In Praise of the Brown Bag

By Hugh Sidey

We are back to debating John Stuart Mill's essay On Liberty (1859). Not all the participants know it by that name, but Mill's idea of the free and sovereign individual may be, aside from the character of the presidential aspirants, the most compelling issue in this campaign. Every person Mill argued, should be given all possible liberty, provided it does not infringe on the liberty of others. This must be so, said Mill, even if some people insist on using that liberty to hurt or diminish themselves.

Mill reached his conclusion after pondering "the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual." Defining the limits has always been at the heart of our political argument, though the debate is often overshadowed by more immediate issues. But because the world is calm and no great national crisis has so far intruded into or focused the campaign, there has been time to grow a bit more philosophical than usual.

It is evident that in many areas of American life we have reached the threshold of tolerance for Government interference. It is not a matter of ideology. It is plain human protest against inconvenience, burden and limitation.

It popped up in the hearings last week on automobile air bags. Secretary of Transportation William Coleman said the decision on installing the devices "raises fundamental questions about the proper role of Government in the lives of the citizens of this country." Linking auto ignitions to seat belts went too far, Coleman noted, and so may laws requiring motorcycle helmets. After a great public cry, the maddening buzzer system was thrown out, and helmet laws are now being attacked. Mill might have nodded approval. Not Consumer Advocate Ralph Nader, who protested last week that by not making air bags mandatory, the Government was "condemning 10,000 people to death and hundreds of thousands of people to needless injury."

The debate surfaced in another form when Jimmy Carter, speaking in Manchester' N.H., voiced vast concern about the state of the American family reciting a litany of despair on divorce, delinquency, illegitimate births, venereal disease and other scourges. Dedicated conservatives fear such talk portends a huge new program that will further classify, regulate and meddle with the American family, compounding the damage that has already been done (they claim) by the hundreds of schemes enacted in recent years. The conservatives do not understand, claim Carter and Vice-Presidential Nominee Walter Mondale. What they advocate, they say, is new Government attention to correct old Government failures, to protect families against mindless, heartless, insensitive bureaucratic intrusions so that people can preserve and nurture traditional American values in this accelerated and crowded society. "If we want less Government," said Carter, "we must have stronger families." The argument is so complex and subtle that even Mill might have been hard put to resolve it.

One of the more delightful episodes in the debate occurred a while back, when the Senate overrode Ford's veto of a bill to expand school breakfast and lunch programs. Maryland's wry Charles Mathias Jr., a bona fide liberal, took the floor to support the override and also sound a warning in the form of an ode to the old brown bag.

Fretted Mathias: "I cannot help but wonder whether, by continuing and expanding the school lunch program, we aren't witnessing, if not encouraging, the slow demise of yet another American tradition: the brown bag ... Perhaps we are beholding yet another break in the chain that links child to home.

"The brown bag, of course, had its imperfections. While some kids carried roast beef sandwiches, others had peanut butter. I have no way of knowing if all of those brown bags contained 'nutritionally adequate diets.' But I do know that those brown bags and those lunch pails symbolized parental love and responsibility. In our desire to see to it that all children in America are adequately fed, housed, clothed, educated and kept healthy, let us take care that we do not undermine the role of parents in the lives of their children."

That is John Stuart Mill's classic debate in a nutshell, or rather, a brown bag.

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