257.
Liberal communitarianism
There
is a usual opposition between liberal individualism and communitarianism. Here
I argue for a position in between: liberal communitarianism.
Colin
Bird[i] argued that the apparent
unity of liberal individualism is a myth. In fact there are two fundamentally
different brands: the ‘aggregative service view’ and the ‘associative
expressive view’. The service view is utilitarian, looking only at outcomes in
terms of utility, regardless of goals or intentions, and the expressivist view
is Kantian, deontological, i.e. looks at intentions and goals.
The
service view assumes a variety of autonomous agents with a multiplicity of
values. It is the task of the state only to provide conditions for the
realization of those values, not to interfere with them in any way. For
example: the state supplies schooling, and it is up to people to make use of
it. Mainstream economists adhere to this view, though mostly implicitly. Here
freedom is purely negative: freedom from outside interference.
The
expressivist view assumes an ideal individual that should seek to realize
corresponding ideal, universal values. It is a task of the state to provide
conditions for realizing those values, even if the individual is not aware of
them. If people do not utilize schooling because they are not aware of their
potential, they are to be made aware. Here freedom is positive: providing
access to self-realization.
Both
views run into problems. The problem with the service view is that different
values or utilities cannot easily be aggregated and often conflict. To
safeguard religion one may have to limit freedom of expression. And vice versa.
The problem with the expressivist view is this: who determines what the ideal
individual is? During the French revolution, the Jacobins and Robespierre
enforced their view of the free citizen, with ‘virtuous’ terror.
The
communitarian view, in contrast with both liberal views, takes as its point of
departure the social constitution of the human being, as argued at length in
this blog. Like the liberal service view it adopts a view of diverse individuality,
rather than the universal ideal of the expressivist liberal view. Like the
expressivist liberal view it recognizes that individual values may have to be
shaped to some extent by education or other forms of guidance. However that is
a social, not a political activity.
The
problem with communitarianism is that it can fall into the view that there is
some collective spirit, rooted in history and expressed in myth, a shared
cultural identity inculcated into individuals, which takes over their autonomy,
yielding totalitarianism. We see that in forms of nationalism. Colin Bird, who
pleads for a form of expressive individualism, also asks, quite rightly, ‘which
community’? The family, municipality, nation, race, or what? If it does not
fall into totalitarianism, communitarianism falls into relativism. He also
notes that social constitution is not always a good thing. One may be misformed
into perversity. Hence, according to Bird, the need to adopt and defend the
notion of an ideal individual.
One
can avoid those problems, up to a point, with the constructivist view of
individual identity argued for in this blog. As Colin Bird noted it is an error
to think that non-liberal or anti-liberal thought must be non-individualistic.
There is an individualistic form of communitarianism, as follows. The individual
constructs its mental and spiritual identity on the basis of its unique genetic
endowment, from action in specific social, economic and cultural environments,
in individual life history. The answer to the question ‘Which community’ is:
all of them are part of the environment that provides the ‘input’ of the
construction of the self. The self is not autonomous in its social formation
but it builds some degree of autonomy, or at least individuality, in its
construction of the self. The role of the state includes concern with the means
and conditions for such development.
Concerning
the underlying ethics, it is neither utilitarian, as in the liberal service
view, nor deontological, universalist, as in the liberal expressivist view. In
this blog I have proposed virtue ethics as an alternative to both.
I
grant that there remains a problem of indoctrination of individuals by the
institutional environment they are in, to the point that even victims of it
take it for proper and justified, as shown by Michel Foucault, with his work on
prisons, clinics, and mental institutions, and power exerted in knowledge
systems. In this blog I have discussed the notion of ‘system tragedy’. It is a
serious issue how one may escape from such binds. The liberal expressivist will
claim that for it one needs some universal ideal of human individuality. I
would rather reserve it for the striving of the individual, who may tap from a
variety of sources to seek its own ideal. In that, being a communitarian, I am
more liberal than the liberal expressivist.
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