|
An Introduction to the Good
Community -
Committee Members |
|
|
An Introduction to the Good
Community -
Committee Members |
|
I would like to take as the text for my talk on the moral crisis in American public life this evening a passage from Pope John Paul II's sermon in Baltimore on the 8th of this month:
America has always wanted to be a land of the free. Today the challenge facing America is to find freedom's fulfillment in the truth: the truth that is intrinsic to human life created in God's image and likeness. . .
One hundred thirty years ago, President Lincoln asked whether a nation "conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal could long endure. President Lincoln's question is no less a question for the present generation of Americans. Democracy cannot be sustained without a shared commitment to certain moral truths about the human person and human community.
The basic question before a democratic society is, "How ought we to live together?" In seeking an answer to this question, can society exclude moral truth and moral reasoning? Can the biblical wisdom which played such a formative part in the very founding of your country be excluded from that debate? Would not doing so mean that America's founding documents no longer have any meaning, but are only the formal dressing of changing opinion? . . . Surely it is important for America that the moral truths which made freedom possible should be passed on to each new generation. Every generation of Americans needs to know that freedom--freedom--consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought.
That startling idea, that freedom consists not in doing what we like but in having the right to do what we ought, takes us right back to the very beginning of the American project. John Winthrop, first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, said something very similar in the seventeenth century. Winthrop distinguished between "natural liberty," that is the liberty to do what you list, we would say to do what you want, and true liberty, what he called "moral freedom in reference to the covenant between God and man"--which is a liberty "to do that only which is good, just and honest." "This liberty," he said, "you are to stand for with the hazard of your lives." That the Pope repeats John Winthrop is not surprising, for they are both repeating the Bible.
Let us consider how Lincoln understood that true freedom is the freedom only to do that which is good, Just and honest. The Lincoln- Douglas debates, which took place during the Illinois senatorial campaign of 1858, were a defining moment in American history. The issue was whether slavery should be extended to the territories in the West. Douglas took the line of popular sovereignty--if they want slavery, let them have slavery. In other words freedom is freedom to do what you want, in this case what the white majority wanted. But Lincoln said slavery is wrong and should not be extended to the territories no matter what the majority wants. In other words freedom is the right only to do that which is good, just and honest. Today, where in America is the leader like Winthrop or Lincoln or FDR who would help us find what is morally right and not just put on, in the Pope's words, "the formal dressing of changing opinion"?
Far more common today are leaders like Buddy Roemer who is the front-running candidate in the primary campaign for the Louisiana governorship, an election that will take place this Saturday. An Associated Press story earlier this month makes my point:
Four years ago, Roemer was nudged out of the runoff by [David Duke, the onetime Ku Klux Klan leader and neo-Nazi who ran on a platform of drug testing for welfare recipients, an end to affirmative action and a get-tough stand on inmates.
Although Roemer was a moderate on social programs while in office, he has turned hard to the right and is now pushing for a return to chain gangs in Louisiana and backing much of Duke's '91 platform.
"This is unbelievable," said Duke, who is sitting out this election, waiting to run next year [for the senate]. "Four years ago, Roemer called me a racist for wanting drug testing for welfare recipients. Four years ago, he defended affirmative action. Now, he is against it."
Roemer's response: He has traveled the state listening to the people, "and this is what they want."
For Buddy Roemer, truth is whatever the people want. Similar changes have been noted in the views of Governor Wilson of my state, California, and of Senator Dole. Nor do the Republicans have a monopoly on such behavior. President Clinton all too often Jumps on the bandwagon, even if he sometimes wants to put on the brake to slow it down a bit.
What are the fundamental issues that face us today as slavery faced the nation as a burning issue in the 1850s? Even though slavery has long been abolished, the issues of what it means to live in a society that believes all men are created equal, of how we treat each other, particularly the poorest and most vulnerable, and of what rewards will go to those at the very top of society, are still very much alive. Even though slavery is gone, our society is still divided by race. And the issue of division by class is more stark than ever before in our history. Americans are uncomfortable talking about class. Isn't ours basically a classless society? Far from it. I will argue that we cannot possibly understand the moral crisis in our public life if we do not look closely at what is happening to our class structure.
The pressures of the global market economy are impinging on all societies in the world. I take the chief consequence of these pressures to be the growing disparity between winners and losers in the global marketplace. The result is not only income polarization, with the rich growing richer and the poor poorer, but a shrinking middle class increasingly anxious about its future.
Let me suggest what these global pressures are creating in terms of tendencies that are worldwide, not limited to, though very obvious in, the U.S. First is the emergence of a deracinated global elite composed of what Robert Reich calls "symbolic analysts, "(Robert B. Reich, The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st Century Capitalism [New York: Knopf, 1991]) that is the people who know how to use the new technologies and information systems that are transforming the global economy. Such people are located not in communities but in networks that may link them, flexibly and transiently, to others all over the world. Educated in the highly competitive atmosphere of excellent universities and graduate schools, such persons have learned to travel light with regard to family, church, locality, even nation. It is here, though not exclusively here, hat we clearly see the process of individualization that I and my co-authors studied in Habits of the Heart, an individualization that convinces people that freedom is the freedom to do anything they want.
A great danger emanating from this powerful elite is its loss of civic consciousness, of a sense of obligation to the rest of society, which leads to a secession from society into guarded, gated residential enclaves and ultra-modern offices, research centers and universities. A sense of a social covenant, of the idea that we are all members of the same body, is singularly weak in this new elite. One analyst recently called this a "duty-free" elite.
What is even more disturbing about this knowledge/power elite is not only its secession from the rest of society, but its predatory attitude toward the rest of society, its willingness to pursue its own interests without regard to anyone else. Lester Thurow (in Head to Head: The Coming Economic Battle among Japan, Europe, and America [New York: Warner, 1992], pp. 266-267) has spoken of the difference between an establishment and an oligarchy. "Japan has an establishment, while Latin America has an oligarchy." The essential difference is that an establishment works for the good of the whole society whereas an oligarchy looks out for its own immediate interests. One of the key differences has to do with taxation: an oligarchy taxes itself least; an establishment taxes itself most. In American history we have had establishments--most notably the founding generation and the period after World War II--but we have also had oligarchies. It is not hard to see what we have today. Again to quote Lester Thurow in an article in the New York Times last month "never before have a majority of American workers suffered real wage reductions while the per capita domestic product was advancing." The real per capita gross domestic product went up 29 percent between 1973 and 1993. That was a lower rate of increase than in the previous 20 years, but it was still a significant increase. Yet that increase in per capita GDP was not shared equally. 80 percent of workers either lost ground or barely held their own. "Among men, the top 20 percent of the labor force has been winning all of the country's wage increases. Nor is this just a feature of a high-tech economy. Other countries comparable to ours, such as Japan and Germany, shared their increase in GDP across the board. And if we look at the top 20 percent we will see inordinate differences. It is the top five percent that has gained the most and particularly the top one percent.
In tandem with the growth of this knowledge/power elite there has been the growth of an impoverished underclass, the people from whom the elite are most anxious to secede. This underclass is to be found in the great urban sprawls that no longer deserve the dignity of being called cities, all over the world from Los Angeles to Calcutta. The global underclass, as in a distorting mirror, reflects individualizing tendencies evident in the new elite. Here too family, locality and religious belonging are weakened, not because of successful individual competition, as in the case of the elite, but because of a Hobbesian struggle for existence which is always only one step away from catastrophe.
If we wish to place the United States in this global picture there are some respects in which we are better off and some in which we are worse off. With respect to economic polarization, at least in the developed world, the U.S. leads the way. In 1960 American CEOs made 40 times the average factory worker's income; in 1990 it was 80 times the average factory worker's income. In 1959 the top 4 percent of our population earned $31 billion in wages and salaries, the same as the bottom 35 percent. In 1989 the top four percent earned $452 billion in wages and salaries, the same as the bottom 51 percent. The most subsidized American is not the welfare mother but the Western rancher or the defense contractor.
Let us consider briefly how we came to our present pass. The twenty-five years after the end of World War II were the most prosperous in our history and during that period we built something of a welfare state, though quite modest by European standards. Since 1970, however, we have been in what Robert Heilbroner calls a "silent depression." In order to maintain the average American lifestyle of consumption more members of the family have had to work more hours Just to stay even. During the 1980s economic polarization became increasingly evident. The number of billionaires grew exponentially while the number of those below the poverty line increased. This situation of stagnation and polarization has produced the two extremes of which I have already spoken. On the one hand is what Robert Reich, the Secretary of Labor, calls the overclass. On the other is what is called the underclass. These two phenomena are interrelated in ways that few Americans are presently prepared to recognize.
Membership in the overclass is composed of the top 20 per cent income bracket, though full membership probably belongs only to the top 1 per cent. George Bush's astonishment at the machines the supermarket checkers use to read the little bars on the packages gives us a rare insight into the life of the higher echelons of the overclass. These are people who have not suffered during the last twenty years of relative economic slow growth. Indeed, especially since the 1980s, they have grown steadily richer and the very rich have grown very, very rich. The political influence of the overclass is out of all proportion to its numbers. Almost all of its members vote whereas more than half of our less affluent citizens fail to vote altogether. Even more important, they supply by far the most money for our increasingly and enormously expensive political campaigns. They have, therefore, a much greater likelihood that their wishes will influence the political process than any other group.
But what does the overclass wish? They wish above all the freedom to do whatever they want. They wish to pay lower taxes and have less government interference with the ways in which they increase their income. In their more extreme moments they seem to be ready to do away with government altogether. There are, however, two areas where they do not mind the government spending money. One is on a military establishment which, until recently, could be justified as defending them and those like them throughout the world from Communism. Since many of the overclass derive a great deal of income from the military-industrial complex they are still loathe to cut government expenditures in this area, even though the objective necessity for them has radically decreased. The other area where the overclass is willing to spend money is on the war on crime, or the war on drugs, or what we could call generally domestic security.
Enter the underclass, our greatest domestic fear. Forty years ago people living in urban ghettoes could go to sleep with their doors unlocked. They were poor and they were segregated but relatively few of them were unemployed and relatively few of them had out-of-wedlock babies. They were not called the underclass, a term only then being invented by the Swedish social analyst Gunnar Myrdal to apply to those who suffered most from poverty and segregation. He carefully hyphenated the term and put it in quotes and it was known only to a few policy specialists. By the late 1970s it had become both a term and a problem widely recognized by the general public and even recognized by ghetto-dwellers themselves. Although originally a neutral term used In social scientific analysis, it became a pejorative term, a way to blame the poor for their poverty. I want to be clear that I am using the term in its analytical sense and that I am very far from blaming the poor for their present situation in America.
As a term underclass had the great advantage of being colorblind in a period when we have become sensitive about racial language. Yet for most Americans the underclass clearly applied to blacks, indeed to those blacks who still inhabited the depopulated ghettoes which now resembled nothing so much as the bombed-out remnants of the thriving communities they had once been. It is worth remembering that most poor people in America are white and that poverty breeds drugs, violence and unstable families without regard to race.
The underclass is everything the overclass wishes to get away from, and its members have succeeded remarkably well in doing so. They have seceded either into suburban communities or into heavily guarded security buildings in choice city locations. They have removed their children from the public schools, unless they live in sufficiently affluent suburbs. They do not use public hospitals or clinics or even libraries or parks in areas they consider unsafe. And, naturally, they are not interested in paying for facilities they no longer use. The overclass has benefited enormously from the public subsidization of suburban growth, through FHA loans, through mortgage deductions on income tax, which overwhelmingly benefit the top 20 percent income bracket, through expenditures on highway systems to bring them quickly into and out of their inner city jobs. Yet expenditure for public housing has always been minuscule in America, seldom more than one percent of new housing, as opposed to 30 or 40 percent in many Western European countries.
How could all this have happened and why did we let it happen? Part of the answer is the deindustrialization of our cities. Hundreds of thousands of blue collar Jobs and many thousands even of white collar Jobs have left our major cities in the last 30 years. Those African Americans with enough education to enter the professional or sub-professional skilled workforce have been able to leave the old ghetto--not for integrated housing since housing segregation remains unchanged in most areas over the last three decades--but for new black neighborhoods or suburbs with most of the amenities of white neighborhoods of comparable income: thus the depopulation of the old ghettoes which are now half or a third the population they were in their prime. Those left behind were then subjected to the systematic withdrawal of institutional support, public and private. The middle class African Americans took with them when they left the churches and clubs they had always initiated. Cities under increasing fiscal pressure closed schools, libraries and clinics, and even police stations, in ghetto areas. The most vulnerable left behind had to fend for themselves in a Hobbesian world where Just making it through the month with enough to eat is often a major problem. Far from breeding dependency, life in the ghetto today requires the most urgent kind of self-reliance.
Elmer Johnson has vividly described the consequences of these changes :
To philosophers of old, the ultimate purpose of the city was to build and maintain a nurturing community for the intellectual, moral, and social development of its citizenry. In the United States today, some of these goals of life in the metropolis seem more remote than ever before in the nation's history. Consider the litany of institutional and behavioral problems that afflict the central cities of many of our major metropolitan areas: their increasing financial burden in caring for the nation's immigrants and poor and their eroding tax base in the wake of the new "edge" cities; the hypersegregation of poor minorities; failed schools; Joblessness; inadequate housing; poor health and high infant mortality rates among inner-city children; children killing children; children having children; gang warfare; and drug addiction. At the same time, much of the suburban dream has proved illusive. Suburbanites find it increasingly difficult to insulate themselves from the congestion, pollution, and social pathologies of the central city. (Elmer Johnson, "Dispersed and Stratified Metropolis," Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 48, 7, April, 1995, pp. 5-18.)
This is not a story the overclass wants to hear, and there have been Journalists and even social scientists who have obliged them with another story. The underclass is not, according to this alternative story, the result of the systematic withdrawal of economic and political support from the most deprived and segregated portion of our society. The underclass have only themselves to blame. It is their resistance to all efforts to help them that has caused the problem. Or, another widely believed elaboration on the underclass story, the underclass was actually created the efforts to help them, above all by the Great Society welfare programs, creating self-perpetuating, indeed permanent, welfare dependency. The fact that welfare payments, including AFDC, have systematically declined in real dollars over the last twenty years, and that they have dropped in half during the 1980s alone, is ignored by those who tell this story, as is the fact that over 70 percent of those on welfare stay on it for less than two years, and over 90 percent for less than eight years.
But the creation of the underclass story, a story which involves blaming the victims rather than recognizing a catastrophic economic and political failure of American society, serves not only to soothe the conscience of the overclass--it even allows them to wax indignant at the cost of welfare in a time of expanding deficits. But even more important, the underclass story serves to frighten and to warn all those who are not that contented, who have seen what they have erode or who have had to battle Just to stay even. The underclass gives people something to define themselves against, it tells them what they are not, it tells them what it would be most fearful to be. And it gives them people to blame. In the shrinking and increasingly anxious middle class, deprived of much of its traditional Job security by the pressure of global competitiveness, it is tempting to look down at those worse off as the source of our national problems. In America we believe that success and failure are the result of individual effort. Who can blame those at the top, unless, of course, they are politicians?
Robert Reich elaborated this three-fold topology in our current socioeconomic life when, in a talk he gave in Dallas a year ago in September, he spoke of our three classes as an "overclass, living in the safety of elite suburbs, an "underclass quarantined in surroundings that are unspeakably bleak, and often violent," and a new "anxious class" trapped in "the frenzy of effort it takes to preserve their standing. More and more families are trying to patch together two and sometimes more paychecks to meet the widening income, health care and pension gaps that are spurring the "disintegration" of the middle class as it has historically been defined.
John Gray has recently described the "ruling American culture of liberal individualism" that characterizes our affluent, educated elite as one "in which individual choice and self-realization are the only undisputed values," rendering "communal attachments" and "civic engagement as optional extras on a fixed menu of individual choice and market exchange. The consequences of this culture are mixed. As Gray puts it, "It has generated extraordinary technological and economic vitality against a background of vast social dislocation, urban desolation, and middle-class impoverishment." (John Gray, "Does Democracy Have a Future?" New York Times Book Review, January 22, 1995, p. 25.) What Gray is saying in effect is that the consequences of a wrong belief in freedom, that freedom is freedom to do whatever you want rather than freedom to do the right and the good, is radically undermining our social coherence.
If our society can be characterized as increasingly divided along the lines of socioeconomic status, what resources can we find in our civic culture for recovering a sense of common social cohesion and direction? Unfortunately, here too there is not much good news.
Robert Putnam has chosen a stunning image as the title of a recent article: Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital. (See Robert D. Putnam, "Bowling Alone, Revisited," The Responsive Community, 5, 2, Spring 1995, pp. 18-33.) He reports that between 1980 and 1993 the total number of bowlers in America increased by 10 percent, while league bowling decreased by 40 percent. Nor, he points out, is this a trivial example: nearly 80 million Americans went bowling at least once in 1993, nearly a third more than voted in the 1994 congressional elections and roughly the same as claim to attend church regularly. But Putnam uses bowling only as a symbol for the decline of American associational life, the vigor of which has been seen as the heart of our civic culture ever since Tocqueville visited the United States in the 1830s.
Not only are there dramatic declines in the typically women's associations such as the PTA and the League of Women voters, a decline that gained momentum already in the 1970s and has been often explained as the result of the massive entry of women into the workforce, but in the 1980s in typically male associations, such as Lions, Elks, Masons, and Shriners, as well. Union membership has dropped by half since its peak in the middle 1950s. We all know of the continuing decline of the number of eligible voters who actually go to the polls, but Putnam reminds us that the number of Americans who answer yes when asked whether they have attended a public meeting on town or school affairs in the last year has fallen by more than a third since 1973.
Almost the only groups that are growing are support groups, such as twelve-step groups, that Robert Wuthnow has recently studied. These groups make minimal demands on their members and are oriented primarily to the needs of individuals: indeed Wuthnow has characterized them as involving individuals who "focus on themselves in the presence of others, what we might call being alone together. Putnam argues that paper membership groups, such as the AARP which has grown to gargantuan proportions, have little or no civic consequences because although their members may have common interests, they do not have any meaningful interaction one with another. Putnam also worries that internet, the electronic town meeting, and other much ballyhooed new technological devices, are probably civically vacuous because they do not sustain civic engagement. Talk radio, for instance, mobilizes private opinion, not public opinion, and trades on anxiety, anger, and distrust, all of which are deadly to civic culture.
The only good news, and here, too, we may have to look below the surface, is that religious membership and church attendance have remained fairly constant after the decline from unnatural highs in the 1950s, although membership in church-related groups had declined by about one-sixth since the 1960s. My caveat about religious membership and church attendance has to do with the emergence of a consumer Christianity that may be primarily self-oriented and unable to contribute to any larger engagement. Nonetheless we must take what we can get. America's religious life is still our deepest moral resource.
What goes together with the decline of associational involvement is the decline of public trust. We will not be surprised to hear that the proportion of Americans who reply that they trust the government in Washington only some of the time or almost never has risen steadily from 30 percent in 1966 to 75 percent in 1992. But are we prepared to hear that the proportion of Americans who say that most people can be trusted fell by more than a third between 1960, when 58 percent chose that alternative, and 1993, when only 37 percent did?
These American findings become compelling against the background of Putnam's much-discussed study of the functioning of regional governments in Italy, Making Democracy Work. For twenty years Putnam has been assembling impressive data which show that it is the strength of civic culture in a given region which allows "strong, effective, responsive, representative institutions." These conditions are the key resources for economic and political strength alike. Putnam was able to show that the one powerfully predictive factor present within regions, largely in the north, whose governments operated effectively and missing within those, largely in the south, with moribund regional institutions was the level of civic culture, rooted in the historic traditions of those regions where it was strong.
In the strongly civic regions, socially-embedded and informally sanctioned norms of "generalized reciprocity" encouraged a willingness to cooperate, while keeping distrust and hostility at relatively low levels. By contrast, the less civic regions suffered from bad governmental performance and poorer economic conditions. There the reigning social expectations were the opposite of those in civic regions: a fatalistic cynicism encouraged individuals to avoid risk and cooperative strategies in favor of seeking the protection of the more powerful, carefully doling out reciprocal services on the basis of quite self-interested, short-term strategic considerations. In a kind of parody of Hobbes'' version of the social contract, in these paranoiac and xenophobic regions latent social anarchy was controlled only by resort to threats and application of repression from above.
Unfortunately, such conditions do not hold true only in Sicily and Calabria. They hold true in much of the United States. Paranoid and xenophobic reactions in California have led to the passage of the three strikes and the anti-immigrant initiatives. Generalized reciprocity, in which one's inclination is to give what is needed assuming only that one can count on others should the need arise, is replaced by narrow contractualism in which one gives only when one expects to get, and one exacts what one can. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, or, as we have improved the old formula, three teeth and you're out. Generalized reciprocity in public provision and private giving was the correlate of a strong civic culture. As that civic culture erodes we can no longer count on generalized reciprocity. Must we slide inevitably into what, after all, is by far the commonest pattern of human life in complex societies: namely a combination of cynicism, corruption and authoritarianism?
Before we get completely depressed let us remember that we have a great history of civic engagement, which has allowed us to deal effectively with our common problems, and our decline is quite recent: therefore, it is still possible for us to reverse these recent trends. Furthermore, although things look bad in this country, if we look comparatively our civic belongingness and even our public trust, though down from our past, are still higher than in all but a few other countries. And most striking of all, comparatively and even looking fairly good compared to our recent past, is our church membership and attendance tone would like to know if the 40 percent who attend church weekly compose most of the 37 percent who think most people can be trusted, but I have no data on that). The danger is that if present trends continue, our current comparative advantage will soon evaporate, but we should not underestimate our present strength as a resource for renewal.
Nonetheless, I think we might well ask how in 25 years we went from looking like northern Italy to looking more like southern Italy today? In 1970 after 25 years of economic growth in which almost everyone shared, America reached the greatest degree of income equality in its modern history and we had a vigorous civic culture. In 1990 after 20 years in which the profits of economic growth went entirely to the top 20 percent of the population we have reached the high point of income inequality in our modern history and our civic life is in shambles. We have seen what Michael Lind calls the revolution of the rich and what Herbert Gans calls the war against the poor. A polarized society in which most of the population is treading water, the bottom is sinking and the top is rising is a society more like southern than northern Italy. It is a society in which an oligarchy has replaced an establishment. Reversing that trend is our greatest need and it certainly will not be easy.
I think there are two conditions that will make it possible for us to begin to deal effectively with our many problems. One condition is that we do something on a national and global scale to counter the deeply divisive consequences of the reign of the global market. As long as we are divided into overclass, underclass and anxious class most of us live under the threat of homelessness and despair. The other condition is that we repair our civic culture and strengthen our local, national and global identities. To imagine that we can rebuild community from below while the hurricane of the global economy blows all around us is naive indeed. But the actions of national and supra-national agencies to control the global market will not automatically repair our civic culture. Only initiative from below can do that.
So let me outline a set of strategies for meeting our present needs. As I have already indicated, articulating a demand that our government take the initiative in controlling the global economy is the first priority. Many of us supported NAFTA and GATT with our fingers crossed because we saw them as providing the framework for international controls. We must insist that those and other international agreements actually begin to provide some protection from such things as currency crises, job losses and price wars, so that our population as a whole can participate in our continuing prosperity.
With respect to our social problems I believe the voluntary sector, including the churches, must reach out to all Americans in an effort to distinguish the real issues from those that express anxiety, paranoia and xenophobia. However unpopular today, we must focus on the real problems of the underclass, those who are essentially excluded from our society economically and politically. We must combat the present shocking war on the poor being waged by the over-class and at least passively applauded by the anxious class.
Senator Daniel Moynihan, in a speech on the Senate floor on September 16 of this year, opposing a bill to repeal Title IV A of the Social Security Act of 1935, castigated the Republicans for proposing such a bill and President Clinton for not opposing it. "It will be," he said, "the first time in the history of the nation that we have repealed a section of the Social Security Act." The section being repealed is Aid to the Families of Dependent children (AFDC). Moynihan cites George Will, who was shocked that conservatives would take so drastic an action with no idea of the consequences: these are the percentages of children on AFDC at some point during 1993 in five cities: Detroit, 67 percent; Philadelphia, 57 percent; Chicago, 46 percent; New York, 39 percent; and Los Angeles, 39 percent. Moynihan went on to say:
there are . . . not enough social workers, not enough nuns, not enough Salvation Army workers to care for children who would be purged from the welfare rolls were Congress to decree. . . a two-year limit for welfare eligibility.
Moynihan argued that it will shame this congress to abandon millions of the poorest and most vulnerable children. I think we can say it will shame the nation. Yet, as Moynihan concluded, there was almost no voice being raised in defense of these voiceless children:
You can stand where I stand and look straight out at the Supreme court--not a person in between that view. . . One group was in Washington yesterday. . . This was a group of Catholic bishops and members of Catholic Charities. They were here. Nobody else. None of the great marchers, the great chanters, the nonnegotiable demanders.
Of course the attack on AFDC is only one part of the current war against the poor, but Senator Moynihan is certainly right to focus on it for it shows it in the harshest light. Why do our leaders not heed those great injunctions from the Hebrew Scriptures to care for the poor and the oppressed? Do they not remember Jesus's words in Matthew 25 when those on the left-hand side ask why they are consigned to the lower realm and Jesus says "I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink. I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me." And when they ask when did we do these things, Jesus answers "as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me."
But we cannot think of the problems of the underclass without simultaneously thinking of the problems of the overclass and the anxious class, both material and spiritual. I hope you will understand me if I say that the real problem in our society at all levels is the need for conversion, which, in biblical religion is always simultaneously spiritual and ethical, a turning to God and a turning away from sin. Above all today the sin of thinking that freedom is the freedom to do whatever we want and not freedom to do the right and the good.
Who will speak to the spiritual problems of the overclass? The mainline churches may be in decline, but they are still in the majority in the corporate boardrooms, the highest levels of government, and even among the cultural elite, for if they are religious at all it is with these communions that they are associated. The thirty year critical assault on the dominance of white Euroamerican males in our society has not greatly dented that dominance, but it has been used to justify a decline in civic responsibility and a selfish withdrawal into monetary aggrandizement. In an open society we can work to make room for more inclusive leadership without derogating the contributions of older elite. I believe we need at least a portion of the overclass if we are to deal with our enormous problems. If the over overcome its own anxieties it can realize that it is far better for one's self respect to be a member of an establishment than of an oligarchy. We can show them, I believe, that civic engagement, a concern for the common good, a belief that we are all members of the same body, will not only contribute to the good of the larger society but will contribute to the salvation of their souls as well. Only some larger engagement can overcome the devastating cultural and psychological narcissism of our current overclass. We must hope for the conversion of its members.
We have a similar and even more challenging task with respect to the anxious class, for its problems are not only cultural and psychological but sharply material. White male income has slowly drifted down from an all-time high in 1992 dollars of $34,231 in 1973 to $31,012 in 1992. Even worse than the income decline, in considerable degree offset by increasing female participation in the workplace, though that creates its own problems, is the rise in uncertainty. We are becoming a society of what has been called "advanced insecurity." Downsizing, part-timing, loss of benefits have become a way of life. Anxiety and anger generated by acute economic anxiety are easily displaced onto welfare queens and illegal immigrants. I believe they also contribute to the decline of voting and associational membership and even to the rise of divorce While these economic anxieties are real and must ultimately be dealt with structurally, we can still make the argument that the decline of engagement in the anxious class only increases cynicism and despair, that a renewed engagement with the larger society, first through the church and then through civic organizations, is the most likely way to meet the very real problems that face society's largest group. And on top of its material problems the anxious class shares more than a little the psychological and cultural problems of the overclass, for which spiritual renewal is the best antidote. Here the evangelical churches and the Catholic Church have the greatest responsibility and opportunity.
Meeting the problems of the underclass and attempting to reincorporate its members into the larger society is the most challenging task of all. I think the basic problem has been caused by economic developments which have simply rendered the 20 or 30 million members of the underclass superfluous (we should not forget that these same forces have rendered much of the anxious class only marginally relevant). If I am right, then only a fundamental change in public policy will begin to change the situation, and in the present atmosphere such a change is hardly to be expected.
But even indispensable changes in public policy cannot alone meet the situation. Where social trust is limited and morale is blasted one of the most urgent needs is a recovery of self-respect and a sense of agency. Under present circumstances dealing with this situation is very delicate. An attitude that government or government social workers know best, a condescending attitude of liberal compassion, have often only increased the problems of the underclass.
We need to turn to the principle of subsidiarity, derived from Catholic social teaching, namely the idea that groups closest to a problem should deal with it, receiving support from higher level groups where necessary, but wherever possible such groups should not be replaced by higher level groups. This principle implies respect for the groups closest to individuals where they live, but it does not absolutize those groups or exempt them from the moral standards that apply to groups at any level. A process of social reconstruction of the underclass would require massive public resources, but brought to the situation by third sector agencies, local so far as possible. The delicacy here is that I can begin to sound like Pat Buchanan, who also uses the term subsidiarity. The difference is that the strategy I propose requires an increase in federal funding, not a decrease. Today subsidiarity language, in contradiction to its basic meaning, is used to justify cuts in government spending. I want to make it clear that is not at all what I am saying. All the churches that have a presence among the poorest and most deprived Americans have a special responsibility to work for these changes, but they cannot carry the burden without public provision. Ultimately what the underclass needs is not so different from what the overclass or the anxious class need. Its social capital is more depleted and its morale more shattered, but like everyone else what its members most need is conversion.
At the beginning of this century American Protestants looked forward to our Christian nation leading an effort to convert the world. As the century closes we see that it is we Americans who, at every level, are lost in sin. If we can hear the words of John Paul II or John Winthrop, or the Bible, in which so many Americans profess to believe, then we can turn away from the course we have been following, the pursuit, as Winthrop put it, of "our pleasures and our profits." That we are to do instead, as Winthrop, paraphrasing the Apostle Paul, put it, is to "entertain each other in brotherly Affection, wee must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others necessities. . . wee must delight in each other, make others Condicions our owne, rejoyce together, mourne together, labour and suffer together, allwayes haveing before our eyes. . . our Community as members of the same Body."
In the Hebrew Scriptures God spoke to the children of Israel through the prophet Ezekiel saying, "I will take out of your flesh the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh." (Ez. 36:26) Can we pray that God do the same for us in America today? Politicians usually end their talks by saying God bless America. I want to end tonight saying God help America.
Copyright © 1998 Missouri State University
URL: http://cicero.missouristate.edu/why/articles/bellah.html
Disclaimer | Comments
