May 04, 2009 07:02 PM UTC

Reconstructing "Community": A vital political innovation

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• by: Steve Harvey

( – promoted by Colorado Pols)

This is the first 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, and then leave it to others to discuss them (or not) as they see fit.

In this offering, I discuss the possibility of using 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.

I just finished writing a child welfare statute and discussion for my “Parent, Child, and State” class at CU Law. At the center of it was one of those little epiphanies that keep us young at heart: The need to, and the possibility of, recreating, in a modern, refined form, 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 a century and a half ago, it holds the promise of intentionally reincarnating, in an in-some-ways improved form, a traditonal institution that served many vital functions, and did so in an intimate and human way. And like the institution of public education, it also holds the promise of being strongly resisted, widely and vigorously criticized as an overly-intrusive arm of the state into our individual and familial privacy and autonomy. And, finally, 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.

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).

It’s functions and purposes are manifold, its potential benefits to human welfare increasingly and surprisingly broad, deep, and dense the more you contemplate it, 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 state over-intrusion while diminishing the insularity of families within which far more abuse occurs 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 in 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 this 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.

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