Conclusion

Abstract

This Conclusion discusses ideas that evolve out of the work presented in this volume; raises issues and questions for further study; and reconfigures previous work on the migration process.     

Conclusion: Getting It All Together

Abstract

As the aticles of the symposium present a wide variety of conclusions on whether public administration has “grown up,” this overview article does not attempt a unified synthesis of the authors’ views but rather makes a composite analysis of contrasts and patterns among them. Attention is then shifted to the organizing metaphor itself, that of maturation. Following a review of how each article employs it, some general reflections are offered on its usefulness.     

Conclusion: exploring the heart of civic darkness

This article is a synthesis of Volume II of Public Policy and Administration: The Minnowbrook Perspective and an extension of the arguments found herein. And, it is an application of issues of ethics and morality to this volume. The author calls for a return to civility in public discourse and to Plato's conception of virtue, and particularly public virtue. New versions of civic space are important. The American emphasis on individualism must be tempered by a greater concern for the common good and the public interest. To achieve this public administrators must be both examples and representative citizens.

Cyrano: Perhaps I do exaggerate—a little.

Le Bret: You see!

Cyrano: But for the sake of principle.

Also in practice I have often found Exaggeration works extremely well.

—Edmund Rostand

Cyrano de Bergerac

And sin, when it is full grown, brings forth death.

—James 1:15

“Civic darkness” and “sin” are offputting words. “Offputting” is also an offputting word, but we must do what we can to follow Cyrano's advice to the Count de Guiche and color our discourse as but we can. Actually, sin is quite a useful word, meaning, as it does, transgression of a moral principle. Those whose sensibilities are offended when words such as sin are introduced, or react in anger at remembrances of the excesses of evangelical piety, would do well to revisit the idea of separation from the moral good and the consequences such separatilon has for persons and for societies. Such is the case with what I will call the sin of incivility, which I believe leads us into a civic heart of darkness, which is the deathtrap of American democracy. I will exaggerate—a little.

The word “moral” is also an attenuated word. It tends to conjure personal identity material and prejudgments about the authority, associations, and intent of the preacher or philosopher using the term. Fresh in my memory after twelve years is the aftermath of the publication of my article, “The Problem of Moral Reasoning in American Public Administration: The Case for a Code of Ethics,” in the Public Administration Review of January/February 1983. Of the nineteen letters I received about the article, five came from academic public administrationists wondering why a person of my background should now be joining the Moral Majority. I sent each of them a copy of my work exposing Jerry Falwell's problems with the Federal Trade Commission.

We have before us thirteen papers and twelve responses, each dealing with an important aspect of public policy. Are there common threads running through them? Do they highlight recurring themes in American public administration? Since they were written just before the collapse of the Soviet Empire in 1989, was there anything prescient about them, or are they just historical artifacts, interesting enough in themselves but now overtaken by events?

There is a common thread, and that is a continuing commitment to the legacy of Mimowbrook I, understood as a post-positivist concern with social values. The most prophetic and, I believe, relevant statements of Minnowbrook I1 extended that understanding to the societal, organizational, and personal dimensions of communicative ethics, including the problem of the alienation of the self. I will elaborate that interest in my discussion of incivility below.

The old controversies were also there: in Willa Bruce's demand that Cynthia McSwain and Orion White translate their exercise in analytic psychology “into a practical application to real world problems,” for example, and in Gary Wamsley's passionate belief that public administrationists should “unmask the norms economists camouflage as science.” Complementarities were there, too, as when real world public administrator, Ray Pethtel, Virginia Commissioner of Transportation, said hurrah for egghead John J. DeIulio, describing him as “a scholar who recognizes the value of the public manager!” A pernicious theme that continued at Minnowbrook II, despite the efforts of conference organizers to diminish it through representation and structured dialogue, was that those who live more contemplative lives do not live in the real world. The truth is that most academic public administrationists are or have been heavily involved in workaday policy formulation and execution and that most civil servants reflect profoundly on what they do. Why, then, do we continue to use the language of separation?

Although there were arguments at Minnowbrook II, and I well remember the tension in the room after Bruce and Wamsley spoke, as on other occasions, we stayed well within the bounds of civility. That is what democracy does. It roughs and tumbles and postures and threatens and in the end stays within the bounds of civility. It finds a way we can live together. Minnowbrook II did not anticipate the degree to which incivility, manifested as displaced anger, separatist politics, and cultural isolation, would come to characterize public discourse in America in the 1990s and threaten the continued existence of democracy itself. Such a development demands careful analysis.

Plato would not have been surprised at any of this, as Dorothy Robyn pointed out in her paper about using cases for teaching public management. Since cases focus on how a process affected substantive policy questions, it is easy to ignore the inherent merits of the policy. Thus induction from fact replaces deduction from theory and leaves a large potential for casuistry and the justification of moral laxity. When discussion of a case begins with the postulate that at least one of the protagonists was unethical, the opportunities for recognizing moral ambiguity in the situation itself are limited. The temptation to reduce moral reasoning to laws and regulations tends to replace the abstraction of the public manager as a political being deducing his or her strategies from whatever ideal is being served. Deontological ethics become the analytical norm.⁽¹⁾

Plato's impatience with deontological ethics means that he is not a popular theorist among democrats today. Yet his critique of democracy remains the most powerful in philosophic literature, and I believe his analysis is particularly relevant for an American political environment of electronic sound bites and bored ignorance about the processes of government. There is a paradoxical way in which Plato's explication can deliver those of us who care too much.

The rhetoricians have their way in a democracy, Plato says. As they pursue their enthusiasms, trying to persuade the inattentive public here and there, misleading the people when necessary, they devise temporary solutions to fundamental problems. They consume as they encourage others to consume, leaving nothing in store. They live transient lives in mortal bodies. The worst thing about rhetoricians such as Gorgias, Plato believes, is that they misuse words. They often invert their meaning. Words are the vehicle of the dialectic that can lead us to transcendent truth, but in the hands of Gorgias, they produce only chaos and discord. In Plato's terms, the rhetoricians

once they have emptied and purged [the good] from the soul of the man whom they are seizing … they proceed to return insolence, anarchy, wastefulness, and shamelessness from exile, in a blaze of light, crowned and accompanied by a numerous chorus, extolling and flattering them by calling insolence good education; anarchy, freedom; wastefulness, magnificence; and shamelessness, courage.⁽²⁾

The deliverance inherent in Plato is the sure knowledge that virtue does not lie finally in what one can achieve in the political world, including the public good served in feeding the poor and bringing social justice to the disinherited. We work to achieve the good, yes; indeed, we may pour out our lives in service to democratic ideals. But virtue is a personal condition of the mind and spirit. In a calculous of inherent worth, prostitutes may be more virtuous than virgins. Virtue may be present in me while I endure any physical or temporal condition, including slavery, the dissolution of the Roman Empire, the trivialization of the Christian Church, or the collapse of the American Republic. Authentic freedom, and whatever wisdom has been given to me, exists in my being and only there. I can enslave myself, of course, and that includes slavery to any appetite, including the passion to be or do good.

Such reasoning is a useful antilogistic ingredient in dealing with the cascading series of manifestos in American public life telling us that we cannot live together; we cannot work together; we are not in this together; we are not Americans who have something in common, but racial, ethnic, gender, or sexually identified groups who demand to be recognized only or exclusively as different. I require that you recognize that we have nothing in common with one another. If goodness or greatness of soul is a capacity that each man and woman has, as Plato argued, then it is also true that each of us has a similar capacity for evil. The theologians of the Middle Ages called that capacity sin and defined it as separation from God, moral principle, and each other.     

阿富汗大选曲终局还乱

阿富汗2009年从西方生搬硬套过来的“民主大选”因水土不服,充满了混乱和争议。外国媒体称阿富汗这次大选是“穿西装的骷髅乞丐”。8月20日的第一轮总统选举被揭出很多舞弊,两位主要总统候选人现任总统卡尔扎伊和前外长阿卡杜拉的得票率也没过半,争议很多,造成很大混乱。选举委员会迫于各方的强大压力,     

Conclusion: Is competency management a passing fad?

Is competency management a passing fad; is it a catch‐all term to cover diverse national patterns of development or a symptom of wider changes within bureaucracies? As the papers published here suggest, it is more likely to be a passing fad in Europe than the USA. Competency management addresses rather different agendas in different countries and while it does not embrace as diverse a collection of activities as ‘new public management’, there is substantial range in the issues it does address. European experience suggests competency is more likely to be ephemeral and concerned with repackaging rather than bringing something substantially new to personnel management in the upper reaches of civil services. Without taking too rosy a view of US experience, there may be a stronger case for arguing that contemporary competency management approaches there have brought something new to a longer standing debate in public and private management.     

从匹兹堡峰会看国际金融体系改革的推进

如果说前两次金融峰会为国际金融体系避免系统性崩溃、世界经济避免全面深度衰退发挥了重要作用,2009年9月25日在美国宾夕法尼亚州的匹兹堡召开的二十国集团领导人第三次金融峰会,则重在引导全球经济实现持续稳定复苏,推动国际金融体制改革取得实质性进展。此次峰会在完善国际金融机构现行决策程序和机制、二十国集团地位等方面取得积极成效,但是国际金融体系改革整体推进仍旧迟缓,同时美元持续走软问题威胁到国际货币体系的稳定,影响国际金融体系改革顺利进行。     

《拆弹部队》完胜：奥斯卡保守依旧

2010年3月8日,第82届奥斯卡奖评选结果出炉。在全,球引发了观影狂潮的科幻影片《阿凡达》不敌《拆弹部队》,包括最佳影片及最佳导演奖在内的六项大奖都被《拆弹部队》收走。     

当代中国村民自治以来的乡村治理模式问题

研究中国村民自治以来的乡村治理模式问题需要注意三条线索,即成本—收益线索,权力—权利线索,传统—现代线索,三条线索构成了一个影响(推进或阻碍)乡村治理进程的作用框架。任何试图以单一模式涵盖中国乡村治理问题的努力都将是不全面的。根据在双向民主化进程基础上实现"自治精神"的原则,应尊重乡村民众的自主权和自发创造能力,自下而上推进民主治理进程,使其与自上而下的治理进程相平衡,由"治民"传统走向现代"民治",以期形成多面相的乡村治理局面。