The Tsunami and the Need for Connection - Reflections One Year Later

In the space of the first two weeks after the tsunami in the Indian Ocean last winter, Americans contributed nearly $350 million dollars to the relief effort for hundreds of thousands of those whose lives were torn apart. This says something about the generosity and concern of millions who have seen the suffering not first hand but only by way of satellite. Perhaps it says something else as well.

Less than two weeks later, a 33-year old computer store owner in Springfield, Virginia bid $3,550 on eBay for the right to aid a 9 year-old boy he’d never met fight a potential cancer named “Frank” on the base of his skull. This also says something about the generosity and concern of an American for someone in need. Perhaps it too says something else as well.

It may seem odd that we are moved so much by events that, were it not for advanced technology, we might never know about. It may seem odd that we feel bonds of affection for those we will never speak to, touch, or see except as a digital image. But maybe this is not as odd as it seems.

This generosity is more than an outpouring of financial largesse. Perhaps these events fill a need for human connection that is somehow missing in lives pulled apart by the pace of technology itself. In our 24/7 world, where we are constantly on the move, on the make, and on call, perhaps we are desperately seeking ways to reduce our isolation and add a human touch to the technological wizardry that drives our days. Could it be that the very medium we love to hate because it never leaves us alone has actually enabled us to fight loneliness itself? As futurist John Naisbitt said at the start of the computer age, the more high tech we become, the more we will look to become hi touch as well.

This generosity may also be a response to the lack of community we feel in a world where we lack time for family, never see or don’t know our neighbors, and increasingly, in sociologist Robert Putnam’s famous phrase, find ourselves “bowling alone.” In a society where so many of us ride in our own cars, live in gated communities, and come home at the end of a long commuting and working day without the energy to even attend a PTA meeting, perhaps the chance to click onto our favorite Web site and give money to someone who is suffering, even if doing so to the ebay or Amazon.com “community,” makes us feel a bit more connected to the human family.

To the extent that our generosity to unseen others reflects our need for human connection and community, the events of the last few weeks may offer an important insight on how we live our lives and what we want them to become. If that is true, perhaps we should turn more attention to coming closer together with those who share our homes and communities. This need not negate the generous spirit that characterizes how we view those in need around the world. We will, hopefully, always be there for strangers. But it might just free us to reexamine the way we live our lives and enable us to be there for those closer to home. If that happens, the millions we have helped abroad may have given us an equally generous gift in return.

The Contract Society

“I don’t kid people,” Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) said on the floor of the Senate last October 20th. "If the Senate decides to discriminate against our state . . . I will resign from this body." One might think Stevens was using this threat to protect the civil liberties of the people of his state, but he was instead referring to a proposal that would redirect $453 million in highway funds earmarked for two Alaska bridges to Hurricane Katrina relief efforts. One of the bridges, at a projected cost of $223 million, would connect a small town to an island and was thus dubbed by critics as the “Bridge to Nowhere.”

Stevens is not alone in wanting to protect the pork barrel funding directed to his constituents. In 1991, the 13 major appropriations bills in Congress contained 546 pork barrel projects costing $3.1 billion. By 2005, the total of pork projects was 13,997 and the cost had increased to $27.3 billion. Welcome to the contract society.

In the contract society, “citizens” have become government “customers,” daily tracking polls are used to guide speeches and legislative proposals, and elected officials are expected to keep specific promises or be turned out of office at the first opportunity. Fund raising is nearly a full-time endeavor and those who supply the cash expect the implied contract to be fulfilled. Indeed, the notion of politicians contracting with those who elect them was at the heart of the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, the famous “Contract with America.” And, as any resident of West Virginia well knows, Senator Byrd has ensured that contractual politics is as much a Democratic as a Republican practice.

There is nothing wrong, of course, with elected officials representing their constituents. That is what the Constitution charges them with doing. But contracting with customers is much different than representing citizens. Its pervasiveness in our public life does not make it productive for our long run interests. By adopting contractual thinking, we accept a style of interaction that may be desirable in a business context but dangerous for the future of democracy.

Contracts are formal, rigid, and highly specific arrangements. They replace the need for trust (or make up for the lack of it), as Frances Fukuyama noted so well in his book of the same name. Contracts are generally short-term, both in real time and in our emotional attachments. We end them when they no longer serve our needs.

The danger of extending the contract model into our public life is growing. Entitlements, the largest (and largest growing) share of the federal budget represents a contract that most politicians are afraid to change, even as it becomes more unsustainable. Congressional earmarks for pet causes are not only growing in absolute terms but are turning us away from creatively competing for discretionary federal assistance, with the innovation that such competition brings. Political promise making – and the fear of what well-funded special interests will do if the promises are not fulfilled – pushes elected officials to pander to powerful interests rather than seek the public interest. Government agencies themselves “contract out” to deliver public services, though fraud and other contracting scandals suggest that they have not mastered how to contract out the commitment to the public interest that is equally a part of what government ought to deliver.

Short-term benefits – the heart of the contract model – replace the need for long-term thinking and the sacrifices needed to reach long-term goals. Contractual thinking applied to politics asks little of the citizen. Indeed, it does not ask that he be a citizen. Being a customer, whose only job is to pay and express her level of satisfaction with the purchase of government goods and services, is assumed to lead in our public lives to the good society as in our private lives it is assumed to lead to the good life.

The contract society is so well embedded that we wonder if there is any other way. There is. It will require a change in our language as well as our behavior to find it. We will first have to ask of ourselves that we become “citizens” rather than “customers,” which means we will have to ask what is in the public interest not just our personal interest. We will have to participate more actively in discussing our long-term needs – and the needs of our grandchildren – in a broad public dialogue rather than in narrow interest groups. We will have to be willing to give ground to gain it. We will have to enable our elected officials to represent us rather than demanding that they only deliver to us.

This has all the trappings of utopian thinking, except that it has happened before. We became citizens to form a nation, fight two world wars, climb out of a depression, extend civil rights, and invest in the public infrastructure needed to build a productive and wealthy society. We can do so again. We can address the problems of an aging society, pay down a massive debt that is mortgaging our grandchildren’s future, extend the health care, education, and income essential for all Americans to live a decent life and build bridges to their neighbors rather than building gated communities to wall them out. We can heal the partisan divisions that are rending the social fabric upon which all else depends. The answer will be found in the language of citizenship and commitment, not the language of customers and contracts.

The Limits of the Law

“It’s values, stupid” seems to be the mantra that the Republicans ran on and the Democrats couldn’t figure out in the last presidential election. If moral values are so important in the minds of voters, however, it seems curious that our national dialogue about torture as a tool for responding to terrorism is mostly silent on this very subject.

One the one hand, the Administration insists it does not condone torture and points to a series of its own memos to illustrate the painstaking analysis it undertook to ensure it broke no law. On the other hand, Congress presses the Administration on how it defines torture so that a judgment can be made about whether the abuses actually did violate the law. It’s a Clintonesque dance in a Bush Administration. We have gone from arguing about what the definition of “is” is to the definition of what “torture” is. The question about whether we as a nation condoned torture recedes to the background amidst a definitional debate. A people that prides itself on adherence to laws not men seems content to have a legal rather than a moral conversation.

The undercurrent of the debate is equally troubling: if a practice is legal it is assumed to be permissible. In essence, the debate accepts the principle, in terms crafted by political scientist Louis Gawthrop, that if we figure out what we can do we will know what we should do. As Gawthrop reminds us, however, in Public Service and Democracy, this leads to a society “in which only that which is categorically illegal is unethical.” Legal distinctions are substituted for moral thought, an ironic result for a nation that has so frequently gone to war against men who cloak torture in legalisms.

A secondary effect of such thinking is that one is only responsible when one has broken the law. This leads to the curious result that responsibility, one of the moral virtues politicians on both sides of the aisle so rightly extol, becomes not a matter for serious national debate but a simple question of determining if a legal barrier has been breached. It’s unlikely we would use this definition of responsibility in any other aspect of our communal life. A society that relies on lawyers to tell it how to be responsible is a society that has lost its moral compass.

Recent scandals in the corporate world have taken on a similar aspect, with prosecutorial care to identify laws that were broken, with executive denials that they have been responsible, and with legislation to define more behavior more finitely that is now illegal.

It’s helpful that at least some Americans are outraged at what took place in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison and at Guantanamo Bay. Perhaps outrage should take a more forceful place in regulating our conduct. It used to do so. A democratic nation of laws is ultimately founded on sound moral values and can survive only when collective outrage greets those who violate them or seek to hide from responsibility for making violation possible. It’s time we used our values, not just our laws, as a guide to our behavior. If we do so, it is more likely that our nation – and the world – will be the safer place we seek.