The ABCs of Communitarianism
Sometime over the last two
years, someone somewhere must have decreed that the intellectual buzzword of
the '90s was to be "communitarianism." Only five years ago, communitarianism
was an obscure school of philosophy discussed in faculty seminars; today, its
ideas are splashed across People magazine and on network TV. "Community"
and "civil society," the two mantras of the movement, are part of everyday
political discourse.
Curiously, in a climate of polarized political discourse, everyone is a
communitarian. The movement's cheerleaders can be found across the political
spectrum, from Hillary Clinton to Barbra Streisand to Pat Buchanan. On the
left, large liberal foundations like Ford and Carnegie, the bellwethers of
political correctness, throw millions of dollars into projects relating to
these ideas. (The result, predictably, is that the magic words "community" and
"civil society" are sprinkled liberally now in all proposals for research
grants, as in "The East Asian Balance of Power--The Neglected Role of Civil
Society.") On the right, Policy Review , the journal of the resolutely
conservative Heritage Foundation, announced last year that it was reorienting
itself to focus on civil society.
What is communitarianism? Where did it come from? How come
everyone seems to agree it is good? It's actually all quite simple. You just
need to remember your ABCs.
*************
A Is for Aristotle.
He is probably started it all. In his treatise on government, The
Politics , he famously wrote that "man is by nature a political animal,"
meaning that human beings can best fulfill themselves as part of social and
political groups, not as isolated individuals sitting at home watching TV
(well, the fourth century B.C. equivalent). Usually regarded as the original
conservative philosopher, Aristotle is popular now with "troubled liberals" who
worry that modern societies, organized around an individualistic, rights-based
creed, leave human beings feeling "hollow at the core."
Of
these troubled types, Harvard University political philosopher Michael Sandel
is perhaps mostly closely identified with communitarianism. Along with serious
scholars like Michael Walzer and unserious publicists like Amitai Etzioni,
Sandel criticizes "minimalist liberalism"--the tradition made most famous by
John Stuart Mill--for too easily celebrating individualism and materialism at
the expense of social and moral issues. In his new book, Democracy's
Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy , Sandel tries to
revive an alternative American path, the Republican tradition, which, he says,
focused on character-building and citizenship. While their critique of
liberalism's reluctance to introduce morality into politics is trenchant,
left-wing communitarians like Sandel themselves are reluctant to advocate
strong remedies--say prayer in public schools or laws against divorce--and rely
instead on vague statements about the value of community life and
neighborhoods.
Conservatives have few such inhibitions. Former Reagan
official and intellectual firebrand William Bennett agrees with everything that
troubled liberals say is wrong with modern society. His answer, however, is not
to talk about nice neighborhoods, but instead, to talk about Virtue. Actually,
he writes about it, and since his Books of Virtues , collections of
morally instructive tales from all over the world, are relentless best sellers,
one has to assume someone is reading them.
The advantage that Bennett
and others, like neo-conservative writer Ben Wattenberg and Christian Coalition
spokesman Ralph Reed, have is that while liberals spend a great deal of time
analyzing the problem--liberalism's value-free politics--they are wary of
actually filling the vacuum with any kind of absolutist morality. They are,
after all, liberals. By contrast, conservative communitarians have solutions.
Both groups talk up abstract virtues like honor, commitment, and thrift, but
conservatives then propose specific policies that put into law their moral and
religious preferences in order to deal with all sorts of issues: unwed mothers,
absent fathers, unruly schoolchildren, gay lovers, and so on. It's a game
liberals can't win.
*************
B Is for Bowling. One of the most important debates
among academics and policy wonks over the last two years has been, is it better
is bowl together or alone? In "Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social
Capital," a now-legendary article written in 1995, Harvard's Robert Putnam
pointed out that league bowling in America has been declining for decades,
while individual bowling is on the rise. This, he contends, is a symbol of the
decline of community spirit and the rise of atomistic individualism.
Part of the reason that
Putnam's article resonated so strongly outside elite circles-- People
magazine profiled him in a bowling alley--is that in using the example of
bowling, that staple of 1950s, Putnam touched on a powerful chord of nostalgia
for the America of that golden decade. A new book by Alan Ehrenhalt, The
Lost City , is subtitled Discovering the Forgotten Virtues of Community
in the Chicago of the 1950s .
Ehrenhalt's book may be
the best of the new literature on community, because rather than waxing poetic
about community in the abstract, he describes actual communities. The result is
a vivid picture showing that the strong bonds that developed in those fabled
neighborhoods of yore were kindled by conditions that we might find
discomforting today--fear of authority, lack of choice, and poverty. People
stayed in neighborhoods, for example, because they could not afford to move,
and because other neighborhoods would not accept them easily. They attended
church services and neighborhood social events because small banks, schools,
and other community institutions were run by a local elite that enforced a
certain kind of conformity. Porches and stoops, those symbols of a vibrant
social life, stopped being used as gathering places for a rather practical
reason--air conditioning. Ehrenhalt himself advocates a return to the
choice-free, obedient life of the 1950s, but while seductive in the abstract,
it sounds more and more confining on close examination. Imagine having to go to
parties with your local bank manager so that you could get a mortgage.
Hard-core left-wingers are
horrified by this rise in nostalgia about the 1950s, a decade that was seen,
not so long ago, as a grim period of pre-enlightenment, racist, sexist,
capitalist boredom. The Nation 's Katha Pollitt takes Putnam's very
example, the shift from league bowling to ad hoc bowling, and suggests that
"[that] story could be told as one of happy progress from a drink-sodden night
of spouse-avoidance with the same old faces from work to temperate and
spontaneous fun with one's intimate friends and family." Hmm. "Temperate and
spontaneous fun" sounds like something one might have to do in a work camp. And
the occasional "drink-sodden night of spouse-avoidance"--for both sexes--is
probably key to enduring marriages.
B, by the way, could also
be for "baseball," but it turns out that baseball leagues have been growing
steadily over the last decades. And the number of soccer clubs has been rising
meteorically as well. The simplest explanation for this rise might be the
desire for a little exercise.
***************
C Is for Civil Society. Civil Society has nothing to do
with Emily Post. It's a term used to describe that part of society that exists
between the family and the state--voluntary organizations, choral groups,
Rotary clubs, etc.
Alexis de Tocqueville
noticed in the 1830s that America was brimming with them, and argued that they
were good for democracy. This celebrated hypothesis has by now become a
theological certitude in the minds of most American intellectuals. It recently
received powerful empirical support from Robert Putnam, whose 1993 book,
Making Democracy Work , documented that northern Italy is civil-society
rich and southern Italy, civil-society poor. Certainly the north has been
better governed than the south for centuries, but that is not to say that is
has been a better democracy. After all, Italy has not been a democracy for that
long. There was that fellow, Mussolini, and before him, the emperor. Perhaps
civil society is good for efficient government rather than democratic
government. Memo to Lee Kuan Yew ...
Of
course, civil society could also be the Mafia, the Michigan militia, Hamas, the
Nation of Islam and other such groups involved in communal projects. But when
most civil-society boosters talk about the concept, they use it to
mean--arbitrarily--those groups that they like. So the left points inevitably
to nonprofit do-good organizations, and the right talks about church
groups.
Consider the difference between the conservative writer
Francis Fukuyama and left winger Benjamin Barber, who, in their recent books,
praise civil society extravagantly. In Fukuyama's Trust , he argues that
private companies are an important part of civil society and that nonfamily
business activity is a key indicator of a politically and economically healthy
society. But for Barber, the author of Jihad vs. McWorld: How the Planet is
Both Falling Apart and Coming Together--and What This Means for
Democracy-- a book President Clinton has read and praised--business, far
from being part of civil society, leads the assault on civil society. "Who will
get business off the backs of civil society?" Barber asks. Now it isn't clear
why firms don't fulfill most of the functions of civil society. Indeed the term
"civil society" originated with writers like Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, and
David Hume in England and Scotland in the 18th century as a way to describe
private business activity. On the other hand, you don't hear many conservatives
proclaiming the virtues of Greenpeace.
Communitarianism was
supposed to be a third way, neither liberal nor conservative, that charted a
new course for philosophy and politics. But as this primer suggests, it has
become a collection of meaningless terms, used as new bottles into which the
old wine of liberalism and conservatism is poured. Community means one thing if
you are a conservative and another if you are a liberal--the same with civil
society, and even bowling. Call it politics as usual.
Illustrations by Robert
Neubecker
