I wanted to take a moment, before another Common Council session goes by, to comment on remarks at our last Common Council meeting, from August 4th. In considering whether to abolish or suspend Whitewater’s Tree Commission, a career bureaucrat made the following observation:
What I would suggest is that if there’s dysfunction in the family, you need to take a time out….”
See, these remarks, beginning at 126:01:
The city as somehow analogous to the family: a notion mistaken, stifling, and subtly oppressive. Few institutions should be farther apart than the family and the state. In the one, private activity, personal conviction and conscience, free from the dictate of one’s neighbors, the encroach of politics, sheltered from the reach of the majority outside.
If one’s home is one’s castle, it bears notice that it is a castle, a strong redoubt against the outside world, that forms the expression.
Funny, that even Aristotle – no defender of liberty he! — saw that the family and state were not analogous:
Every state is a community of some kind, and every community is established with a view to some good; for mankind always act in order to obtain that which they think good. But, if all communities aim at some good, the state or political community, which is the highest of all, and which embraces all the rest, aims at good in a greater degree than any other, and at the highest good.
Some people think that the qualifications of a statesman, king, householder, and master are the same, and that they differ, not in kind, but only in the number of their subjects. For example, the ruler over a few is called a master; over more, the manager of a household; over a still larger number, a statesman or king, as if there were no difference between a great household and a small state…. But all this is a mistake; for governments differ in kind, as will be evident to any one who considers the matter according to the method which has hitherto guided us. As in other departments of science, so in politics, the compound should always be resolved into the simple elements or least parts of the whole. We must therefore look at the elements of which the state is composed, in order that we may see in what the different kinds of rule differ from one another….
Politics, Book One, Part 1, available online at http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/politics.1.one.html
As we see a few quotes each week in a city weekly report, I am sure that no one in our municipal building would object to one in reply, of a passage read years ago, and easily available for review on the Web.
We have few families alike in Whitewater, so many expressing different tastes, sentiments, and convictions. One family may chose one faith, a second family another, and third none at all. Within a family, there may be much concern about common belief, but in the city — from the state — there should be, and must be, none.
A free man or woman — that is, any American — owes neither the state nor his neighbors adherence to a common understanding of family, faith, or tastes and preferences.
I know a few in Whitewater believe (falsely) and strive (oppressively and intrusively) to forge this common way for the town. The ties and expectations that a family might have — comfortable to them, but uncomfortable even to another nearby — must not extend to the state. Neither a mayor nor a governor is a fit analog to a mother or father.
The role of government is merely instrumental in a free society. A politician’s election, and less so a bureaucrat’s appointment, don’t entitle him to assume a familiar role over those in the city. It is mistaken to conflate family (the quintessence of private) and municipal (the quintessence of public) matters.
There’s no good analogy there. Instead, one finds only a poor one, likely a result of either ignorance or arrogance: ignorance of our tradition of individual liberty, or arrogance to assume that individual liberty should be susceptible of a politician’s overreaching concerns.
It’s not the remark, of course — it’s the attitude underlying so much else it represents.
Municipal government is neither a fitting analogy to the family, nor to a church, nor to a club — no matter how much some might wish it to be.