At one level, doubtless, the fight over public broadcasting is just over political advantage: as Speaker Newt says, why shouldn't he try to kill a medium he sees as giving aid and comfort to his political foes? But that level will not be our concern here. Let's follow the argument into another level, where it touches upon some profound and difficult questions about human nature and the good, about authority and its role, about what hinders and what enables human beings to grow. Part of the argument for public broadcasting is that it delivers the kind of quality that uplifts America: better art, better coverage of public affairs, more timeless and uplifting dramas. It is what viewers should see. So, according to this argument, it is right to put taxpayer dollars to work to enhance the quality of American culture. Those now seeking to dismantle public broadcasting (and the National Endowment of the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities) argue that programs worth our having will make it on their own in the market: if people want it they'll watch it, and the good ratings will mean no need for a federal subsidy. Why, many conservatives are saying, should the taxpayers be forced to pay for programming most of the public doesn't want to watch, or listen to? Do people choose to watch what is best for them? Critics of market-driven culture complain that when news, for example, is governed by ratings, we get incessant scrutiny of the relationship between Lorena and John Bobbitt, wall-to-wall telecasts of the OJ trial, in which every play by defense or prosecution is dissected like a Super Bowl pass-pattern-- in other words sensationalistic pandering to people's appetite for sex and violence, for whatever titillates. In the meanwhile, more important but less arousing issues --like whether life on earth is endangered, or what kind of international system we should construct for the post-cold war world, or how campaigns in our democracy should be financed-- get short shrift. OJ sells. More important stories just don't have the juice to thrive in the market. Fatuous situation comedies dominate TV's entertainment screen. Hamlet doesn't draw the crowds. Roseanne gets the ratings; Shakespeare does not. Believers in the market say: whatever people want to watch is what's best to put on the screen. Who are you --who is anybody-- to judge one preference as better than another? Up with freedom! Down with elitism! But many of those who have attacked the idea of public broadcasting in favor of a market-driven culture seem to adopt a very different posture when dealing with something like school curricula. Far from leaving it to students to find their way, these people want the schools to give strong guidance, to impose on students the classics of our cultural tradition, to inculcate traditional American values, and to impose a variety of other curricular elements determined not by the consumers but by authority. Why this two-sided approach to authority and freedom of choice? Are we to believe that somehow, although young people cannot be trusted to obtain what they need from our practically infinite cultural resources, as soon as we reach adulthood we humans can be trusted to want what's best for us? When it comes to such things as drugs, similarly, the guiding hand of authority is favored over the freedom of the market by those who would submit the offerings of public broadcasting to the rule of ratings. The same people who in some instances will issue denunciations of "Elitism!" will in others call for the exercise of "Moral authority!" Is this an inconsistency? Should the OJ trial and the inane sitcoms be regarded as the media equivalent of drug use? In fact, I expect few of us would consistently maintain that people --even normal, average adults-- will reliably want and choose what is good for them. Look at the evidence of the check-out line at the grocery store. On the question of diet, a great deal is in fact known about what best nourishes human health-- and the best diet is not what most people bring to the check-out line. Twinkies and Cokes, potato chips and too much meat, too much refined foods and too much alcohol. Too few whole grains and beans, too little in the way of fresh fruits and vegetables. If it is appropriate for taxpayer dollars to help fund a PBS to give us food for thought, is there some equivalent with respect to the foods we get for dinner that would be appropriate? The supermarket offers us the good along with the bad and the ugly, but many Americans --free to choose, and unencumbered by any taxpayer-supported authority-- are eating themselves to death. This brings up the question that intrigues me the most: if people cannot be trusted to choose what is best for them --in their diet, or in the TV viewing, or their reading-- why is that? Does it reveal something defective in human nature? Were we somehow designed with appetites that are inconsistent with our real needs? Why would such a design come about, whether we see that design emerge from an evolutionary process or from creation by a Creator who embodies the good and doesn't make mistakes? Or do the shortcomings in people's choices --our preferring what is not good for us to what is-- reflect some way in which the world we grow up in has damaged us, disabled us from exercising the good judgment that our inborn nature would give us? If that is so, just how and why do we get damaged? Whatever explanation one chooses for our inability or refusal to choose what is best for us, the question then arises, What should we do about it? If we are as imperfect in our choices as some evidence suggests, what is the proper line to draw between giving people the freedom of choice we believe in and using authority to alter the range of choices? By what kinds of measures can we --we in our own individual lives, we as parents of new lives growing up, we as a nation making public policy-- help engender the kind of will that does choose what is best, that is drawn to what is really needful over that which is alluring but empty or injurious? What does it take for a society to produce people who do choose what is good for them?