Res Publica

The day is soon coming when people in this country will have to pay a premium for clean water, clean air, and sanitary food. Public utilities are rapidly declining, and in their stead are private companies that now charge for basic necessities.

This is hardly a new phenomenon. Over the course of this last century, every manner of public space has been destroyed and converted into expensive pieces of real estate. Gone are the public squares, the county fairs, the farmer’s markets, the town halls, the community watering holes; instead, we have the mega-mall and Disneyland. The private and walled off backyard has replaced the park.

What happens to a society when things that were once held in common by the entire community are parcelled out, commodified and sold for profit? It turns selfish, greedy, and utterly alone.

The English word “republic” comes from the Latin “Res Publica” — literally “the public thing.” It is a word that reminded the Romans of the ideals of their original city-state, where the common good was elevated over individual motivations such as pecuniary gain or the acquisition of power. In a genuine republic, government exists to serve the needs of the people and to further life, liberty, and happiness. A person does not view his neighbors as competitors or potential sources of profit, but as individuals worthy of basic dignity and respect. When one person suffers, the entire society also suffers because there is an understanding that the individual good and the common good are the same thing.

In such a society, the desires to privatize and exploit are appropriately labelled as foul and harmful to everyone. A person who attains fabulous levels of wealth at the expense of his fellow citizens plunders from the common treasury in no less devious a way than a man who robs a child, or a trustee who abuses his powers in trust. There is no honor in the pursuit of coin or the acquisition of material wealth, only the imposition of burdens on the rest of society.

Thus, in a land where the tenets of liberty and justice have been besmirched by greed, there can be little concern with the res publica — for the law, for one’s neighbor, or for the republic. If people could, they would sell us the sunshine in the sky and the wetness of water, and because we have such little respect for ourselves, our fellow citizens, and our Constitution, many of us would no doubt line up to purchase the basic birthrights of our humanity.

How can we put a price on liberty or on our happiness? There is no mountain of gold worth the shackles of any slavery or the oppression of any tyranny. Yet so many of us are willing to suffer day after day in building such a mountain coin-by-coin and dollar-by-dollar. And for what?

How revolutionary it is today to consider the ancient idea that the common good ought to be a prominent social value.

“The world that I envision is one in which national boundaries no longer exist, in which you can move from one country to another with the same ease in which we can move from Massachusetts to Connecticut, a world without passports or visas or immigration quotas. True globalization in the human sense, in which we recognize that the world is one and that human beings everywhere have the same rights.

“In a world like that you could not make war because it is your family, just as we are not thinking of making war on an adjoining state or even a far-off state. It would be a world in which the riches of the planet would be distributed in an equitable fashion, where everybody has access to clean water. Yes, that would take some organization to make sure that the riches of the earth are distributed according to human need.

“A world in which people are free to speak, a world in which there was a true bill of rights. A world in which people had their fundamental economic needs taken care of would be a world in which people were freer to express themselves because political rights and free speech rights are really dependent on economic status and having fundamental economic needs taken care of.

“I think it would be a world in which the boundaries of race and religion and nation would not become causes for antagonism. Even though there would still be cultural differences and still be language differences, there would not be causes for violent action of one against the other.

“I think it would be a world in which people would not have to work more than a few hours a day, which is possible with the technology available today. If this technology were not used in the way it is now used, for war and for wasteful activities, people could work three or four hours a day and produce enough to take care of any needs. So it would be a world in which people had more time for music and sports and literature and just living in a human way with others.”

– Howard Zinn

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 1st, 2006 at 6:46 pm and is filed under Alternative Living, Freedom and Democracy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.