Review: The New Golden Rule
| Author: | Amitai Etzioni |
| Review Date: | 01/12/2004 |
| Basic Summary: | George Washington University Professor of Sociology argues that moral values are necessary to society's wellbeing, but must bubble up from communities, rather than being imposed by government. |
The day I took this book out of the library, I found myself in precisely the kind of situation that leads people to search for new social moorings: Stuck on a crowded subway train with three raucous high school students. Specifically, two of the them were engaged in a long and sexually charged wrestling match, performed so aggressively that they were rolling onto the people sitting near them.
Not a soul on this crowded train of adults said a word to these teens. Even the people taking glancing fists and kicks just buried themselves deeper into their newspapers, or stared away and pretended not to notice.
I was going to say something to these kids, but doubt immediately set in. What if I was the only person bothered? Or perhaps everyone else was also annoyed, but believed that only direct harm justified interference. Hell, what if the rest of the people on the train simply believed that only parents have the right to discipline their children?
And I had to wonder: What would I do if the kids ignored me? Confront them physically? Bring them to the police? Absurd. But if I chastised the kids and they ignored me, and the rest of the train sat passively, it would be worse than doing nothing at all. I would have taught these kids that society has no response to their willful disrespect.
My subway car encounter was minor, of course, but the same pattern unfolds when bystanders are confronted by first stages of public abuse. Unsure if others think it is appropriate to intervene, each person stands by, personally uncomfortable and doing nothing to aid a person in need. In a crowd, is it always easier to hide and abdicate responsibility than it is to act and risk being alone.
Our fear of letting our actions isolate us is not inevitable, says Amitai Etzioni. Modern society does not dictate the absence of shared values. Blame lies, rather, with our individualistic, atomized modern society. And our response should be to define our shared values, so that our communities can once more be meaningful moral actors. Only when society knows what it wants to say can it find its voice.
Like Sharon Krause's Liberalism with Honor, The New Golden Rule is a project of reclamation, an attempt to restore the idea of morality that many today reject as reactionary. And Etzioni does a fairly good job of showing that moral values can be modern, secular, or liberal, just as much as they can be archaic, religious, or conservative. This alone is an important point that too many Americans forget.
But Etzioni does more than decouple morality from social conservatism. He proposes an ordering of society - communitarianism - that is a third way between the social conservative's enforced morality and modern liberalism's moral silence.
Etzioni begins with the powerful observation that social order and liberty are not always locked in a zero-sum equation, but can be mutually reinforcing. Yes, the social order of totalitarianism restricts liberty, just as the liberty of anarchy prevents social order, but there is also a middle ground in which increased liberty can lead to greater social order and vice versa. The end of prohibition removed a method of social control yet it increased both liberty and social order.
Society's goal, therefore, should be to make liberty and social order reinforce one another, rather than maximizing one at the expense of the other. The trick, according to Etzioni, is to align society's values with its members' beliefs. Enforcing an unpopular value requires government force that restricts liberty and alienates people. By comparison, a value that is widely accepted can be enforced chiefly through informal social norms, creating a voluntary social order that still allows individual liberties.
Naturally, such a sensible dictum finds no place in our political system, where we have divided ourselves into two poles: Social conservatives who demand that the government enforces traditional morality, and liberals and libertarians who studiously avoid imposing their values on others.
These are top-down visions of values: either government tells us what to do, or government does not. Communitarianism, on the other hand, is bottom-up. Every community determines its own values through discussion and debate between individual members. These dialogues can be formal, but they are also the informal give-and-take of everyday life, through which a community's moral voice is slowly shaped.
The moral voice does not mean stonings or red letters. Put simply, history's moral communities were stifling because people lived in small towns with no real possibility to leave. Accepting the community's values was necessary: One could not choose between moral communities, only between the community's values and total isolation. Today, when it is easy to move between professions, religions, and cities, a community's ability to impose its values is greatly curtailed.
But if modern man's multiplicity of overlapping community memberships - social and professional, religious and civic, local and international - prevents the abuse of community power, it can also limit communities to the point of near irrelevance. A person pulled in different directions by different communities will retreat into individualism. Without some intercommunity grounding, only the individual can mediate between his communities' conflicting values. And if each individual is making his own moral decisions in isolation, then the individual is still alone in the crowd.
This, explains Etzioni, is why it is not enough for there to be moral discussions within communities. There must also be "megalogues" between communities, so that society - the "community of communities" - can define its own core values. Again, communitarianism is bottom-up in nature: Society does not dictate rules to communities, but draws out the most important commonalities from among its constituent parts. The end result is more like a constitutional framework than a book of laws.
In other words, communitarianism is moral federalism. In place of the citizen, local government, and national government, there is the individual, community, and community of communities. The individual can move between communities confident of the basic social order, the community has freedom to experiment, and society defends the core values that can only be amended through the extraordinary effort of the component communities.
Etzioni argues that just as federalist democracies are more agile than dictatorships, so too are communitarian societies quicker to adapt than top-down societies. The latter tend to force the future into the patterns of the past, by censuring deviations from accepted practices and fighting new ideas or, at best, ignoring them. By comparison, communitarian societies encourage ideas to bubble up and quickly incorporate them into ongoing megalogues. Therefore, the opportunity for experimentation at the community level is greater, the feedback loop shorter, and the moral debate more open.
A more adaptable society should, in turn, better reflect its members' values and beliefs. And this increased congruence between the individual and the society will - Etzioni conjectures - decrease alienation. After all, what is alienation but self-isolating disaffection from the structure of one's social surroundings?
Decreased alienation and more rapid adaptation are ends worthy enough in themselves, but Etzioni makes the even more daring claim that communitarianism can end our addiction to incarceration and litigation, which he diagnoses as another symptom of our atomized society. When shared social values are "thin," disagreements are common and courts are the only possible arbiter. Where communities are weak, only the police can enforce compliance.
In a communitarian society, on the other hand, police and lawyers will not be our first line of response but our last. For example, rather than relying on police to prevent looting during a blackout, neighbors would use their informal power - perhaps through a neighborhood watch or public condemnation of looters - to communicate and enforce their values. The happy result would be fewer stores looted, fewer people thrown in jail, and more police to tackle the real threats.
To take another example, let's pull a frivolous lawsuit from the news. When a man sues his cable company for making him lazy and fat, we strain to imagine how he could be so lacking in common sense. But what is common sense in a society where values are not actually common? Many of us still believe in self-discipline, but we believe as individuals, not as a community that furthers the value. Something as simple as mockery by his coworkers or barmates might have been enough to stop this man from filing a lawsuit, but when that informal condemnation is not expressed, his case ends up clogging the courts.
Etzioni delivers an appealing vision of a self-policing, self-healing society. But, in the final analysis, it is too much to hope that communitarianism can actually deliver us from litigants, delinquents, alienation, and stagnation. While it might correct some distortions caused by overly individualistic societies, Etzioni overestimates the effectiveness and speed of large-scale communication and underestimates the ability of individuals and sub-communities to hold out against society's moral norms. Even if society could carry out an endless megalogue, it could never attract the attention of more than the engaged minority, and could never reach a normatively significant consensus on every issue.
There is no way, for example, to paper over the issue of abortion. 40 years of national debate on the issue have produced culture wars, not moral consensus. But without the possibility for consensus, even a communitarian society would end up with exactly what we already have - an uneasy balance enforced chiefly through the legal system. Devolving abortion to the community level is no option, either. Neither side could climb-down from their moral absolutes: pro-lifers would reject a solution that allowed people to avoid their locality's anti-abortion laws by driving to another locality, while pro-choicers would reject any compromise that denied some women the right to abortion just because of the accident of geography.
Besides, even if we could devolve the issue, there are no communities big enough to function but small enough that all members are be satisfied with the community's stance on abortion. Inevitably, some significant minority will disagree with whatever compromise the majority can craft. These people will continue to define their values individually, and will remain alienated.
The truth is, there is no such thing as total moral consensus in a community. Even on the most banal issues, there will always be subgroups who resist the broad agreements that the community has hammered out. And these subgroups often cause damage far greater than their numbers might suggest. There might be only 10 people in a neighborhood who are unmoved by their neighbor's pleas against looting during a blackout, but only takes a handful of people stealing a few thousand dollars in property to single- handedly undermine the community's informal power. Once has shown that the church meetings, neighborhood watches, and rallies can be ignored, the number of people who choose to leave their desires unchecked by morals will increase.
Etzioni has let his own personal antipathy to law enforcement color his analysis. I have no trouble believing that most New Yorkers believed that crime was wrong, graffiti ugly, and morals necessary, but it took Mayor Giuliani, Police Chief Bratton, and thousands of new police officers to bring order to New York City. As pleasant as it would be to imagine that crime was brought down by neighbors working together in community boards, PTA meetings, and local organizations, the evidence from New York City, Los Angeles, and other cities across the United States suggests otherwise.
Police action is as necessary in the international arena as it is at the local level. I have no doubt that Islam is compatible with freedom, that Arabs want democracy, and that most of the international community supports democratic values. But none of that made any difference to the man preventing democracy in Iraq, and until we removed Saddam Hussein through formal power, all the informal power in the world wasn't going to make a lick of difference.
Now, once the subgroup or individual resisting community values has been forced into submission - and I am being purposely blunt - the community may be able to keep the peace thereafter through informal actions. Democratic countries do not go to war with each other, and peaceful communities do not have trouble with looters. But before you can get to those points, you must first remove the dictators, and place the criminals in jail. Or, in other words, magninamity is a virtue after victory, but not before.
Communitarianism is therefore more of an ideal to strive for than a reality to be attained. Humans cannot end alienation, disband our police forces, or close our courts. We are, in the end, always going to be fallible individuals.