Search results for social capital

I’ve been reading sociologist Amitai Etzioni’s thoughts on what he calls commutarianism.  He describes the Clinton presidency on the liberal blog, The Huffington Post, as defying liberal/conservative labels by being commutarian:

[Clinton] certainly did reveal some liberal proclivities, but his welfare reform was clearly in a conservative mode, and he capped most social programs in order to balance the budget. (He ended up generating a surplus which the Bush administration inherited and squandered). At other times, when looking for common ground, promoting volunteerism (AmeriCorps), and trying to defuse tensions between the races and between the religious right and the liberal secularists, Clinton was much more a communitarian than a liberal.

Communitarianism, a social philosophy centered around the concept of community, is hardly a household word and is very unlikely to become one. However, one should consider it — because Barack Obama is easily the most communitarian presidential candidate of all those we have seen for decades.

He later defines commutarianism as being focused on the importance of community, the common good, and service, contrasting it with divisive strategies such as identity politics.  

How does this fit in with the American ideal of individualism?  Hasn’t society become increasingly fragmented to the point where there isn’t a shared society or culture?  Could you just say that Clinton and Obama are simply being pragmatic in their approach?  Isn’t McCain a commutarian, as well?

Politics aside for a moment, I think there’s something to this idea of commutarianism, given sociological research on organizations, well entrenched in the workings of capitalism.  In task-oriented settings, you can have “communities of practice” that go beyond functional areas (e.g., marketing, finance, accounting, etc.) and even organizational boundaries (firms collaborating on innovations or dividing up specialized tasks).  It begs the question of what are the true drivers of collaboration in politics that go beyond immediate self-interest?  Is it trust?  Framing activities as uniting common causes?  All of the above?

I think it’s hard to be communitarian in certain contexts and one only has to look at office politics to see evidence of this.  Nevertheless, I think that as a philosophy that can be embedded in a set of values, commutarianism can foster a shift in priorities.  These shifts could be good or bad, so I don’t feel that commutarianism is a panacea.  I do feel that these shifts require a critical mass of shared values and the meanings behind them.  I don’t think a lot of this is new, but I think what is new is getting the general populace thinking and behaving in these terms and replicating this over time.

Mad scholarly props to University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt for articulating in much clearer language the blind spot I observe among Democrats that may very well lose them yet another presidential election.

Hey lays out the traditional “diagnosis” for the “disease” of conservatism on the left:

strict parenting and a variety of personal insecurities work together to turn people against liberalism, diversity, and progress. But now that we can map the brains, genes, and unconscious attitudes of conservatives, we have refined our diagnosis: conservatism is a partially heritable personality trait that predisposes some people to be cognitively inflexible, fond of hierarchy, and inordinately afraid of uncertainty, change, and death. People vote Republican because Republicans offer “moral clarity”—a simple vision of good and evil that activates deep seated fears in much of the electorate. Democrats, in contrast, appeal to reason with their long-winded explorations of policy options for a complex world.

His view is that this analysisis a seduction of its own. It makes people on the left feel morally superior.

Our diagnosis tells us that we have nothing to learn from other ideologies, and it blinds us to what I think is one of the main reasons that so many Americans voted Republican over the last 30 years: they honestly prefer the Republican vision of a moral order to the one offered by Democrats.

Haidt goes on say that all value systems have two elements in common: a Milian harm principle, and laws against doing harm to others. For Haidt, both liberals and conservatives shares But he goes on to identify three virtues identified with a conservative moral system:

ingroup/loyalty (involving mechanisms that evolved during the long human history of tribalism), authority/respect (involving ancient primate mechanisms for managing social rank, tempered by the obligation of superiors to protect and provide for subordinates), and purity/sanctity (a relatively new part of the moral mind, related to the evolution of disgust, that makes us see carnality as degrading and renunciation as noble).

Haidt’s most provocative argument is that the conservative system might be the more morally sophisticated:

We think of the moral mind as being like an audio equalizer, with five slider switches for different parts of the moral spectrum. Democrats generally use a much smaller part of the spectrum than do Republicans. The resulting music may sound beautiful to other Democrats, but it sounds thin and incomplete to many of the swing voters that left the party in the 1980s.

As much as I love this quote (the equalizer metaphor makes me think of Spinal Tap — these go to Eleven). My sense is that this is way overblown. Democrats have their own notions of loyalty, respect and sanctity that do not necessarily track with Republicans. Progressives have been very active in a number of movements towards localism (“buy local” campaigns, anti big-box ordinances, and, dare I say it, community organizing). These are all manifestations of an emphasis on the value of community. In fact a good argument that Obama needs to make more is that mocking community organizing efforts is essentially anti-community efforts for local self-determination and pro the broad impersonal forces of global capitalism.

This is why in his prescription, I think Haidt is a bit hard on the Democrats:

Democrats could close much of the gap if they simply learned to see society not just as a collection of individuals—each with a panoply of rights–but as an entity in itself, an entity that needs some tending and caring.

This is a straw man view of Democratic ideology. The genius of Obama’s 2004 Democratic National Convention keynote speech was to articulate a Democratic morality that s rooted in shared responsibility. Obama has tried to stake out a more communitarian position by tying social welfare policy to a sense of obligation to attend to the “least of these.” He’s used economic populism, claiming that he won’t give tax brakes to “companies who ship jobs overseas.” His repeated pleas for parents to “read a book” and to “turn off the television” are direct attempts to tap into this broader “in-group” based moral system.

But in a broader sense, the Republican convention was a home run because it tapped into this broader moral system much more effectively than the Democratic convention did. This is why McCain is now doing better than Obama among independents. To get them back, the Democrats truly need to connect to what it is about progressive ideology that is pro-American. They have the raw materials to challenge the Republicans (remember, it is President Bush that asked Americans to “go shopping” after 9-11: how pure or sanctimonious is that?) but perhaps not the requisite political chops.