To Empower People: From State to Civil Society

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To Empower People From State to Civil Society

• Peter L. Berger and Richard John Neuhaus

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Central Problem

• Desire for government services
• Strong dislike of government and bureaucracy

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Societal Conceptions

• Megastructures
• Private Life
• Mediating Structures

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Examples of Megastructures

• The State
• Corporations, Big Business
• Educational Bureaucracy
• Organized Professions

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Problems with the Megastructures

• Alienating to individuals.
• Not helpful in providing meaning, fulfillment, or
  identity to the individual.
• Viewed as unreal or malignant

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Problems with Private Life

• Isolating
• Cannot be relied upon unstable

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Examples of Mediating Structures

• Neighborhood
• Family
• Church
• Voluntary Association

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Value of Mediating Structures

• Bridge gap between private life and
  megastructures
• Give stability to private life
• Provide meaning and value to megastructures If
  meaning is lost, democracy suffers.
• Provide moral basis to political order, so order
  is secured through consent not coercion

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Liberalism

• Tends to be blind to the functions of mediating
  structures
• Greater concern for the individual and a just
  public order
• Defends private rights from the mediating
  structures (hostile to the idea that religion has
  public rights and public functions)

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Conservatism

• Held mediating structures in high regard before
  the 18th century
• Now has a tendency to revoke modernity
• Sensitive to the alienations of big government,
  but blind to the same effects of big business

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Proposition 1

• Mediating structures are essential for a vital
  democracy
• If mediating structures didnt generate and
  maintain values, the State would. When values are
  determined top-down, the government is
  authoritarian, not democratic.

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Proposition 2

• Public policy should protect and foster mediating
  structures.

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Proposition 3

• Public policy should utilize mediating structures
  for the realization of social purposes.
• Risk of government cooption of mediating
  structures
• Goal is to expand government services without
  increasing government oppressiveness

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Empowerment

• Feeling of powerlessness caused by faceless
  controlling institutions with different values
  than the individual
• Easier for the affluent to resist the
  encroachment of the megastructures
• Policy based on the mediating structures aims to
  empower poor people to do the things the more
  affluent can already do

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Neighborhood
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Good Neighborhoods

• Safe
• Sanitary
• Chosen freely
• Have varying degrees of social cohesion.

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Bad Neighborhoods

• Bad neighborhoods can be
• Ignored
• Dismantled and redistributed
• Threatening to non-poor
• Doesnt make poor less poor, just moves them
  around
• May make the poor feel worse, since their poverty
  will show in starker contrast by new proximity to
  non-poor
• Transformed

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Policy Goals

• Sustain diversity of neighborhoods.
• Counter destruction of neighborhoods caused by
  court judgments that treat all communities alike

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Challenges

• Neighborhoods empowered to impose their values on
  individuals can be coercive and cruel
• Government intervention necessary to protect
  elementary human rights (race).
• Conflict between individual and communal rights
  due to the unjust extension of policies deriving
  from racial dilemma.

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Racism as community characteristic

• Focus public policy on neighborhood-defined
  neighborhood development to bring up poor
  communities.
• As they achieve middle class goals, racism will
  be reduced or separated from other discrimination
  and will be more easily prosecuted.
• Achievement of individuals doesnt necessarily
  mean theyll move out of poor neighborhoods.
• Media, churches, schools, government, etc. must
  continue and intensify efforts to educate against
  racial bias.

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Specific Recommendations

• Return tax money in non-categorical ways to be
  spent as neighborhoods deem necessary
• Since we cant force private financial
  institutions to make money available to poor
  neighborhoods,
• We need a new version of the Federal Housing
  Administration
• Property tax regulations should be changed to
  encourage home improvement.
• Strengthen neighborhoods by giving them more
  responsibility for law enforcement.
• Funding for part-time employment of parents to
  police schools and public places.
• Open up unused airwaves to regional, ethnic, and
  elective groups to fight media homogenization
• Taxation policies and postal regulations should
  support neighborhood newspapers

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Family
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Redefined, but not in decline

• High divorce rate, but also high remarriage rate
• Includes foster parents, lesbian and gay parents,
  etc.

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Policy Goal 1

• Recognize family as an institution
• Society has a vested interest in how values are
  transmitted to the next generation.
• Weak families produce uprooted individuals, which
  make for ideal recruits for authoritarian
  movements.

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Policy Goal 2

• Oppose policies that expose the child directly to
  state authority without the mediation of the
  family
• Experts have relevant and helpful expertise
• Experts do not love or have long-term open ended
  commitment to individual children

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Policy Goal 3

• Restore some control of education and economics
  that has been stripped away by modernization

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Education

• State has a coercive monopoly on education.
• Low-income parents have the least say about what
  happens to their kids in school.
• Personnel of the education establishment are
  upper middle class.
• They teach their upper middle class values.
• Disparage the ways of life of the poor
• Teach contempt for the parents and self-contempt.
• Best way to break up the monopoly is to allow
  choice