Philanthropy and Democracy

Traumatic events such as the death of a young son change our sense of reality. It is somewhat like the experience that Thomas Wolfe had in mind in You Can't Go Home Again. Things are the same and yet they are forever different. You are the same, and yet your values are different. I have no sense of a "born again" experience, no sense of a conversion from one day to the next from despair to joy. What I have found instead, imbued in the same flawed human being, is a larger sense of commitment and a more generous sense of the way I should try to carry it out. With humbling inconsistency I have, since Matt died in 1973, discovered a larger and more important world -- especially beyond my own immediate needs and concerns.

Having lived with the encroachment of death into our lives during the four years of Matt's illness, years that were also the years of his precocious maturity as a person, I formed a profound respect for him. His standards for himself were very high; he always seemed guided by aspiration rather than by ambition. He showed extraordinary moral courage in the face of recurrent physical defeat; he never conceded victory to his disease. We all became braver and stronger by imitation. All of the failings we had before his death we continued to suffer after he died, but each one of us had accepted a new standard whether we were ready for it or not. A new standard for everything: toward our relationships to one another, toward our health, toward our work, toward the world that he had wanted to serve.

When I became a paternal surrogate for my son Joe in the life of Joey, the son he didn't live to see, it was, in its first years, a philosophical exercise. I kept a journal for him and wrote in it about his father and about the things going on in the world, knowing that what I was writing he would not read for twenty or thirty years.

It was in thinking about this unspoken obligation to my grandson -- the little boy who had no father, a child who holds two passports as the offspring of an American father and a British mother -- that I began to formulate the argument of this essay. I began to ask myself the question, What is it about my life that I would most want to preserve for my grandson?

My first effort at an answer was put forward in a commencement address at Richmond College near London; a more careful version of it was later published. I tried and failed to write another essay on the subject and have been struggling with the subject for almost a decade. The core idea, expressed in that loose way that frustrates some of my colleagues but that still seems to me to capture the spirit of what I'm after better than more precise formulations, is this: Joey should have the opportunity to grow up and live in a free, open, and democratic society. More important than passing along to him an economic system, a body of religious doctrine, or even an intellectual tradition preserved and institutionalized in the form of the university, it seemed to me that the opportunity to be a free man in an open and democratic society would have to come first, to be a precondition of all the rest. In such a society he could listen to me or to anyone else he chose about economic arrangements, and he could pass from capitalism to socialism and back again; he could be a fundamentalist, a backslider, a mainline churchman too sophisticated for the Apostle's Creed, or an earnest, searching man of faith, free to wrestle with God or to ignore Him as he chose. Like the rich young man in the parable, when challenged by Jesus to give everything he had to the poor and follow Him, he could bow his head and turn away. I believe firmly in some notion of freedom --some ability to make choices to shape our lives that enables us to turn our backs on matters of utmost importance. We are also free to act in violation of "on the average." In a sense that really counts, we are free. If we are free, others are too. To share our freedom, we talk. "Openness" is the still-problematic issue of our present ability to engage in serious public discourse about serious issues.

My reference point for discourse has always been the sorely-abused and little understood ideal of academic freedom. My academic years parallel those of the McCarthy era and the years of the Vietnam war. I have seen the betrayal of academic freedom from within as well as bullying and intimidation from without. The freedom of the classroom is as sacred to me as the freedom of the church. Despite that, it is on the record that in the spring of 1970 1 ordered the closing of C. W. Post College in the face of the threat of physical violence (not aimed at me but at the campus as a whole). In my opinion, now as well as then the issues that disrupted the campus were external to it. Political values displaced intellectual values.

An open society places such a high value on talk about issues that it maintains strong safeguards of such forums as classrooms and newspapers and sanctuaries. One's natural tendency toward the middle is greatly reinforced by the reckless abuses of discourse by both Left and Right. There is some historical evidence that such extremism is politically effective. I'm unwilling to concede the point.

I have no secure conceptual reason for arguing for a "democratic" society; my commitment to that is based on what I know about political history and on the experience of my own life -- a life that spans the extraordinary 20th century social movements of civil and human rights. The United States seems to me to have pushed the notion of democracy as far as it can. On the one hand, we speak of our society as if we're still able to have town meetings or even constitutional assemblies. On the other hand we grow greatly in numbers and in ethnic and cultural complexity. New understandings of civic education, of representation, of what "republic" might mean, cry out for new Madisons and Hamiltons to be our public teachers. In my less optimistic moods I see the long-term future of the United States in much the brief story of the United Nations -- that is, ungovernable.

There is nothing assured about the future of freedom or openness or democracy, but the best hope for the survival of such things rests with those who have benefited most fully from them -- that is, my generation and perhaps the next one or two.