said that people who feel that way shouldn’t be in the city in the first place; they belong in the suburbs. I didn’t sleep much that night.
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I thought about that conversation a few days later, on September 17 in New York, while listening to some learned and witty sparring between political theorists William Galston and Robert George on “The Moral Foundations of Liberal Democracy.” The occasion was the annual symposium of the Institute for American Values, a think tank headed by David Blankenhorn. You may have read about the report issued that day by the institute’s Council on Families, Closed Hearts, Closed Minds: The Textbook Story of Marriage, by Norval Glenn, an evaluation of the nation’s 20 leading college-level textbooks on marriage and family life. (For a copy of the report, devastating in its documentation of the ideological bias and sheer incompetence of the texts surveyed, contact David Brenner at the Institute for American Values, 212-246-3942.)
In addition to a discussion of the report and its implications, the day’s proceedings, presided over by Blankenhorn and Jean Bethke Elshtain, the chair of the Council on Families, had included an address by Mary Ann Glendon of Harvard Law School, offering a key participant’s assessment of “The State of the Debate on Civil Society.” Now, in the midafternoon, Galston and George were talking about Aristotle and John Rawls and the Constitution. Though they occasionally swooped down to address a pressing policy issue (homosexuals in the military, for instance), the level of abstraction was high.
That was when I recalled the argument of a few days earlier, which had been under my skin ever since. The debate on civil society is played out not only in think tanks and academic journals, but also in kitchens and city council meetings. How do we keep lines of connection open between the two realms, the theoretical and the everyday? (And isn’t that precisely what we are trying to do in B&C?)
The only way I know to answer that question is to point to examples. There is Jean Elshtain’s new book, Real Politics: At the Center of Everyday Life (Johns Hopkins University Press, 373 pp.; $29.95), a collection of essays and reviews, “many of them written in the heat of battle,” informed by the conviction that “human life is always smudgy, always a mixture of limit and possibility, hope and despair.” Another example, this one drawn from theology, is Miroslav Volf’s Exclusion and Embrace (reviewed on page 32 of this issue). What these books have in common is their engagement with the “messy stuff,” as Elshtain calls it: the resistance of the real. We hope you will find plenty of that messy stuff in these pages.
–John Wilson, Editor
Copyright(c) 1997 by the author or Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@booksandculture.com.
Nov/Dec 1997, Vol. 3, No. 6, Page 5
