Put Community Back In Government

Wouldn’t it be wonderful, I asked my public policy students, if each city had a public grief agency, complete with experts who (for instance) could visit high schools where there had been a suicide …

A few tentative nods.

… or people who could help families with the paperwork that death usually occasions …

More scattered approval.

… or who could bring casseroles to grieving families?

And suddenly the whole class reacts as if I’ve gone nuts. A government agency bringing casseroles? Absurd. That’s something best left to friends and neighbors. Maybe really busy friends and neighbors might purchase a casserole at the local deli, but no government deliveries, thank you.

The lecture that day was on community: what it is, what it takes to build and sustain it, what things work to dissolve it.

It was, of course, Charles Murray again. I’ve tried to avoid him since that awful and purposeless “Bell Curve” book. His earlier efforts, including “Losing Ground,” at least had the virtue of being intellectually provocative. But after “Bell Curve” …

And yet I keep coming back to “In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government,” not because I agree with everything he says in that book but because it does for me what I hope to do for my Duke University students: It makes me think.

We were thinking that day about the impact of public policy on community. It is clear, we decided, that for community to thrive, it is necessary that individuals have a valued and vital role: watching out for one another’s children, feeding and clothing the destitute, combining in civic undertakings, building the social capital of interpersonal connections. Moreover, such activities are inherently satisfying.

But if we long for community, know what it takes to build it and know that building it provides unmatched personal satisfaction, why are we worrying that we seem to have less and less of it? Why aren’t we looking for - insisting upon - more community-building activities? What keeps us on the sidelines?

My students mostly don’t care for Murray, but they thought he had a point: “When the government takes away a core function, it depletes not only the source of vitality pertaining to that function, but also the vitality of a much larger family of responses. By hiring professional social workers to care for those most in need, it cuts off nourishment to secondary and tertiary behaviors that have nothing to do with formal social work.”

The class agreed that many of the community-building things that people used to do - from barn-raising to mutual protection - are now done by private and public agencies, often to the detriment of community.

That, they said, is why they want no official government casserole service for bereaved families. We mustn’t let government go too far in its effort to (Murray’s phrase) “take the trouble out of things.”

But then, when I asked them what other possible public services would, in their minds, be too much, they had difficulty coming up with examples. Government-provided weddings, perhaps, baby-sitting services.

More interesting: They couldn’t think of a single government service now being provided that, in their view, goes too far.

And suddenly I could understand more clearly the ambivalence so many Americans have toward their government at all levels. We hate the intrusions, the shoving aside of amateurs and helpful neighbors in favor of more efficient government agents. We desperately miss the old ways and the old days when we looked after one another and, as a result, not only knew who among us could be counted on but also worked to be included among the reliables.

We excoriate big government. But we also like the trouble taken out of things. Not just the big things, like police work and firefighting, but the smaller things, like school crossing guards.

It is, my students taught me, a one-way flow. Once the services migrate from citizen to government, that’s where they tend to stay. And pretty soon we aren’t able even to imagine things being much different than they are.

xxxx

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = William Raspberry Washington Post