To Empower People: From State to Civil Society

1. To Empower People: From State to Civil Society Peter L. Berger and Richard John Neuhaus

2. Central Problem • Desire for government services • Strong dislike of government and bureaucracy

3. Societal Conceptions • Megastructures • Private Life • Mediating Structures

4. Examples of Megastructures • The State • Corporations, Big Business • Educational Bureaucracy • Organized Professions

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

6. Problems with Private Life • Isolating • Cannot be relied upon – unstable

7. Examples of Mediating Structures • Neighborhood • Family • Church • Voluntary Association

8. 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

9. 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)

10. 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

11. Proposition 1 • Mediating structures are essential for a vital democracy • If mediating structures didn’t generate and maintain values, the State would. When values are determined top-down, the government is authoritarian, not democratic.

12. Proposition 2 • Public policy should protect and foster mediating structures.

13. 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

14. 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

15. Neighborhood

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

17. Bad Neighborhoods Bad neighborhoods can be: • Ignored • Dismantled and redistributed • Threatening to non-poor • Doesn’t 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

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

19. 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.

20. 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 doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll move out of poor neighborhoods. • Media, churches, schools, government, etc. must continue and intensify efforts to educate against racial bias.

21. Specific Recommendations • Return tax money in non-categorical ways to be spent as neighborhoods deem necessary • Since we can’t 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

22. Family

23. Redefined, but not in decline • High divorce rate, but also high remarriage rate • Includes foster parents, lesbian and gay parents, etc.

24. 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.

25. 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

26. Policy Goal 3 • Restore some control of education and economics that has been stripped away by modernization

27. 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