First appeared October 27, 1999, in the Chicago Free Press.
A large number of current controversies hinge on whether public funds should be used to display or promote symbols or materials that offend some persons but which others support as promoting tolerance or virtue, or recognizing the contributions or heritage of their groups. One way of defusing this culture war might be to reduce the government's role in the support of advocacy, art, and public symbol-mongering generally.
LIKE MANY PEOPLE who regularly write on public issues, I have developed an interest in examining how people argue about these issues. Not just the arguments one way or the other about specific topics or the merits of specific positions, but the types of arguments people make, the general principles they appeal to, the background assumptions that never actually get stated or argued.
Take a couple of examples. In Plymouth, Mich., recently, high school teachers set up showcase displays about gay history for Gay History Month (October).
The local school superintendent ordered the displays taken down because they were not part of the curriculum and were offensive ("promoting a lifestyle" was his boilerplate language).
The Brooklyn Museum of Art recently mounted an exhibition of supposedly shocking "art" including a bland picture of a black woman with scattered brown blobs (alleged to be elephant dung), titled "The Holy Virgin Mary."
New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani called the exhibition offensive and threatened to cancel the city's subsidy of the museum, arguing that the city should only be supporting real art.
It is easy to get caught up in the heat of these controversies. Should a gay history display be considered offensive? Does it promote a lifestyle? Does it help promote tolerance and understanding? Is the controversial art any good? Is it sacrilegious? Is Giuliani just playing politics?
But it seems to me that people who argue on different sides of issues like these are tacitly appealing to different models of what the "public" (that is, the government - that is, people's tax money) should be supporting.
One model assumes without argument that since government ("public" entities) embraces all the various views and groups of people in society, it should be using tax money to support and promote the widest possible cultural diversity, points of view and expressive representations (e.g., art, group symbols, etc.).
The alternative model assumes, again without argument, that the government which-in a democracy, at least-represents the whole people, should subsidize and promote traditions and viewpoints that "the people" have in common, that are part of our common cultural heritage, provide undeniable public benefit and have strong popular support.
Thus, for example, the teachers in Michigan could argue that gays are one of American's diverse social groups, that they have made unique if previously unacknowledged contributions to the society, that schools should teach unbiased truth, that knowledge promotes understanding which helps promote social tolerance, that it promotes self-esteem among gay students, and that any objections are based on ignorance, fear, hate and prejudice.
Parents and school administrators can argue that gays are a small minority, that the displays offend most people in the area, that they just create divisiveness and disruption, that they are mere group advocacy, and scarce teaching time and resources should promote things all of us-including gay-have in common.
You can easily imagine the parallel arguments regarding the controversial art in New York. In fact, you can now probably generate new arguments yourself.
Once you begin looking around, examples spring into view: Should the National Endowment for the Arts subsidize controversial performance artists? Should Christmas displays be on "public" (government) land? Should the Confederate flag fly atop South Carolina's capitol building? What about the rainbow flag at the Ohio state capitol?
Should Kwanzaa be treated as a "real" holiday in public schools? Should government employees get Good Friday off from work? Should Robert Mapplethorpe photographs be exhibited at government-subsidized art galleries?
The two sides are fundamentally at odds over how they view society - as a people or as a collectivity of groups - so they diverge over their views of what the government should support and represent. There seems no way for them to compromise or reach an accommodation: The two positions and their partisans will remain in a fundamental strife for all eternity, one gaining a little here now, the other gaining a little over there later.
Considerations such as these might lead someone to a more libertarian approach, attempting to minimize the areas of social conflict as much as possible by reducing the amount of "public" (government) subsidizing, promotion and sponsorship, and leaving social, cultural, and ideological advocacy of any sort to individuals and civic groups.
We might leave the promotion of art, for instance, to the vast army of private collectors, art dealers, art critics, private museums and perhaps even the artists themselves.
In the area of viewpoint promotion, we could leave that to the wide array of think tanks, public policy institutes, philanthropists, advocacy groups, editorial writers and public polemicists.
Instead of having the government take people's money and spend it according to one or the other model of the "public interest," it might be preferable and more peaceful to let people keep their own money and spend it to support the ideas and buy the cultural products they actually want.
But this libertarian view antagonizes both the diversitarians and the majoritarians more than anything, more even than they antagonize each other. Both want to seize control of the public treasury and the government megaphone in order to promote the art, viewpoints, and ideologies they approve of. Both are afraid that if things are left up to individuals and civic associations, they will not get the results they want.
Both may be right.