Civil Society Watch

A mericans are increasingly oblivious to politics but exceptionally sensitive to culture. What constitutes for other countries the meat and potatoes of political conflict--the distribution of income among classes, regulation of industry, protectionism versus free trade, sectional antagonism--here captures only the attention of the interests immediately affected. Politics in the classic sense of who gets what, when, and how is carried out by a tiny elite watched over by a somewhat larger, but still infinitesimally small, audience of news followers. The attitude of the great majority of Americans to such traditional political subjects is an unstable combination of boredom, resentment, and sporadic attention.

Other than the time between the two World Wars, democracy has been a remarkable success after World War II. From 1918 through 1939, after the progression of democratic tendencies in the beginning of the 1920s, most countries in Europe gradually returned to autocratic, even fascist regimes. Today it is a fact that democracy is deeply rooted in Western European countries and all communist regimes in the eastern half of Europe have failed. Some countries, in that region, though, are on their way to democracy, and in other countries democratic governments are trying their first steps, which turn out to be hopeful, yet difficult. I deliberately call it the eastern half of Europe--not Eastern Europe--because very often Central European countries are called Eastern European. Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, and Hungarians, however, consider themselves Central European, not Eastern European.

There are indeed liberal and productive forms of capitalism. Invariably, these bear the indelible imprint of Western socialism or of solidaristic social Christianity. The collapse of the Communist regimes by no means entails the imminent triumph of an enlightened capitalism across large areas of the earth's surface. An appreciably more savage version of capitalism is dominant in many societies (in Latin America, for instance). As they consider the economic and social costs of their integration into the world market, the peoples of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe have good reason to be apprehensive. In our own nation, meanwhile, the loud, triumphant rejoicing of 1989 has given way to more sober reflection on our own condition. We struggle, after all, with cultural confusion, economic stagnation, and social conflict in equal measure--while our citizenry is increasingly ambivalent about the remnants of our public life. This essay asks if we in the United States have the intellectual and spiritual resources to think anew about the relationships of individual liberty and social obligation, market function and public sovereignty, public good and private interest. The metahistorical flatness of our imaginative horizon, the increasing fragmentation of our social existence, have so affected our cultural institutions that the sphere of public argument is constricted and deformed. We confront, instead, a situation rather like that depicted in Breughel's painting of the tower of Babel. Work on the edifice of our common life has all but ceased, as architects and artisans contend with one another in strange tongues. Political and social philosophy have become domains for yet another set of academic specialists, who hardly address a public. Those pursuing inquiry into history and society often suppose that they can dispense with questions of direction, purpose, and value --and so philosophize uncritically. The larger issues that underlie our problems, then, are often relegated to a background dimly perceived and even more dimly depicted.