Community is not an aggregate: culture war at the school board

Commonweal, Oct 23, 1992 by John Garvey

The debate over family values is, of course, not a debate at all. People invoke the word to mean something vague-- wholesome versus self-indulgence, tradition versus change, a distrust of modernity (and, I suppose, postmodernity). The use of the idea by politiclans, as if the things that most threaten us could be solved politically, is as empty as most political rhetoric. But occasionally something political happens that reveals a genuine question of values, and shows that some of what gets pulled into the debate over traditional family values does in fact matter deeply.

In May, the New York City Board of Education's vice-president, Irene Impellizzeri, addressed a Catholic organization. Some of what she had to say about sex education, family values, and the children growing up in New York's poor neighborhoods caused a fierce reaction: sixteen City Council members demanded that she be removed, and Brooklyn's Borough President Howard Golden criticized the speech.

On June 23 New York Newsday reprinted some of the most controversial excerpts. I'd like to quote a few, because Impellizzeri's speech and the reaction to it strike me as much more revealing than the empty rhetoric at the Republican National Convention, and the empty reaction to it.

Impellizzeri is critical of "nonethnic, nonracial minorities--self-defined minorities-such as the underclass" who have agendas that have nothing to do with emergence into the surrounding culture. She borrows a distinction, originally made by Disraeli, between a community and an aggregation. "In the city where we work, there is little or no community any more. There is aggregation---the forming of groups. And the difference is profound. Communities have consciences. Aggregations have programs. Communities work by civility. Aggregations get their way by stridency .... The fundamental difference between a community ,and an aggregation is really the difference between what is in one's interest and what one desires.

"A community shares a hope; hope is an activity of the spirit. An aggregation simply wants, with brutal urgency. The human mind is so complicated that intelligence and other gifts of the spirit can actually regulate desire--or it can be prostituted to desire.

"A nonjudgmental culture--an indifferentist culture .... puts desire ahead of interest, because desire can be so readily expressed; it has that beet-red infantile immediacy. In such a culture, hope is replaced by the arithmetical sum of appetites.

"Those appetites have made their way into much of our lives in this city. They are a large factor in explaining the recent turbulent changes in the school system ....

"The saddest immaturity... is to accept appetite as a rule of life. The most debilitating weakness is to be unable to defer gratification. The most grievous failure in life is the lack of self-discipline .... Self-discipline is not an instinct; it is learned from adults, sometimes subconsciously, sometimes painfully. Even when learned in childhood, it often falters in adolescence, when desire takes on new forms and an anarchic intensity, and then the young brain is awash with hormones and with the erotic imagery of popular culture. The adult who tells an adolescent 'You have the right to obey your impulses' is guilty of treachery to the adolescent as well as to the community .... That may not seem so pressing to the rich, who have a long way to slide, though not as long a way as they may think. But if the children of the poor are taught that they need not be constrained by the social order and its civilities and its prudential demands; that they have the right-- unearued--to set their own standards, or no standards at all; that they are mysteriously able to 'think for themselves': without in fact learning to think--as distinct from feel or want they will never, never escape from poverty."

What Impellizzeri said has to be seen against the background of a school system that distributes condoms to students, but was furious when members of the school board voted in favor of a policy which said that, in addition to being taught about condoms and safe sex, students must be told that refraining from sex is by far the safest way to avoid AIDS, and that this instruction must be a prominent part of the mandated instruction. The same system was outraged when some school boards voted not to include the books Heather Has Two Mommies and Daddy's Roommate in the curriculum; the books were designed to present homosexual couples as equivalent to the traditional family.

Impellizzeri's was an angry speech, but she is onto something important. We are, in fact, being asked to accept the idea that chastity is impossible for teenagers, and indeed for anyone; or, if possible, it is a kind of repression. We are being asked to accept all "lifestyles" as equally valid, equally worthy of support and praise. Not only that: to question any of this is to risk--or rather to ensure--being called homophobic or intolerant or racist or repressive. People like Impellizzeri are accused of wanting to repress all gays, of not caring about those who suffer from AIDS, of not respecting minority cultures, etc. And no doubt some people who agree enthusiastically with Impellizzeri are intolerant, and wouldn't mind a bit of suppression.