The Spirit of Community. - book reviews

Reason, Nov, 1993 by Loren E. Lomasky

An early theorist of the market system observed of the man who trades in his plow for the higher income that goes with a factory workbench: "While he remains in a country village his conduct may be attended to, and he may be obliged to attend to it himself. In this situation, and in this situation only, he may have what is called a character to lose. But as soon as he comes into a great city, he is sunk in obscurity and darkness. His conduct is observed and attended to by nobody, and he is therefore very likely to neglect it himself, and to abandon himself to every sort of low profligacy and vice."

Karl Marx on alienation? No, Adam Smith on the human costs of urbanization. The great evangelist of proto-capitalism was, of course, a passionate and persuasive advocate of free markets, but he did not believe that market arrangements by themselves were sufficient for a society's health. Indeed, Smith was willing to bend the principles of laissez-faire in the cause of promoting a virtuous citizenry. So were the American Founders, especially Jefferson, who considered a disciplined, self-reliant yeomanry a prerequisite to the new republic's flourishing.

In our own time, Charles Murray has eloquently diagnosed the "obscurity and darkness" of America's great cities. Somewhat more ambiguously, the Republican right's call for a return to "family values" bespeaks devotion to old-fashioned virtue. (It also trades, as anyone who watched the 1992 convention knows, on more than a little old-fashioned bigotry). But willingness to proclaim and defend moral values, argues Amitai Etzioni, should not be ceded to conservatives as their exclusive territory, and in The Spirit of Community he unabashedly offers from the (moderate) left a prescription for the moral renewal of America. Or rather a multitude of prescriptions, for the pages of this book overflow with specific policy proposals, some clever and promising, others a rehash of old nostrums that age has not improved. The social vision they are meant to express and enhance is dubbed Communitarianism.

Particular caring communities, maintains Etzioni, are the fount of values from which the greater society receives sustenance, but in recent decades these communities have become badly eroded. The rot starts with the primal community, the family. Divorce, illegitimacy, and two-income households in which parents value money over time deprive children of adequate supervision and example. No easy talk about "quality time" erases the fact that too many children aren't getting the hours they need with a committed mother and father. Nor are shortfalls in the family made good elsewhere. Schools don't function adequately as parent substitutes; they don't even function adequately as schools. The predictable consequence is that kids get into trouble and fail to learn what they need to become productive workers and citizens.

Other communities, too, are at risk. Neighborhoods, even when not posing imminent danger to life and health as so many in the inner city do, are enclaves of anonymity and generalized lack of concern. Universities that ought to function as bastions of free speech instead give themselves over to the manufacture of codes of repression. The political processes of municipalities, states, and the federal government no longer work for the common good but spin to the tune of special interests. On all levels, claims Etzioni, social gears are badly in need of lubrication.

This is discomfortingly accurate, if not in every detail then in the overall picture. And it bears saying that in the liberal circles in which Etzioni most often travels it takes some courage to plainly state these facts without hiding behind a barrage of politically correct euphemism. Still, one might ask, "So what else is new?" There is nothing in this catalog of laments that we haven't heard before--and heard, and heard. A further recitation is worthwhile only to the extent that it is packaged in a way that enables us better to diagnose the source of the pathology and then treat it.

Etzioni sees attention to community as providing that understanding. Each of these problems, he contends, is symptomatic of the decaying moral infrastructure of our society. Too many of our efforts as individuals and as a polity are aimed at securing purely private goods, and not enough goes toward cooperative activity for the sake of a common good.

We're all the time minting and claiming for ourselves heretofore unknown rights to whatever may happen to be an object of desire while simultaneously disclaiming responsibilities to others. While there is blame enough to go around, the worst offenders, Etzioni maintains, are "Radical Individualists, such as libertarians and the American Civil Liberties Union." They need to be resisted so as to restore a balance now badly out of whack between public and private.

Part of this analysis rings true. Etzioni correctly notes that the state increasingly takes over functions once primarily carried out within families (such as care of the elderly) and by ethnic fellowships (settlement of new immigrants), preempting and thereby sapping the vitality of these voluntary associations. And one can enthusiastically concur in his excoriation of an overinflated rights talk that, by turning expressions of preference into non-negotiable demands, elevates the decibel level of controversy between groups and renders compromise unattainable. Unfortunately, though, too much of The Spirit of Community is pitched at a level of superficial campaign-type rhetoric and too much is simply confused.