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Machan's Musings-Controversy: Private vs. Public with some blogs, the presence of controversies cannot escape you. Consider, just for starters, what gets written in National Review versus, say, The Nation, The New Republic, Commentary, or Reason Magazine, say on environmental issues or foreign policy. When it comes to an institution such as the press, which is almost completely free of government meddling (because of the way the courts have understood the First Amendment to the US Constitution), opinions vary tremendously. But perhaps an even better example is religion—there are about 4000 different religions afoot in the United States and each has its particular take on innumerable topics, often disagreeing with all the others. Yet very little of this makes the news. Baptists will hold one view, Methodists another, Roman Catholics yet a different one, and so on down the line. All the faithful, in turn, bring their children to church to hear sermons urging different ideas upon them, many of them leaving the kids to get an even more emphatic message at Sunday School. On the other hand, consider the country’s thousands of public schools, from elementary, secondary to the college and university levels. What is being taught in these places generates public controversy all the time. Right now it is about whether Intelligent Design should be included in the curriculum; it used to be sex education and environmental studies. At college and university levels it is whether Leftist or conservative ideas dominant the classrooms. All these matters are, like most of the material included within religious instructions, controversial, yet while those kept away from government manage to co-exist quite happily, thank you, the stuff that gets covered in public education tends to generate newsworthy—which is to say sensational—disputes. Why is this the case? It is not all that difficult to appreciate that when it comes to the public sphere, all the different parties, with their different ideas on various topics, want to be in charge. This used to be the norm when state and religion were bound but the American founders had the wisdom to separate the two, with only bits and pieces of religion bearing on government. So those who believe in Intelligent Design wish they could control the curriculum while those who are convinced that Darwinian natural selection explains best what has occurred in the history of life on earth want their story to rule. In the public education system there will always be this kind of turf-fighting going on, with courts getting into the act, with voters having to make up or down decisions about whether some idea gets respect or even just acknowledgement. In the private sector, such as within the areas of religion and the press, this rarely comes up. Everyone is free to preach whatever he or she believes in, attend the church where he or she wants to worship, publish in or read magazines conducive to his or her point of view, and they all coexist reasonably peacefully. The reason is that they occupy their own private sphere and do not displace others by sticking to their views. So while everyone may hope that others will change their minds, so long as they are left free to think and worship and read and write as they choose, there is no urgency to fight, let alone to invite the media to air anything about some dispute. (How often do we read in The New York Times about some parish priest’s views on abortion or divorce or some ministers ideas on dancing or contemporary hip-hop music? But just check out the dutiful and extensive coverage given to the controversy over whether Intelligent Design theory should be taught in Ohio public schools.) Yet, despite how evident is the benign influence of the nearly fully privatized institutions of religion and the press, the notion that education too needs to be divorced from government still gets very little airing in the mainstream media and from mainstream pundits. I suppose the practice of sticking one’s head in the sand when implications are uncomfortable will be with us forever.
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