Screeds
Sunday, September 26, 2004
A Little Peace And Quiet
January 3, 2003
The Christmas holidays can be raucous—fun, but raucous, and therefore wearing. Family descends and grills you about things they couldn’t care less about 98% of the year. There are parties, and guests, and holiday music, and food, food, food. There’s the relentless come-togetherism that attends all formalized celebrations of any stripe. There’s a shortage of quiet.
Don’t get me wrong. I like the holidays. But I always breathe a heartfelt sigh of relief when they’re over. By January 2, the re-establishment of my usual level of domestic tranquility has become a survival imperative.
Peace and quiet are necessary to some degree to any rational creature. You have to be able to hear yourself think. You have to be free from social pressures to ponder matters of importance that require decisions. You have to have time to make those decisions and implement them appropriately. The continuous attention of others, and the concomitant demand for your attention, reduce the room required for these other things.
I’d guess most people don’t get enough peace and quiet. In some cases, the problem is self-inflicted. In others, it arises from the well-meaning but ultimately destructive exhortations of others that you pay attention, usually to matters whose importance is far less to you than it is to them.
Now let’s talk about citizen participation in politics.
The calls for greater citizen involvement in politics—by which is usually meant involvement in the campaigns of politicians—have become continuous. Often, they’re tinged by an implied condemnation of the alternative, which is, of course, private life: tending to one’s own hearth, home, and business affairs.
Politicians choose their own hells. By offering themselves to the electorate in any capacity, they surrender their claim to private lives. At least, that’s the current practice. When Grover Cleveland was President, there was still a chance that his illegitimate child could escape publicity. Many editors regarded the matter as unfit for the pages of their papers. Today, a politician can’t even break wind in his own living room without facing headlines about it the next day, assuming no sufficiently lurid sex crime crowds them off the front page.
Perhaps in revenge, they all seem to be trying to turn everyone else in the country into politicians.
Once upon a time, one’s participation in charity was a private matter, resolved according to one’s sense of community, religious duty, and personal feelings for the beneficiaries. But President Bush has explicitly called Americans to devote a significant fraction of their lives—two years—to “serving others,” a phrase of elastic meaning. I admire Dubya, but this was a major gaffe. The politicization of charitable works has already severely damaged the mechanisms of charity, impeded true benevolence in America, and mainly served the fortunes of persons and institutions whose agendas he would condemn, all while reducing the individual’s sphere of privacy. More politicization will bring still more destruction—and President Bush should know it.
Everyone has an interest group, these days, and all of them are screaming for something. Just yesterday, I learned that the city of Newport, Rhode Island has appointed a special liaison to the “gay and lesbian community.” Let’s not bother to imagine that this might be happening against the wishes of politically active homosexuals in Newport. Let’s ponder instead why anyone might think that pandering in this fashion to a legendarily vociferous interest group is likely to shut them up. Isn’t it far more likely that other groups, eager to get on the gravy train, will simply add their voices to the clamor for special recognition, making the din of special-interest warfare still worse?
Privacy as a concept has been under heavy assault from the Left for quite some time, of course, but it’s truly galling when voices on the Right, where we expect the importance of privacy to be taken seriously, join the chorus.
On New Year’s Day, Brit Hume moderated a brief panel discussion on the Fox News Channel, in which Fred Barnes and Morton Kondracke participated, about the Dishonorable Charles Rangel’s call for the reinstitution of military conscription—the draft. Barnes, Kondracke, and Hume all agreed with Rangel that a new draft would be a good thing, though not for Rangel’s reasons. The three conservatives thought the draft would strengthen various public virtues and the ethic of self-sacrifice among Americans—an argument usually associated with Leftist sociologist Charles Moskos, for whom a draft is the only public policy that matters.
Never mind that our all-volunteer military is the most formidable fighting force in all of history. Never mind that career military planners consider conscription the enemy of military effectiveness. Never mind that the draft made the Vietnam War a war fought by America against itself, in the newspapers and broadcast media and on the streets of our cities.
The draft would put a quarrel through the heart of that nasty presumption that you own your own life, that it’s up to you to decide what fraction of it to devote to the concerns of others. It would turn every young American into a politician, someone with a life-and-death interest in affairs of State. It would also severely undermine the incentive to keep the peace whenever possible that arises from a volunteer military.
While it might not be each individual’s right to ignore the State, as Herbert Spencer proposed, it would certainly be nice if we could pay it less, not more, of our attention. Politicians and their cheering squads want it the other way—and they’re gaining ground.
Curmudgeons hate all this clamor. We’re sensitive to invasions of our privacy. We hold them firmly against those who commit them, and we don’t forget an offense. And we do as we would be done by, which is why we make good neighbors—and are never politicians.
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