Lewis Hyde's New Observations on Civic Virtue, Mixing Values, and the Freedom to Listen

Two years ago, I wrote a blog post about a book by Lewis Hyde entitled The Gift, which had a lot to say, philosophically, about gift-giving and -receiving, an issue of relevance to government ethics. I just finished Hyde's book Common As Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership, which just came out last month from Farrar Straus. It's a fantastic book about the philosophical bases of copyright and patent law (I used to be in book publishing), but Hyde says a lot that applies to the philosophical bases and the origins of government ethics, as well.

Intellectual property law, as the book's title implies, deals with a sort of commons, a cultural commons. To define and preserve a commons, one must distinguish between what is private and what is public. It is because the private-public distinction is central to government ethics that the philosophy discussed in this book, especially the philosophy of America's founding fathers, is relevant to us.

Civic Duties and Civic Virtue
An important part of the private-public distinction in colonial America involved the idea that property, which was required for voting, freed individuals for public service. In other words, citizenship carried with it duties within and to the community. Volunteer service was the norm, and was less a choice than a duty. When people squeal today about ethics laws applying to volunteers in local government, perhaps they should be reminded that our nation was founded by volunteers, and that the extension of the right to vote does not necessarily change the civic duties of citizenship.

Here's a nice quote from Hyde: "Citizens acquire virtue in the civic republic ... by willingly allowing self-interest to bow to the public good (or by recognizing that the two are one). Civic virtue is not something anyone is born with; it is acquired through civic action."

Here is what John Adams wrote about civic virtue. "Every man must seriously set himself to root out his Passions, Prejudices and Attachments, and to get the better of his private interest." But Benjamin Franklin, who was more realistic about human nature, felt that what was needed were "systems of public virtue more than citizens of public virtue." As one of Virginia's early senators wrote, even "an avaricious society can form a government able to defend itself against the avarice of its members." Back in colonial America there were already those effectively favoring character education and those effectively favoring enforceable ethics codes.

And here's a nice quote from John Dickinson, a delegate at the Constitutional Convention: "A people is traveling fast to destruction, when individuals consider their interests as distinct from those of the public." Hyde notes that the ancient Greek word for pertaining or belonging to one's self is idios, a word that gave rise to our word "idiot."

It's worth recalling that, at the time of America's founding, there had not been a contrast between private and public, so much as a contrast between ruler and ruled. The public part of a kingdom was primarily ceremonial. Hyde writes, "In the eighteenth century, the willingness to erase the personal in favor of the public was an ideal regularly expressed in political debate. It was part of the rhetoric by which private citizens made themselves into public citizens; it was, in fact, part of the rhetoric by which something new under the sun, 'the public,' came into being, and with it what we call in retrospect 'the public sphere.'"

It's also worth recalling that legislative proceedings had not been public at the time of the nation's founding. Making them public was the first major step in government transparency. Even this original sort of government transparency, although it has made great progress in recent years, is still far from achieved at the local level.

Mixing Business and Public Service Norms and Values
Hyde notes that contemporary moral philosopher Michael Sandel feels that corruption is based on a mistaken assumption that all goods are commensurable, for example, that a vote is no different from a decision to purchase. Buying votes corrupts the democratic ideal. (See Sandel's "What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets," available in PDF form online).

A government official arranging or voting for a family member or business associate to get a contract or a zoning decision is effectively acting on the same mistaken assumption. Even if the government official does not personally benefit, our form of government is corrupted.

Hyde also considers Michael Walzer's argument in Spheres of Justice, that there are discrete areas of social life, including the market and the legislature, with distinct norms and values. When one area dominates another, for example when government dominates business, or the military dominates government, there is tyranny. Tyranny is "the wish to obtain by one means what can only be had by another."

In the government ethics context, this view calls into question the wish to obtain a fortune not through business, where that is perfectly acceptable, but through government, where the values and norms involve not success in the market, but rather service to the public. Misuse of office to help oneself does not itself create actual (as opposed to philosophical) tyranny, but misuse of office rarely occurs in this sort of isolation. To run a government, especially one that preys on its own citizens, requires many people, and those people will also want to help themselves, unless they can be intimidated into merely going along. It is the intimidation required to allow misuse of office to occur that turns misuse of office into actual tyranny. Ongoing misuse of office corrupts everyone involved.

The same idea applies in the opposite direction. Few question the creation of wealth through business. The question is "whether this surplus value is convertible, whether it purchases special privileges ... in the spheres of office and politics." When it comes to the determination of public issues, why should wealth matter more than, say, physical strength (which matters in sports), spirituality (which matters in religion), friendliness (which matters in socializing), or loyalty (which matters in family)? None of these should matter in government, because they are not government values or norms, but all of them do.

The Freedom to Listen
Finally, Hyde speaks of the freedom to listen which, unlike freedom of speech, is a collective rather than a personal right (see his short essay on this topic). Just think how different arguments about free speech rights in the campaign finance domain would be if they were arguments about free listening rights. The freedom to listen would emphasize diversity of speech. The drowning out of others' political speech by those with lots of wealth would not be protected, and the funding of the speech of those with fewer resources, as happens in public campaign financing programs, would be protected.

In a world that emphasized freedom of listening, a leader's obligations would be "to transparency and to keeping the noise low enough that no speaker gets drowned out."

Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics

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