GUARDING COMMUNITY FROM COMMUNITARIANS

Guarding Liberty from Democracy (Roger Scruton, American Conservative, June 16, 2003)

As it proceeds, Zakaria’s argument turns increasingly towards the condition of America and the damage that untrammeled democratization is doing, as he sees it, to American social and political institutions....

But, Zakaria argues, the law has lost its dignity now that the democratic idea has taken possession of it. In a country where all have access to the law, litigation becomes a scramble for profit, and lawyers become speculative businessmen for whom justice has no special value. Indeed, Zakaria finds the pressure of democratization to be a downward-directed force that lowers the social, cultural, and intellectual level of every institution, from church to newspaper, and from Senate to school.

I wholeheartedly endorse Zakaria's main argument -- that widespread experience in voluntary private associations, which is usually attained around a GDP of $6,000 per capita, is essential to functioning democratic institutions and the survival of liberty. But Zakaria's cultural argument, which has received little attention, deserves comment. Zakaria appears to be arguing that a "spirit of democratization" can undermine private associations and community, and thereby destroy the training grounds for cooperation that alone maintain liberty and democracy. His primary example, the litigation business, is also a leading example of extreme selfishness and absence of community-feeling. Plaintiffs feel no obligation to be fair to defendants; punitive damages need bear no relation to actual damages.

In Orrin's review of Amitai Etzioni's autobiography, he points out a curious paradox in Etzioni's thought. Etzioni criticizes liberals for their unwillingness to verbally censure immoral behavior; but he also criticizes conservatives for their willingness to discriminate against the immoral. For instance, Etzioni thinks it would be wrong for a landlord to evict a sexually active gay AIDS carrier. (Etzioni quite unfairly, to my mind, accuses "social conservatives" of wanting to outlaw actions they don't like. In most cases, I believe, conservatives want only the right to be free in their own associations, which enables them to influence the immoral by withholding cooperation from them or even ostracizing them.) So Etzioni favors attempts at persuading the immoral to change, but opposes acting either coercively or non-coercively to induce them to change.

From an economist's point of view, Etzioni's approach seems designed for ineffectiveness. Talk doesn't change costs as seen by the decision-maker; talk is easily endured and easily avoided. On the other hand, eviction imposes real costs upon a tenant, and the threat of eviction might well change the behavior of our sexually active AIDS carrier. It is precisely this sort of effective response that liberals -- and Etzioni -- are most eager to rule out of bounds.

Few social attitudes have been under greater attack for the last forty years than moralism -- the idea that people should reward those who adhere to their moral principles and withhold rewards from those who don't. We associate moralism with the misery of Hester Prynne, and regard it as evil. But it is the only effective way, short of tyrannical coercion, to regularize human preferences and establish social norms. Without these regularities, conflict becomes routine; without shared norms, it is difficult to cooperatively resolve conflict. The destruction of moralism leads us to Hobbes's choice between coercive authority and an anarchy that makes life nasty, brutish, and short.

Curiously, the leading practitioners of moralism today are liberals. Liberals are not shy about urging smokers to put out their cigarettes, or about urging Christian fundamentalists to cease their denunciations of homosexual intercourse. Conservatives are generally too cowed or too well-mannered to argue for their own morality (though I think conservatives have become more assertive since Clinton and 9/11). Communitarians are good folk, but they seem to take some elements of the liberals' "public ideology" -- e.g. their assaults on moralism -- more seriously than even the liberals do. In doing so they may be inadvertently undermining the moral basis of community.

Posted by Paul Jaminet at June 20, 2003 7:52 AM