Scrutableness

I was just reading the local political and community discussion group for the town that I live in. I find that no matter my best intentions about being a good local citizen, I can't find the depth of interest that it seems to take in order to be fully engaged. When the individuals are close to the action weigh-in on school budgeting, for example, it simply defies a cursory reading. It takes something of an involved experts eye, and I don't have that to contribute.
In a recent post, in fact, someone referred to the local school budgeting process as being inscrutable. The municipal political leadership and the school board have constructed a process that remains opaque and leaves open the various back doors for unaccountable behavior that extracts a premium from everyone.
I think I'm fortunate -- I live in a place where the citizenry really value education. I was fortunate to be able to educate my son in the local public schools, and for most part that was positive although I'm sure he might argue otherwise. He certainly bore the brunt of the snobbishness and cliquishness that dominates school culture. But it would have been so no matter where he went. Us-versus-them culture is just another of the unfortunate cultural artifacts that we're convinced is a natural phenomenon, despite the fact that it's abundantly clear if you study it that it's entirely a learned behavior. But that's a story for another blog entry, and likely for an entire book.
At any rate, this remark about the school budgeting process being "inscrutable" brought to mind David Gelernter's vision in Mirror Worlds when he discussed the possibility of individuals having access to all the information processing systems iin the universe, such as the sensory systems at a hospital. On one hand theres a certain Orwellian cast to having this kind of global transparency. But at the same time, if we are to confront the deep and significant privacy issues we confront as a result of both government action (which dictate that the flow be one-way) and more open and transparent systems 9which by definition demand two-way observability.) I can better deal with the fact that I am so widely observed if I have the capability to track back to all the individuals and units observing me. The certainly is not the current paradigm. The point is that transparency and openness are certainly not built into our civic structures -- hence the "inscrutable" school budget. Addressing this issue is more than structural or procedural--it's cultural.