'The monstrous hybrid'
In the cultural sphere, the past two decades are studded with illustrations of the privatization of American public life, which has been underway at least since the Reagan administration. As these three examples from the past six months suggest, however, the phenomenon may be approaching something like critical mass.
At the very least the scale has swelled, not to mention the brazenness. So it might be worth stepping back a moment to ask: What gives?
The answer: Commercial values are now so routinely applied to the nonprofit sector that American cultural life has severely warped. The farcical result is what Jane Jacobs, the legendary independent scholar, once helpfully characterized as "the monstrous hybrid."
Jacobs' powerful 1961 book, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," changed the way we think about urban experience. Three decades later, as the Reagan era crested into the first Bush presidency, Jacobs coined the term "monstrous hybrid" in her book "Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics." She employed lengthy Platonic discourse to examine the competing ethical structures that sustain social and economic life.
Two distinct ethical systems govern human behavior, Jacobs proposed. When they collide -- as they have lately on a grand scale in Washington, Philadelphia and Boston/Las Vegas -- a monstrous hybrid is born.
One system she called guardian culture. Guardians protect. They work in the military and police, government legislatures and courts, churches and schools. They work in art museums too, where they protect our collective artistic patrimony. Guardians have no profit motive.
The other system is commercial culture, where profit is the aim. Elements of guardian behavior are displayed by all animals, but commercial culture is novel. Trade and the production of goods are uniquely human endeavors.
The book has the virtue of neither demonizing commerce nor glorifying guardians. Each is simply what it is. Both are essential. And when they follow their intrinsic ethical guidelines, they help societies prosper.
What's good for the guardian is generally bad for the commercial order, Jacobs wrote, and vice versa. Each system claims a discrete -- and contradictory -- ethical system.
When commercial culture operates according to guardian morality, or when guardians adopt commercial ethics, all hell breaks loose. Conflicts erupt. Decadence follows.
