Could the US use a 'Big Society'?

All modern societies operate on two different levels of social organization - the informal level (non-official institutions such as families, communities, churches, private organizations etc.) and the formal level (official institutions, i.e. state and federal governments. My Law and Society professor pointed out that while the informal level of organization accounts for the majority of our social control (personally I dislike this term; it sounds very Orwellian but really means the sum of customs, norms, traditions, and laws that enable a society to live in harmony) Americans almost always appeal to formal social institutions to solve our societies multifarious problems. If there is a natural disaster people immediately call on FEMA, despite the massive amount of aid that private charities and churches provide (such as in the aftermath of Katrina). Conservative Christians, who often despise big government, nevertheless appeal to that big government to further their agendas. Looking to the government to solve social problems is what has caused government to grow so large in the first place. Beginning in the early 20th century, though this effort was most pronounced in the post-war era of the 50s, 60s, and 70s, leading public figures believed that through government societies could be engineered using "scientific" knowledge from the social sciences. Social science research continues to be a huge influence in law-making and judicial decisions. While social science is central to understanding how society functions and how we can make good and effective laws based on moral principles, it has often been accompanied with utilitarianism and a heavy-handed elitism. Efforts to engineer society are almost always aimed not at achieving moral improvement but at creating the kind of society that those in power want.

It is frightening to consider how little influence our elected representatives actually have in the day-to-day operation of our government. Bills that are passed by legislatures are long, complex, and purposely vague so that their actual interpretation and implementation is left to a network of administrators and bureaucrats (who aren't elected) and politicians can deflect blame for programs gone wrong. Many conservatives (or people who style themselves as conservatives) think the solution is a "return" to rugged individualism. This belief among "conservatives" is precisely why I am opposed to movements such as the Tea Party. Individualism has not decreased in America, it has grown rampant. The paradox of big government is that it produces individualism. Since people automatically appeal to giant, impersonal government bureaucracies for help community ties are severely weakened. People are selfish by nature and when big government erodes the bonds of informal social control with increased formal social control the individual is severed from all meaningful social bonds and becomes individualistic and narcissistic. This has been especially toxic since throughout the past 200 years human autonomy has been ideal. Thinkers such as Locke and Thoreau taught people to think of social bonds, not as natural or necessary elements of human existence, but as contracts that people willing enter into and can willing leave.

The death of community that the heavy reliance on formal social institutions has brought about is paralleled by the death of civic responsibility. How often to we seriously care about our communities? How often do we help the poor in our neighborhood, engage in church activities outside of worship, organize community events, or even get to know our neighbor? Americans focus primarily on their own self interest or their political interests. Often, though unwittingly, the lifestyle of average American contributes to the problems that they want to see solved. This lack of civic responsibility has created a culture that is lonely, insecure, self-centered, consumerist, shallow, and trivial.

If these trends are to be reversed (and they can be reversed. Americans need to stop thinking about the inexorable movement of history. We as individuals help create history) conservatives need to stop talking about individualism and start talking about community. This is precisely what conservatives across the pond have been doing with their Big Society initiative. Republicans need, like the Tories have already done, to stop talking about giving individuals back their "rights" and start talking about empowering communities to take over the responsibilities of a bloated federal government. Increased individualism only increases a vicious cycle; individualism, having had their informal community bonds cut by formal institutions, will increasingly look to those formal institutions. I will close with an anecdote which will serve to reinforce my point. 100 years ago, despite the fact that drugs were produced and legal, the US had no narcotics problem. Today, despite a boom in formal, government opposition to drugs through widespread education programs aimed at young people, commercials, and the DEA, the US continues to have an enormous narcotics problem. It is a problem that raises hell for our Latin American neighbors to the south. The difference between now and 100 years ago is that informal social control, the most effective kind of social control, is being replaced by generally ineffective formal social control. The reason I don't smoke pot isn't because it's illegal or a program in high school told me not it. It is because my family and my church has taught me not to.

An Enlightening Quote by CS Lewis

My professor for my class on the rise of Christianity gave us this lengthy quote. I finally decided to find the passage it is from and copy it down. It is taken from his introduction to St. Athanasius' treatise On the Incarnation of the Word God. In addition to being true about old books, I think it is also true about the study of history.

"Whenever you find a little study circle of Christian laity you can be almost certain that they are studying not St. Luke or St. Paul or St. Augustine or Thomas Aquinas or Hooker or Butler, but M. Berdyaev or M. Maritain, or M. Niebuhr or Miss Sayers or even myself.

Now this seems to me topsy-turvey. Naturally, since I am myself a writer, I do not wish to the ordinary reader to read no modern books. But if he must read only the new or the old, I would advise him to read the old. And I would give him this advice precisely because he is an amateur and therefore much less protected than the expert against the dangers of an exclusive contemporary diet. A new book is still on its trial and the amateur is not in a position to judge it. It has to be tested against the great body of Christian thought down the ages, and all its hidden implications (often unsuspected by the author himself) have to be brought to light…

...Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook - even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were al the time secretly united - united with each other and against earlier and later ages - by a great mass of common assumptions. We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century - the blindness about which posterity will ask, "But how could they have thought that?" - lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H.G. Wells and Karl Barth. None of us escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only be reading old books. Not, of course, because there is any magic in the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we have. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing.; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them."