Beneficence

Building Bridges

Ahhhh, now we're getting somewhere.  Dave Pollard has discovered Ivan Illich!   De-Schooling Society has been prominent on my recommended reading list here from the beginning.    Yes, Dave, I think there are several places of common agreement from which we can together leap forward toward a more unifying understanding of social cooperation and order, but we'll have to go back a bit.  The decade between about 1965 and 1975 was a fertile period, and we would do look back to those years and pick up Cornuelle, Jonas Salk, Illich, Kenneth Boulding, and a handful of others grappling with the problems honestly and inventively but in ways that were largely buried by the increasing politicization of American intellectual life that ensued in the wake of Deconstruction and postmodernism. 

You outline part of the challenge:   "Instead of being obsessed with 'building something better' should we instead be focused on 'deconstruction tools' that liberate us from institutions and government and business and systems, and allow us to apply them to self-organized community-based networks?"   

I would suggest it is really the work of building that is required.. the deconstruction will take care of itself once people have better alternatives from which to choose.  But there is another problem with your vocabulary of deconstruction:  the politics of difference promulgated by deconstructionists and postmodernists in the academy and embraced by many progressives today throws up strange and unnecessary barriers to the creation of the strong and weak links necessary in self-organizing networks.   For an organic society to be possible, we have to believe that we can communicate with one another, and that our modes of discourse are not merely attempts at hegemony over one another. 

Phil Cubeta at GiftHub doesn't like my choice of language at times--complaining that my earnest desire to explore the possibility and problems of "beneficence" is merely a front for "stinginess--and one of his commentors supposes that the religious roots of my approach to the world are merely "warmed over calvinism" that has little appeal to "adults."   These are not trust-building criticisms.

If I'm speaking as truly as possible here from my heart and mind, but I'm condemned as one capable only of either false consciousness (a conservative "head fake" I believe Phil calls it) or a facile intellectual and spiritual immaturity, it really doesn't leave us much room to have a conversation about Illich or anyone else. 

My faith enjoins charity and humility and provides me a robust model of communication in the Three-in-One (and through the sacrament of communion)--which holds that the signifiers we call language can and do point to deeper truths about reality than what we meagerly minded humans can make up on our own.  Ultimately, it is only through my faith that I have hope that there can be trust and common ground between us, and it is in good faith that I continue to try to build bridges rather than throw up walls.

Red, Blue, and Green

Enjoy this Valentine's Day inspired reflection by Dan Klein.   Dan  puts an interesting twist on red/blue politics relevant to the exchange in the comments to my previous post.  The only thing I wonder is why  those who tend to call themselves Democrats or progressives tend  so often to the color green and allow their rhetoric to sound more like a  politics of envy (i.e., make the rich pay) than a politics of compassion.   In compassion we may come closer to finding some unity of spirit and truth, whether we experience the hot red passion of romance or the cooler blue passion of prudence.  Envy, however, is by nature divisive.   

Identifying Need

How do we best deal with the needs of the others?  Phil Cubeta at GiftHub writes:

Involuntary philanthropy or taxation is a forced exaction to make up for the limitations of our own sympathy and range of personal experience and face to face compassion. As citizens in our little communities of interest, we do not know, often, who needs what most. Government programs fill in what glamorous giving, and elite giving, and "be like me" giving so often forgets, that those most in need may be out of sight, beyond the pale of our sympathy and yet have a call upon us as fellow citizens. Nor can business do much for those without marketable skills, good health, or the ability to buy things.

The problem with this critique of our giving patterns, is in the assumption that government programs which tend to centralization and bureaucratization can have BETTER knowledge of "who needs what most."  The conservative case when stated at its best does not deny that needs exist but hones in on the critical problem of the limited knowledge of central planners.  The failure of centralized Soviet-style economic planning is patent, so why do so many continue to presume that bureaucratized government-centered social planning (aka redistribution) can succeed any better. 

Phil has identified the key problem:  how do we come to know the who, what, when, and where of true needs.  But the answer is not to pretend that government can put on some mighty spectacles that grant omnivision.   Rather the challenge is to help us all become better citizens by looking more closely at the needs of our neighbors--and that includes the communities we drive through from our bedroom communities in suburbia to our jobs in downtown highrises.   Dislocation of civic responsibility by entrusting it all to government merely allows me to put on my sunglasses, lock the doors, and turn up my satellite radio so I'm not required to look.

I fear that  the  "limitations of our own sympathy" are more encouraged by "forced exactions" than by our participation in the life-changing "little platoons" of civil society.  What we should be pursuing is both to foster more personal engagement in the nexus of associations and organizations--the "communities of interest"--that comprise society and to raise the sights, expand the interests, increase connections and communication among these communities so that the needs of some of the poorest among us become known to us personally, not written off as "not my problem anymore" each year when we pay our tax bill.