Book by Peter L Berger and Richard John Neuhaus
(FTP, 1996 (Twentieth Anniversary Edition))
Reviewed by Tim Montgomerie on 1 August 2001
To Empower People was a landmark book in 1977 - heralding the subject of civil society long before it became mainstream. In a collection of essays this book brings the subject matter up-to-date. Key points include:
· Identification of civil society as a key political battleground.
· Politicians and public commentators are attracted to grand designs and initiatives that will achieve quick results for millions of people. Revitalising civil society requires more patience and minimal political control. Can this agenda excite political leaders and maintain their interest? Can it excite the public?
· The values of the expert class that fuelled the growth of the state have been exposed as false: personal character is still important for social and personal prosperity.
· Public policy should first protect the integrity of mediating institutions such as families, churches and charities before using them - or potentially subverting them - for public policy ends.
· Government is bad at identifying good mediating institutions to support and then often corrupts those good mediating institutions that it does seek to help. Government can, however, do much to help mediating institutions through the regulatory and tax regimes.
*****
Mediating institutions are the key new battleground of practical politics....
"We think that the political party that best makes mediating structures the North Star of a new bipartisan agenda will dominate practical politics for the next fifty years."
This statement by Berger and Father Neuhaus was the exact sentiment of Clinton's top-political strategist, Dick Morris. Suggesting that the right 'owned' the economy and the left 'owned' the state, Morris declared the third sector as the key new political battleground.
....But can we get people excited about micro-level social activity?
Michael Novak:
"The mediating structures proposal will not go very far unless it engages the intellectual and moral energies of the next generation. In the past fifty years, it is fair to say, intellectual and moral excitement about social policy was largely captive to the governmentalising of human behaviour.... The careers of many intellectuals became increasingly dependent on expanding government. But, at a deeper level, there was an intellectual alienation from what might be called the everyday life of Americans.... The new thing, the exciting thing, was planning, rationality, and social redesign.... Is it possible to generate intellectual excitement about everyday lives of everyday people?"
President Bush has tried to interest voters and commentators in community and faith-based social action by regularly visiting and profiling life-changing projects. The individual stories that these projects embody can capture the public's imagination but the temptation for politicians to look for new, dramatic ways of defining government's relationship with poverty-fighting and poverty-fighters is great. Politicians and media can often lack the patience to allow the important work of grassroots groups to reach fruition and so heal broken lives and communities.
Michael Novak asks "What is the 'This' we are seeking?"
A moral and intellectual vision of a politics built around civil society is offered by one of the book's essayists and Catholic theologian, Michael Novak:
"I propose that what our hearts desire is a society in which the self-governing actions of individuals and their small local organisations grow in number and frequency. In this way, freedom will be exercised, not simply lie dormant. Citizens will become more and more active subjects, who imagine new things, who launch initiatives of their own, and who make course corrections by learning from the consequences of their own actions. We would also like to see the number of spheres in which such actions occur steadily increase."
The cult of the statist expert and 'freedom' from moral codes and institutions
Michael Joyce and William Schambra document how the state grew and crowded out local, voluntary energies. The national unity behind the second world war effort helped define the idea of a national purpose. A class of experts sprang up to direct the 'Great Society' in the same way that generals run a military campaign. Only the expert class, it was said, understood the structural forces that produced social problems. And only structural forces mattered. The absolute belief in structural causes of poverty and social ills overwhelmed civilisation's long-defended barricades against uninhibited self-expression and freed people from moral codes (such as Christianity) and institutions (such as the family). The defining relationship in a vulnerable person's life ceased to be his or her relationship with family, church or community but with government and that relationship was mediated anonymously through various agencies and payments.
Few people challenged the new orthodoxy. It became unacceptable to argue that addiction, dependency, an inability to control temper or other character weaknesses disempowered individuals as much as the absence of material resources and social order.
Increasingly, however, Joyce and Schambra contest, Americans are rejecting the cult of the expert. They recognise the immorality of individual criminal acts even when social conditions are unpromising; they recognise that education isn't just about self-discovery but about learning about what civilisation has already discovered; they have learnt that different family patterns are not all the same but that some are very destructive of person and community.
Berger and Neuhaus warn, however, that even if the expert class has been defeated intellectually they now have so much vested interest in maintaining their social position:
"The old paradigm of the welfare state continues to haunt the political discourse. It is based on the following formula for social policy: locate a social problem; define it as a government responsibility; set up a government programme designed to solve it. Intellectual habits die as slowly as other habits. People who have thought according to this formula for many years are not easily induced to look at reality in new ways. But there is more at stake here than sluggish mind-sets. Very large and powerful vested interests have grown up around every policy of the welfare state. The paradigm shift suggested by the concept of mediating structures directly threatens some of those interests."
The big question is whether moral codes - and the institutions that embody them - can be rebuilt - particularly amongst the most vulnerable sections of society?
The difference between an 'enterprise association' and a 'civil association'
David Green (after Michael Oakeshott):
"An 'enterprise association' is composed of persons united in pursuit of a common interest or objective.... In a nation of 'civil associates' people are related to one another, not because they share a concrete goal but because they acknowledge the authority of the laws and morals under which they live."
This is a vital distinction. Enterprise associations can become civil associations: a neighbourhood watch group, for example, can come together to fight crime but in coming together can become a real community of shared understanding. Civil associations, however, are of a different order and more precious to the well-being of a society and in generating a sense of belonging for their members. Civil associations like the family can undertake enterprises such as education or caring for the elderly. But whilst these enterprises can be crucial to their success, the associations are of importance beyond any one enterprise they perform and in existing they perform other valuable and often unseen purposes. It is their constancy that contrasts with most enterprise associations. Constancy is particularly important for the development of character. David Green writes:
"None of the moral virtues are natural, says Aristotle. They are engendered in us: 'Neither by nor contrary to nature; we are constituted by nature to receive them, but their full development in us is due to habit.' We acquire virtues by exercising them. People become builders by building, musicians by playing instruments, and 'just by performing just acts, temperate by performing temperate ones, brave by performing brave ones.' So, he continues, "it is a matter of no little importance what sort of habits we form from the earliest age - it makes a vast difference.' Good habits dispose us to act in just ways, hence, Aristotle says, the importance of having been trained 'from infancy to feel joy and grief at the right things: true education is precisely this."
In relating to civil associations the government, in particular, must be careful not to usurp their purposes. If schools rob families, for example, of authority on education and the media undermines parental authority the civic association might die. The Government can become like a giant magnet - attracting people away from established multi-functional relationships and to itself. Similarly if an individual church - a typical civic association - undertakes too many enterprises (whether social care or musical performances) and neglects its core identity - worship - is roots will die and the entity may not survive difficult times.
Catholics would recognise this danger because of the teachings of Pius XI on subsidiarity and Protestants have their theory of sphere sovereignty. Novak quotes Abraham Lincoln's interest in the same principle:
"The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done but cannot do at all, or cannot so well do for themselves in their separate and individual capacities. In all that people can individually do as well for themselves, government ought not to interfere."
Berger and Neuhaus offer two approaches to defining the government's relationship with mediating institutions - minimalist and maximalist approaches:
· Minimalist approaches involve stopping damage to mediating structures - the fact that much of the damage has been unintentional rather than malicious does not make it any less damaging.
· The maximalist proposition is about utilising mediating structures for public policy ends such as social inclusion, racial equality or national security.
Practical principles for helping voluntary institutions
Stuart Butler offers six principles:
1. Diversify funding decisions: Edmund Burke wrote that: "It is a general error to suppose the loudest complainers for the public to be the most anxious for its welfare." Government always tends to favour the loudest complainers. Ways need to be found to help the most effective voluntary institutions and government is not good at identifying these. No-one is better placed to do so than those closest to the needy situations and government needs to find a way of empowering these very people. The more diversity of poverty-fighting that government allows the more creative the discovery of social solutions is likely to be.
2. The postcode test. Will the medium for addressing a given situation feel the pain of failure or the fruits of success? Too many of the people running urban regeneration are too remote from the communities they seek to support to feel the consequences of bad housing or amenity planning, for example.
3. Mediating structures for the mediating structures: because the most effective mediating structures are often unqualified at least at their outset they are difficult for remote bureaucrats to identify - let alone help. But remote bureaucrats can and should trust parachurch or other intermediary groups to help perform this discovery function for them.
4. Look for results, not credentials: people who have lived through and-or alongside difficulties are much more likely to address problems than those who have learnt about the same problems through a textbook. Reformed prisoners can often best help prisoners; recovered addicts can help current addicts etc. Results have to be measured carefully, however. If government uses only a few target indicators to measure success it can devalue ministries that work holistically.
5. Reduce costly barriers to start-ups: regulation stops new voluntary endeavours from ever getting going.
6. Better for government's influence to be as limited as possible. Government money either funds the wrong kind of projects or discovers good projects and then destroys them with regulation and political correctness. The more direct and free the relationship between citizen and civic association, the better.
Douglas Besharov summarises Butler's points in this way:
"Unfortunately, governmental decisions are less likely to be correct than are the cumulative decisions of thousands, or millions, of consumers. Worse, once government funding begins, political pressures make it almost impossible to end support. Thus, in his research of the differences between private and government support for start-up companies, Allan Meltzer found that private decision makers were more successful because they were more likely to abandon an obviously unsuccessful project than was government."
Observations on the language used in 'To Empower People':
· 'Empower': although a frequently used word it remains one of the best words to describe a philosophy that respects people and their aspirations and talents. Rather than fostering dependence it builds people up and potentially liberates their creativity.
· 'Civil society': civil society helpfully qualifies 'society' which many people read as the state. It remains, however, a word that lacks popular resonance.
· 'Mediating institutions': a very academic expression but one that captures the extent to which institutions like the church, school and family transmit values.
· 'People-sized institutions': as a contrast to institutions that lack humanity because of their size, manner or values this is a helpful expression.
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