May 08, 2009 12:34 AM UTC

Blending Liberty and Leviathan: The Role of "Community" (short versions now posted in comments)

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• by: Steve Harvey

This is the first, revised, installment of what I’ll call my virtual chautauqua series, in which I’ll introduce what I hope are novel and thought-provoking ideas concerning political and social innovations that might serve our collective welfare, or topics that focus the mind on something beyond “business-as-usual,” and then leave it to others to discuss them (or not) as they see fit, participating myself to clarify or respond as seems necessary.

In this offering, I discuss (in what I hope is a more useful form than my first attempt, which I removed temporarily due to CU Law School policy), first and foremost, the issue of balancing and blending the dual concerns of individualism and  society, and secondarily, as a means to that end, the possibility of employing the apparatus of the state to reconstruct, or catalyze the reemergence of enclaves of interpersonal interdependence, such as have existed throughout most of human history in almost all times and places but have grown particularly attentuated in modern, highly individualistic America. The purpose of this endeavor would be to simultaneously facilitate and articulate the dual demands of liberty and social coherence in service to human welfare, recognizing the value of both respect for individual autonomy and recognition of human interdependence.

The topic of discussion is not just the particular legal construct I am proposing, but also the broader topic of how to balance liberty and interdependence, and how to understand the relationship between the two. People often, incorrectly, represent them as diametrically opposed, with “more” government necessarily meaning “less” liberty, and vice versa. Of course, the logical conclusion of that conceptualization is that no government means perfect liberty, though it requires little reflection to realize that without government to protect the liberties of each from the predation of others, there is in fact little or no liberty at all.

The preservation and perpetuation of liberty depends, to a suprisingly large extent, on the ways in which government (or, more locally, “community”) facilitates our mutual cooperation in order to increase our range of choices and degree of efficacy. Government can fail to maximize our liberty both by doing too little and by doing too much, or, more precisely, by implementing a more poorly rather than more wisely designed set of mechanisms for accomplishing the task.

The purpose of the project I am suggesting involves a step further in the direction of achieving this optimal articulation of government facilitation and individual discretion, via the recreation, in a modern, refined form, of a social institution that has largely evaporated and dissipated in American cultural, economic, and political life: the Community.

Like the innovation of free, compulsory, universal public education over a century and a half ago, the legal artifact I am proposing holds the promise of re-establishing, with focused intentionality, a traditonal institution that served many vital functions, and did so in an intimate and human way. Like the institution of public education when first introduced in America by Horace Mann, it is likely to meet strong resistance, and to be widely and vigorously criticized as an overly-intrusive arm of the state into our individual and familial privacy and autonomy. And like public education, if successfully implemented (a big “if,” and a long-term project), it holds the promise of being an enormous investment that pays off enormously with far-ranging benefits, eventually to be taken for granted and utterly depended upon as an indispensible social institution.

The analogy to public education isn’t just an analogy: This new legal entity, “Community,” is in many ways an extension of the public education model. One of the great weaknesses of our public education system, just in terms of providing education, is that it misconceptualizes education as something that occurs within a precise location during precise hours. In reality, our schools cannot be as successful as we would like them to be until we recognize that their mission extends to working with parents and the community to facilitate their mutual success in a shared endeavor.

The “Community” in this statute takes that notion, and extends its responsibilities to the full range of those that communities have always served, aided by and in partnership with both the state and individual families.

I view this reincarnation of community as a legal construct, different from incorporated towns and other corporate entities in both purpose and composition. People could select their Community (capitalized to distinguish the legal entity from the attenuated traditional entity), either geographically (by default or choice), or culturally (people living with some degree of geographical dispersion, but probably not too much, who share a sub-culture or a set of values and beliefs). The purpose of the cultural option is not to reify or glorify separate sub-cultures, nor to preserve them as entities unto themselves, but rather to seek the optimal balance of cohesion and individuation, permitting individuals to choose their Community rather than have it thrust upon them, if they so desire.

The functions and purposes of the Community are manifold, its potential benefits to human welfare increasingly and surprisingly broad and deep as its implications are explored, its potential downsides significant and worthy of cautious attention (after all, local communities, historically, can be the most tyrannical and spirit-crushing of all social entities), but a catalyst for a discussion that, wherever it leads, is likely to lead to some good and immediately implementable ideas.

As I’ve designed it, the Community is an artifice which can increase the efficiency and efficacy of the delivery of social services; improve the flow of information between individuals and families on the one hand, and the state on the other; empower, to a greater degree, those who have been most marginalized (including children, in terms of their ability to participate in weighty decisions that often determine their fate), protect diverse approaches and subcultures from excessive state intrusion while diminishing the insularity of families within which far more abuse and neglect occur than most of us are willing to acknowledge or confront.

Of course, community has not entirely disappeared: It still exists, to some extent, both in its traditional form, and in new incarnations. One new incarnation is the “virtual community,” such as that which exists on this site. There are also, similarly, special-interest communities, who share a cause or a common interest, such as a game or topic. And there is a concept called “invisible colleges,” in which people of shared orientations or frameworks communicate and work together in a decentralized, geographically dispersed way. Such communities serve some small subset of the functions that physical communities do, but fail in general to serve its most vital functions of mutual support and assistance across the spectrum of human needs.

It is easy to anticipate some of the concerns, that of the overreaching state being central among them. Some might compare this model to the local “soviets” that were at the core of the horribly failed and human-suffering-inducing Russian Soviet experiment initiated almost a century ago. In fact, there are some parallels, but there are also some very crucial differences.

As I see it, there are, in one sense, two types of error, existing, as is common, at the poles of a continuum, to which humans who incompletely examine and apply historical experience and social institutional analysis commonly submit: The error of repeating historical mistakes, and the error of creating new ones by learning exaggerated and distorted lessons from the failures of the past.

Designing well-functioning, human-welfare producing social institutions requires a more subtle approach, and more willingness to look at issues anew, fully informed but without prejudice. Whatever the merits or defects of the very raw and minimally developed idea being presented here, examining and evaluating it in detail and on its own merits, rather than on principle and through a process of categorical reduction, is certainly the most useful and productive approach.

In this re-published diary, I will post, as comments immediately following this introductory text, the hypothetical statute itself for reference (four pages single spaced), which introduces Community in the context of child welfare policy, and the first several paragraphs of my discussion of the statute. These will hopefully clarify the nature of the proposition, for those who are interested. At core, though, beneath the specific proposition itself, is a more fundamental challenge: How to balance liberty and interdependence, serving the human needs both of individual autonomy and expression, on the one hand, and of state facilitation and protection both of that autonomy and of other needs not served by it, on the other.

I would be delighted to see parallel discussions of both the broader topic and the specific application. I believe the broader topic is the one we often dance around on this site, digging ideological trenches on one side of the debate or the other, but failing to discuss it in any meaningful or mutually informative way. Let’s use this forum, beyond just sharing information about, and vying over the ideological framing of the political narrative in our state, as a means to move past assumptions and in the direction of insights.

It is incumbent on people of all ideologies, whether libertarians, progressives, or social conservatives, to give careful thought to the questions of what balance and blend of Liberty and Leviathan is optimal and why, since all or most ideologies start with an assumed answer to those questions. And maybe, instead of talking past each other, lost in respective false certainties, repeating well-worn platitudes, we can aspire, for a change to explore these questions in earnest, suspending the pretense, each in his own way, of a unique wisdom that those who agree with us understand and those who disagree are ignorant of. If there is one thing intelligent people should be able to agree on, it is that it really is a subtle and complex world after all.

If, for instance, the well-worn, but too shallow answer is “the least government is the best government, because government is inefficient,” explain how markets (or other non-governmental social institutions) will better address true public goods issues (ie, externalities), or why they need not be addressed. If, on the other hand, the well-worn but too shallow answer is “government is needed to internalize externalities and attend to issues of social justice,” explain how government better addresses these needs than markets, and why they need to be addressed. And try to listen and address the reasoning of those on the other side. We can continue to talk past each other, or we can start to talk with each other. Most reasonable people, I suspect, will move from the poles of making a fetish out of either absolute liberty or complete reliance on the social welfare state, and toward a more moderate position.

For those who are interested in reading or perusing the entire discussion of the hypothetical statute (21 pages double-spaced), email me at steven.harvey@colorado.edu and I would be glad to send it to you.