Note from CM: I have said often that I am a-political — I don’t care much for politics, and we don’t talk too much about that world here on IM, except when it impinges on some facet of religious discourse. In today’s terms, I consider myself a moderate and you will usually find me lamenting the severe partisan divides that keep our governmental leaders from being effective in working for the common good. My roots are deep in the Midwestern small town ethos, and I also lived for some time in New England, where town meeting was still the main political event of the year. One of the best socio-political expressions which represents the way I think politically goes by the designation “communitarianism.” My friend Andy Zehner (Damaris’s husband) is an eloquent proponent of this commonsense, neighborly approach to community and civic life. I’ve asked him to explain it for us today here at IM.

Andy blogs regularly at Jordan or Styx? It’s a great site; you should check it out.

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Many of the urgent, practical questions that arise in life find no answer in the Bible or the catechisms and doctrinal texts of the various denominations. The Sermon on the Mount is wonderful, but it doesn’t help a young Christian woman decide whether her skirt shows too much leg. There’s nothing in the Westminster Confession of Faith to help a conscientious person decide what to think (or do) about fracking, Ferguson or flat tax. When we do find specific commands (e.g., Lev. 25:35-37 or I Cor. 11:6), we are quick to dismiss them as irrelevant to our time and culture. And because practical instruction is rare and often disregarded, practical decisions about how to live continue to perplex us.

Communitarianism is a social theory suggesting how people can develop a fair and effective society. Chaplain Mike has asked me to explain a bit about it. If you will agree that fairness, effectiveness, and possibly God’s favor are worthy goals, I’ll try to show how communitarian principles lead to those ends. Consider:

• Psalm 68 offers a litany of God’s great works, among which David lists, “God sets the lonely in families,” and concludes, “Praise be to God!”
• Cooperation and community are the very essence of the Christian life as described by the apostle Paul: “For just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others.” (Romans 12:4-5).
• John Donne, the brilliant 16^th century pastor and poet, declares: “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” (Meditation XVII).
• Dorothy Gale from Kansas experiences wonders meteorological, anthropomorphic and occult, and concludes, “There’s no place like home.”

These glimpses attest that relationships are fundamental to the human experience. God intends us to live with and through others. Communitarianism accepts the central role of community, and then builds a social theory to suggest how we should live. Human happiness requires, according to this view, a balance of personal freedom and civic rules. This is in contrast to libertarianism, which contends that liberty alone secures happiness. Communitarianism also disagrees with any who say personal wellbeing should be compromised for the good of the state (fascism). Personal wellbeing is the communitarian priority. A healthy society is the means to that end.

A new movement based on old ideas

The roots of communitarianism go back to the Bible and to Aristotle. It emerged as a school of thought only in the 1980s. Some important modern thinkers associated with the theory are Harvard professors Michael Sandel and Robert Putnam, whose 2000 book, Bowling Alone, describes the decline of civic engagement in America; the conservative sociologist Robert Nisbet; the political philosopher John Rawls; and Notre Dame theologian Alasdair MacIntyre. Its most fervent proponent is the Israeli-American sociologist Amitai Etzioni, who runs the Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies at George Washington University.

Caution: If you do any follow-up reading on this subject, you’ll likely come across dishonest articles equating communitarianism with one-world government and hidden agendas of domination. Here’s one. Here’s another. And here’s a third. These are fantastical misinterpretations. What the communitarian platform actually says is, “No social task should be assigned to an institution that is larger than necessary to do the job.” The important issues, in other words, should be resolved around the family dinner table more often than at the UN Headquarters or at Davos. Giving a voice to people in a Detroit slum or a Brazilian rain forest is the opposite of world domination.

Far from it

An informed and involved citizenry is the sine qua non of communitarianism. America today is far from that.

“It’s enough for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people’s. Mine occupies me constantly.” Charles Dickens put these words into the mouth of Ebenezer Scrooge, knowing they would mark him as an odious miser. In ancient Athens, a man of Scrooge’s mind was ιδιωτησ, an idiot. The word didn’t imply deficient mental capacity. A man was an idiot if he neglected his civic responsibilities. America today is a nation of avowed idiots, and of people proud to share Scrooge’s worst quality.

Let’s clarify what communitarianism isn’t. It is not politics. The purpose of politics is to gain power by winning elections. Communitarianism stands for a consistent idea whether it is popular or not. Communitarianism is not religion. The purpose of religion is to explain and regulate man’s relationship to what is transcendent, while communitarianism focuses on this life. Communitarianism is not ideology. Ideologies insist on a short-circuit path from principles to priorities to conclusions. Communitarianism asserts only foundational principles and leaves the conclusions to work themselves out through experience. I think it fair to say that communitarian principles are congruous with religion, but not so much with politics or ideology.

Communitarianism is, as I’ve said, a social theory. It is a package of ideas that ideologues and politicians pick up and discard as it suits them. Political conservatives tend to talk the communitarian talk concerning morality and limited government. They part ways when communitarians defend labor unions, immigrant groups and other minority perspectives. They agree about Normal Rockwell’s Freedom of Speech, in other words, but not about Norman’s Rockwell’s Golden Rule.

Communitarians and political liberals also maintain a tenuous alliance. A liberal regime seeks to act mainly through each individual’s dependence on the (national) government. Communitarianism prefers that families, church congregations, neighborhood associations and dozens of other groups provide the guidance and support the individual needs.

Communitarianism hovers on the periphery of public discourse. At his 1989 inaugural address, George H.W. Bush spoke of “a thousand points of light.” Since leaving office Bill Clinton has said the country (and world) needs, “Not liberal, but communitarian solutions.” According to Etzioni’s history of the movement, George W. Bush was also onboard until September 11, 2001, when urgent security concerns seemed to demand state power, secrets, and ruling by fiat  (all very anti-communitarian). Barack Obama has been more of a classic liberal, at least insofar as his signature health care reform is a big government program. Still, at his famous 2004 Democratic National Convention speech, Obama declaimed, “For alongside our famous individualism, there’s another ingredient in the American saga, a belief that we are all connected as one people. If there’s a child on the South Side of Chicago who can’t read, that matters to me, even if it’s not my child.”

Am I saying all or any of these men are communitarians? No, they are politicians. Their convictions are shallow and changing. But you can see that communitarian principles are not far from center stage. Indeed, they’ve been there since before America’s beginning.

We must, we must, we must

In 1630, as his puritan followers prepared to debark at their Massachusetts Bay settlement, John Winthrop delivered his famous “City on a Hill” sermon. It is one the highest, noblest agendas ever uttered. It thrills me every time I read it. It is thoroughly communitarian:

[W]e must be knit together in this work as one man. We must entertain each other in brotherly affection. We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of other’s necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality. We must delight in each other; make other’s conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body. 

Now, it is a fact that the Massachusetts Bay puritans fell short of these ideals. They argued over doctrine. They burned witches. They plundered their Abenaki, Narragansett and Pequod neighbors. But their failure doesn’t tarnish the ideals.

If community mattered to the earliest settlers, and top politicians of today continue to endorse the rhetoric of community, why has communitarianism failed to accomplish widespread social improvement? Perhaps it has done more than we know. But I think the answer is that people have too little regard for their neighbors, and too much regard for the distant halls of power.  The first of these is sin, and the second is madness.

Waiting for the government to solve your problems is a poor strategy at any time. With the dysfunction that pervades Washington now, it has become even less hopeful. A former presidential advisor said not long ago that it is not possible to coalesce all Americans around an idea. “We don’t have the ability to communicate with them . . . They are talking to people who agree with them, they are listening to news outlets that reinforce that point of view, and [President Obama] is probably the person with the least ability to break into that because of the partisan bias there.”

If, in today’s bifurcated society, even a president cannot rally the people to consensus, he still has the option of ramming through his policies irrespective of public support. Or does he? The Affordable Care Act was passed by a Democratic Congress and with little discussion. In the five years since, several million Americans have gained health coverage and the cost of health care has fallen. Yet a majority of Americans still distrust the law and many are working to undermine it. Without consensus and support, even federal law is weak. But laws based on communitarian consensus would be supported by the people who administer them, and the people who obey them.

And this is where communitarianism might disappoint potential adherents. Consensus takes time and patience. Working in hundreds of communities is harder than commanding once and for all from on high. When decisions are decentralized, laws and practices can vary from place to place. And that is OK. Communitarianism is comfortable with legal marijuana in Colorado, if Coloradans decide after careful consideration that they want it. Most communitarians would not force rules onto all Americans from above, even on critical issues such as abortion or gun control. Compelling people to do the right thing is just another sort of tyranny. From the communitarian platform: “[W]hen a community reaches the point at which these responsibilities are largely enforced by the powers of the state, it is in deep moral crisis. If communities are to function well, most members most of the time must discharge their responsibilities because they are committed to do so, not because they fear lawsuits, penalties, or jails.”

Count the failures

The Sandy Hook School massacre represents a failure of the federal congress to take action. And that is where most people’s analysis rests. But it was also failure at many other levels. Adam Lanza failed to respect his mother. She failed to raise him up in the way that he should go. Neighbors and school officials failed to notice that Mrs. Lanza had more than she could handle, or failed to do anything about it. The schools failed to even try to teach moral and civic duty. Local police and mental health officials failed to act on what they knew about Lanza’s morbid intentions. A communitarian society would instill many local checks – many points of intervention – before the bullets began to fly.

Have it your way

The mention of moral teaching and intervention evokes the thought of religious or cultural or ideological indoctrination. “Whose principles,” you might ask, “will these communitarian societies expound?” The surprising answer, if you are not a complete sociopath, is: “Yours!” Again from the communitarian platform:

“We ought to teach those values Americans share, for example, that the dignity of all persons ought to be respected, that tolerance is a virtue and discrimination abhorrent, that peaceful resolution of conflicts is superior to violence, that generally truth-telling is morally superior to lying, that democratic government is morally superior to totalitarianism and authoritarianism, that one ought to give a day’s work for a day’s pay, that saving for one’s own and one’s country’s future is better than squandering one’s income and relying on others to attend to one’s future needs.”

And now….

Before ending I should give you some proof of communitarianism in action. I don’t presume to urge the iMonk community to be communitarian or to join any social movement based on communitarian principles. I just want you to know things are happening and it’s not just a theory. The nature of a human-scale, decentralized ethic is that it will never be large and headline-grabbing. But there are plenty of growing initiatives with communitarian values:

Urban farming is one example. Rather than settling for what giant retail and agro corporations provide, people in the hearts of big cities are growing fresh, healthy food on vacant city land and sharing it with their neighbors. For people who live nearer to farm production, community supported agriculture cooperatives connect conscientious growers with customers eager to pay a premium for fresher meat, fruits and vegetables than the stores supply.

The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund helps communities defy “unsustainable economic and environmental policies set by state and federal governments” in order to achieve “sustainable energy production, sustainable land development, and sustainable water use, among others.”

The best and most extensive example of success built on a foundation of community and cooperation is the Mondragon Corporation of Spain. The company is a major enterprise with nearly 75,000 employees worldwide and sales of €12.5 billion. But Mondragon operates according to principles laid down in 1941by Catholic priest and corporate founder José María Arizmendiarrieta. Those principles are cooperation, empowerment, innovation and social responsibility. This video shows more. Most workers own shares in the company. Layoffs almost never happen, even during the severe recession of 2008-2010. Such things might not work in America where focus on maximum profits forces out other priorities. And then again, they just might work in Ohio, too.