In the service of democracy

The notion of service can encompass much more than the basic duties of obedience, loyalty, trust, and courage directed solely to some higher secular authority. It can also encompass a duty to a “common good,” a “good society,” a “public,” or a people. If public service is to be viewed as an integral component of our democratic political system, the ethical-moral values of faith, hope, and love must be recognized as the critical impulses which energize a life dedicated to the service of democracy. But such an approach is very different from the current focus of democratic ethics. In particular the love ethic inevitably moves on a collision course with many of our basic canons of public sector management such as the concept of formal, institutionalized, bureaucratic authority, the notion of detached, dispassionate, objective neutrality, and the almost absolute emphasis placed on rational, routinized, programmed behavior.

To labor in the service of democracy is to recognize that all of us are called, in one way or another, to be watchmen, sentinels, or prophets of others. It is a recognition of the fact that a life in service of democracy is a life of constant instruction, giving and receiving knowledge about right conduct in the formation of one person's character by another, and in the acceptance of another's guidance in one's own growth. In a word, society is dependent on the career professionals in governments at all levels to lead it to a new value vision of the common good. As a first step in this direction, public administrators must be willing to confront the suppressive and debilitating constraints which currently are being imposed on bureaucracy from all directions, and to reaffirm the values and virtues inherent in the notion of service which have unified the ethical forces of democracy so well in the past.