Utility & Craft

Freedom and community

Mere hours after completing the previous entry, my introduction to utility & craft, I read Richard Posner's article from last week's New Republic, attacking the idea of mandatory service (largely defined in his piece as mandatory military service, or the draft, but he hints at mandatory non-military work as well). (As an aside, I'm not sure that there's a big movement to re-instate the military draft, but that's not really pertinent here.) Posner's argument, and I'm reversing the order in this rendition, is that the push for mandatory service comes from communitarians, who are the currently (and generally, not just with respect to the draft) the biggest threat to the Millsian, centrist concept of maximum economic and personal liberty.

In Posner's telling, the nearly maximized freedom we currently enjoy is a result of the left's protection of personal liberties and the right's protection of economic liberties. What we are left with is a situation where either side is unable to make substantive in-roads in curtailing either sort of liberty, because both sides' first task is to protect what they have. The two are able to hold each other at bay, and we in the big middle are the better for it.

However, he warns that this balance is under attack from an idealistic, but wrong-headed, group of communitarians:

These political theorists think that liberalism as practiced in the United States today is causing people to lose all sense of communal responsibility. They argue that people are becoming self-preoccupied and thus indifferent to the claims of the community. As evidence they point to our high rates of crime and divorce and out-of-wedlock births; and to our declining rates of participation in communal activities such as voting; and even to the prevalence of commuting and the popularity of television-watching because these (the first especially) tend to be solitary activities.

He continues outlining the major target of communitarian complaint: the ever-encroaching reach of commodification. It's at this point that, if you read the previous post, you should start seeing where my angle is.

Posner moves quickly on to the question of mandatory service, which I'm less interested in right now, and only briefly tosses off a general critique of communitarianism, essentially saying that once communitarians have had their say about the evils of commodification (or its symptoms), they don't have a lot to contribute in the way of useful goals or tools to achieve them. Part of this critique, and I'm mostly surmising, given his introduction, is that communitarians want to legislate their point of view. I don't think that this is necessarily untrue generally. For myself, though, I want to clarify my own stance on this.

First, most of what I'll be looking at on this site, in terms of prescriptions, are for my self, and anyone who finds his or her interest coinciding. However, that's a little disingenious (and not just because I have no doubt I'll start talking politics soon): this coming fall, I'll be starting school, studying urban planning, which (assuming I graduate) will put me very close to where legislation happens. So, my other clarification, more useful generally, is that I think that there is much that various levels of government do that impacts the symptoms of commodification, as Posner describes it. We are here already, and my interest is in shifting, subtly as well as in large ways, the way we spend money, so that instead of discouraging communities, they are encouraged. I do think that this can be done with little further curtailing of liberty, and with the very real goal of encouraging freedom alongside community.

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