Publication Date: Wednesday, September 29, 2004
Guest Opinion: Searching for "the common good" hot seat -- locally and nationally
Guest Opinion: Searching for "the common good" hot seat -- locally and nationally
(September 29, 2004) by Ray Bacchetti
I used to think that a sort of aquifer of civic pride and broad, shared values lay -- cool and dependable -- beneath both Palo Alto and the United States.
If particular issues started to heat up and divide us, we could tap into it and be reminded that, despite the devilish details on which reasonable people can disagree, there was something special about my city and country that at some level everyone agreed about.
Senators seemed to respect the institution they served. Supreme Court justices were inclined to see themselves first as Americans and second as Catholics, Southerners or members of a political party. Cities achieved some successes reconciling ethnic and economic (though not yet racial) differences . Civics courses in high school, admittedly oversimplified, were about principles that symbolized what we as a people stood for in the world.
How naïve that view seems now. As complicated as the world of my childhood and young adulthood was -- with the Depression, World War II and the Iron Curtain -- it seems several orders of magnitude more complex now. Do we still have a grip on the principles that brought the United Nations into being, conceived the Marshall Plan, turned the corner on civil rights at home and created the Peace Corps?
The depth of an aquifer, especially a moral one, isn't easily calculated. It can nourish and refresh you right up until the well goes dry.
It seems we now live in a nation of red and blue states, in a state where few assembly districts are in play in elections, where a "market metaphor" dominates areas well beyond business -- dividing us into winners and losers and making compromise a synonym for weakness rather than a tool in the search for common ground.
But "all politics is local," as the late Tip O'Neill and many others have observed. And even in our bumper-sticker age of political philosophy a few good ideas get attached to the backs of cars -- such as "Think globally, act locally."
So where does Palo Alto fit in this polarized, contentious and feisty world? Here we are with as rich a mix of resources and talent as one is likely to find in any mid-sized American city -- in the world, for that matter.
Do we shift from a city once known for leadership and come to look like just another instance of civic decomposition in which opposing sides line up behind their positions and no one articulates a case for the common good? Our arguments on the larger stages of state and national politics will have a hollow sound if we aren't modeling locally the approaches we believe in more generally.
The notion of the common good is one of the more important elements in the Palo Alto as well as the national aquifer.
It's not magic. It doesn't make problems go away. And some of our recent debates -- such as 800 High St., optimizing city revenues and city services, traffic calming -- aren't easily resolved.
Neither is the current hot issue about dedicated parkland versus a large recycling center in the Palo Alto baylands. Such problems require evidence, analysis and the exploration of alternatives.
A "common good" perspective doesn't provide answers. It deals with the tone of debate and the qualities answers need to have. No process dictates particular policies and practices. But it governs which particular answers make the cut and how to evaluate what's working and what isn't.
How do we get at the common good so that it might become a pragmatic tool for our engaging each other in seeking solutions we all can feel OK about?
Several years ago, I brushed up against a program that aimed at transforming the common good from an abstraction to a lens useable in all manner of public contexts. One of its techniques was to gather groups into conversations. A part of the apparatus of those conversations was a chair labeled "the common good," and participants would occupy that chair by turns.
When in it, each would need to discuss the issue at hand from the perspective of the common good. Mini-epiphanies happened. For example, the sitters often realized that there was such a perspective and that they had a pretty good idea of what it felt like and how it might look.
It was difficult for sitters to state a narrow view and still, without dissonance, claim that it was identical with the common good.
No one needs to warn us, "Don't try this kind of thinking at home." It's not dangerous, and home is a great place to experiment.
If it works there, maybe we can take it down the tree-lined street to City Hall -- and maybe use it as we face decisions in November out how we want our leaders, at every level, to govern.
Ray Bacchetti is a scholar in residence at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Knowledge, above Stanford University. He is a longtime resident of Palo Alto and a former member of the Palo Alto Unified School District Board of Trustees. He can be e-mailed at raybac@earthlink.net.
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