Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

Are we entering a communitarian era?

I’m continuing to follow the fallout of Kevin Rudd and Labor’s victory over John Howard’s Liberals here in Australia. I’ve read a bunch of op-eds that basically track the argument made by Robyn Sykes:

Australians have decided they don’t want to live in an economy, they want to live in a community. That’s the message I received from Saturday’s election. Of course the economy is important- without a strong economy we don’t get the rise in employment that has been one of the major achievements of the Howard-Costello years.

But Australians want more than a strong economy. We want a strong economy with compassion.

Hence, the Liberals are being advised to embrace “contemporary, progressive liberalism that resonates with the electorate,” even by pundits who think “younger Australians’ attitudes heavily align with classical liberal thought.”

As John Hulsman observes, the same sort of nonsense thinking can be found in the USA, even among nominal conservatives:

Michael Gerson, long praised (some would say over-praised) as President Bush’s genius speechwriter, is also, it turns out, a would-be moral philosopher and political strategist. In “Heroic Conservatism,” he calls for the Republican Party to redefine itself and brighten its future by casting aside its suspicion of big government and pursuing lofty projects of statist do-goodery. ... Mr. Gerson calls traditional conservatives “anti-state conservatives,” coyly implying that anyone who objects to sweeping, messianic programs--Mr. Gerson loves the idea of the U.S. government spending billions of dollars on AIDS in Africa--is flirting with anarchism. He scoffs at the “unheroic” conservative belief that domestic problems should be solved either by private means or by narrowly gauged government efforts at the local level--that is, at the level closest to the people. He warns: “If Republicans run in future elections with a simplistic anti-government message, ignoring the poor, the addicted, and children at risk, they will lose, and they will deserve to lose.”

The “deserve to lose” part of his message is especially galling. The U.S. government has been pouring billions and billions of dollars into the welfare state since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, with results so wayward that, for decades now, a cottage industry has grown up among policy intellectuals to document all the disappointing results and ill effects. The welfare reform of Bill Clinton’s first term grew out of such a critique. Still, Mr. Gerson equates “caring” with government spending, as though, self-evidently, yet more “visionary” programs are the best way of dealing with poverty, addiction and children at risk.

The great moral difficulty with the emerging politics of communitarianism is that, if taken to extremes, it treats individuals as though they were little more than cells of a larger organism. Just as when doctors kill cells to prevent cancer from spreading, communitarianism readily justifies state intrusion into the private sphere in the name of some communal good. This is precisely why conservatives have always balanced the communitarian elements of our philosophy with a strong commitment to ordered liberty.

The difference between real conservatives and communitarians - whether of the progressive or the nominally conservative variety - is captured by the distinction between virtue and principle ethics. Principle ethics are most attractive to those who are tempted to propose a rule as a solution to a problem. In a principle-dominated ethical system, the moral life consists mainly of complying with society’s mandated code of conduct. In contrast, virtue ethics reject codes of conduct in favor of context-based judgment. In a virtues-based ethical system, the moral life consists mainly of the habitual private exercise of truthfulness, courage, justice, mercy, and the other virtues.

Principle ethics seem especially attractive to communitarians like Sykes and Gerson, who appear to be unable to envision a society in which trust and other virtues are solely a matter of private morality. Hence, we see paeans to cooperation and cohesion over conflict and enmity. But why assume that these are the only conceivable states of society? Can we imagine a society free of enmity or conflict, but which also values freedom from cohesion enforced by positive law? Can we not imagine a society of rugged individualists in which conflict is precluded by wary mutual respect? In other words, can we not imagine a society that resembles the American West (or, perhaps more accurately, John Ford’s vision thereof)? And even if those two alternatives really are the only possible states of society, why assume that state-coerced cooperation and cohesion is preferable to the risk of conflict that comes from leaving morality to private virtues?

Principle ethics in fact pose a double threat to ordered liberty: principle ethics displace not just private ordering of economic relationships, but also personal virtue. In principle-based ethical systems, individuals are not allowed to define for themselves what constitutes trustworthy or honorable behavior, but instead must comply with some judge’s or some bureaucrat’s definition of honor.
Conservatives claim it is possible to embrace communitarian values without having to embrace the statist baggage political communitarianism brings with it. American culture once partook of a dynamic interaction between individualistic and communitarian tendencies that produced a rich associational life. Unfortunately, today, the political communitarians of both left and right subjugate the rich set of mediating institutions famously praised by Tocqueville to the dictates of the nanny state.

As Hulsman asks of Gerson’s communitarianism:

What about the longtime conservative belief that limited, accountable government works best--that it is the form of government least likely to squander resources, thwart private initiative, impinge on freedom and avoid harmful, unintended consequences? Unheroic, says Mr. Gerson. What about the quaint notion that government should live within its means? Short-sighted when people are suffering, says Mr. Gerson. Little wonder that Mr. Gerson’s co-workers in the White House (from which he retired earlier this year) called him, only half-jokingly, “the Christian Socialist.”

Conservatives reject both prongs of modern liberalism in favor of achieving communitarian goals through private ordering. Our pessimism about human nature thus does not lead us to statism, but to promoting intermediating institutions that build what George Weigel called “a citizenry regulating itself from within according to a shared public ‘language of good and evil.’” We believe that the state cannot make people virtuous. Virtue is an adaptive response to the instinctive human recognition of (and need for) a transcendent moral order codified in a body of natural law. People are most likely to act virtuously when they believe in an external power, higher and more permanent than the state, who is aware of their shortcomings and will punish them in the next life even if they escape retribution in this life.

Civic virtue also can be created by secular communities. As James Q. Wilson observes, “something in us makes it all but impossible to justify our acts as mere self-interest whenever those acts are seen by others as violating a moral principle.” Rather, “[w]e want our actions to be seen by others—and by ourselves—as arising out of appropriate motives.” Voluntary communities strengthen this instinct in two ways. First, they provide a network of reputational and other social sanctions that shape incentives. Virtuous communities will use those sanctions to encourage virtue among their members. Second, because people care more about how they are perceived by those close too them, communal life provides a cloud of witnesses about whom we care and whose good opinion we value. We hesitate to disappoint those people and thus strive to comport ourselves in accordance with communal norms.

The nanny state is a poor substitute, at best, for the virtue inculcating power of faith and voluntary community. We may fear the faceless bureaucrat, but he does not inspire us to virtue. Conduct that rises above the lowest common moral denominator thus cannot be created by state action. But while the state cannot make its citizens virtuous. Instead, as Richard Epstein has observed the state tends to destroy the intermediary institutions that do inculcate virtue: “Communities can be destroyed from without; but they cannot be created from without; they must be built from within.”

Hence, as Hulsman concludes:

To the traditional conservative, it is more heroic--that is, more honest and realistic--to acknowledge that such problems are too deeply ingrained to be solved by a far-away Washington bureaucracy. Traditional conservatives since Edmund Burke have put their faith in the organic forces of society--family, community, civic institutions. In America, such faith has made common cause with commercial dynamism and the opportunities it creates for upward mobility. ... For traditional conservatives, societies evolve in an almost geological way--formed by the immense weight of history and culture over vast stretches of time. Grand schemes, even grand religiously driven schemes, do not suddenly “direct” history or solve long-festering problems or, for that matter, remake the world.

So pardon me if I don’t share the apparently widespread enthusiasm for “community.”