ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, June 2, 1996 TAG: 9606030028
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
WITH MY advancing years, the number of things I am certain about seems to shrink.
Not often these days can I muster the sort of unambivalent political confidence that Steve Munro, for example, exhibits elsewhere on this page, in an article decrying the hypocrisy of "liberal" Bedford school officials who confiscated a fourth-grader's book because it included references to condoms.
Ever more issues, it seems to me, don't break neatly along ideological lines. In contradiction to my own opinions, I often confront other points of view that I am at a loss to dismiss. And I am increasingly turned off by efforts to make sense of the world by dividing it into the good and correct "us" versus the bad and erroneous "them."
Hence I got a lot out of reading the current issue of "The American Prospect," a political journal. One article suggests the need for everyone to accommodate a bit to reach a new social consensus. A second reminds that good things, even "community," have downsides. A third notes the dangers of divisive moralizing.
In "Won't You Be My Neighbor?," former Clinton aide William Galston writes about the thesis of Harvard professor Robert Putnam - that Americans are losing their sense of civil society, their involvement in voluntary associations and activities that sustain trust and community and make life more satisfying.
This lament, Galston argues, is neither conservative nor liberal, but a mix.
To help rebuild America's "social capital," conservatives need to acknowledge that the operations of a market economy don't always support civil society. Capital, for instance, tends to be less place-specific than communities are.
Liberals, on the other hand, need to realize that the growth of government isn't always compatible with a strong civil society, either. They need to admit, too, that cultural changes of the past generation, while liberating individuals from various restraints, also have eroded social norms of mutual obligation, fidelity and sacrifice.
Galston poses the question: "Are we prepared to accept restraints on choice and entitlement to create a stronger society that can endure?"
Perhaps, but let's think about it first, argue sociologists Alejandro Portes and Patricia Landolt in their article, "The Downside of Social Capital."
Social capital, a term much in vogue nowadays, refers to benefits derived from voluntary group memberships. Such benefits often are economic, as in the case of Jewish diamond merchants in New York who save on lawyers' fees by conducting their transactions informally.
But group membership, the authors remind, isn't always an unmixed blessing. For one thing, social ties and mutual-support networks, while helping members, can encourage exclusion of outsiders. For another, membership in a community brings demands for conformity. Small towns are nice; they can also be claustrophobic.
Sure, you can get supplies on credit if the store owner is your neighbor. But, as Portes and Landolt point out, the press of obligations to family and friends and the social constraints of peer pressure and low expectations can hinder success. In some cases, enterprise and innovation require breaking free from a community.
Meantime, the broadening of women's options and opportunities in America surely has contributed to declining voluntary memberships. But who among us would want to keep women inside failed or abusive marriages or outside the paid work force so they can devote more time to civic groups and garden clubs?
These are, in short, difficult issues that don't lend themselves to facile moralizing or pitched battles. Which brings me to the third article, "The Corrosive Politics of Virtue," by a Brown University political science professor, James Marone.
Who can argue with calls for moral uplift? Marone can. He contends that "when economic and social problems are transformed into declining moral standards, the hunt is on for immoral people who threaten the public good. There are always plenty of suspects (though the contemporary list is particularly skewed toward poor people's sins)."
According to the narrative preached by a host of moralists, good people are trying to cling to their virtues but are besieged by a tide of sneering, secular, media-crazed, welfare-dependent no-goods.
This jeremiad, says Marone, achieves several things. It reassures good people that they share no part of the blame for social tribulations and economic troubles. It drafts them into a political fight. It engages an enemy. And it offers a theory for suffering. Those bad people - the shadowy, immoral "other" - explain "why life is hard or why times are confusing or why America is not what it used to be."
Marone observes, acutely I think, that today's celebration of virtue includes scarcely a word about what the privileged owe their society or the poor. In contrast with crusades such as abolitionism, women's suffrage and the civil rights movement, today's culture war doesn't challenge exclusion or injustice. Instead, it invokes a punitive politics that turns us against each other.
But, of course, my own tentativeness argues against a crusade against the crusaders. I don't think Mr. Munro should regard public-school educators as his enemy. That I hold this opinion shouldn't make Munro my enemy, either.
I'm not saying that we can't be clear about what's right and wrong, or that we don't need crusades. We do. But shouldn't they be for rather than against something; unite more than divide; and appeal to our better selves, not our fears and jealousies? (Improving the lot of children, anyone?) And shouldn't they be prepared to acknowledge costs and complexity?
It seems to me that if we ask questions in ways that don't necessarily draw battle lines - How can we build community without suppressing freedom? How can we promote virtue without losing the sense that we're all in this together? - the answers will be harder, but the search for them will prove more useful.
LENGTH: Long : 105 linesby CNB