May 08, 2009 12:34 AM UTC
Blending Liberty and Leviathan: The Role of "Community" (short versions now posted in comments)
13 Comments- by: Steve Harvey
This is the first, revised, installment of what I’ll call my virtual chautauqua series, in which I’ll introduce what I hope are novel and thought-provoking ideas concerning political and social innovations that might serve our collective welfare, or topics that focus the mind on something beyond “business-as-usual,” and then leave it to others to discuss them (or not) as they see fit, participating myself to clarify or respond as seems necessary.
In this offering, I discuss (in what I hope is a more useful form than my first attempt, which I removed temporarily due to CU Law School policy), first and foremost, the issue of balancing and blending the dual concerns of individualism and society, and secondarily, as a means to that end, the possibility of employing the apparatus of the state to reconstruct, or catalyze the reemergence of enclaves of interpersonal interdependence, such as have existed throughout most of human history in almost all times and places but have grown particularly attentuated in modern, highly individualistic America. The purpose of this endeavor would be to simultaneously facilitate and articulate the dual demands of liberty and social coherence in service to human welfare, recognizing the value of both respect for individual autonomy and recognition of human interdependence.
The topic of discussion is not just the particular legal construct I am proposing, but also the broader topic of how to balance liberty and interdependence, and how to understand the relationship between the two. People often, incorrectly, represent them as diametrically opposed, with “more” government necessarily meaning “less” liberty, and vice versa. Of course, the logical conclusion of that conceptualization is that no government means perfect liberty, though it requires little reflection to realize that without government to protect the liberties of each from the predation of others, there is in fact little or no liberty at all.
The preservation and perpetuation of liberty depends, to a suprisingly large extent, on the ways in which government (or, more locally, “community”) facilitates our mutual cooperation in order to increase our range of choices and degree of efficacy. Government can fail to maximize our liberty both by doing too little and by doing too much, or, more precisely, by implementing a more poorly rather than more wisely designed set of mechanisms for accomplishing the task.
The purpose of the project I am suggesting involves a step further in the direction of achieving this optimal articulation of government facilitation and individual discretion, via the recreation, in a modern, refined form, of a social institution that has largely evaporated and dissipated in American cultural, economic, and political life: the Community.
Like the innovation of free, compulsory, universal public education over a century and a half ago, the legal artifact I am proposing holds the promise of re-establishing, with focused intentionality, a traditonal institution that served many vital functions, and did so in an intimate and human way. Like the institution of public education when first introduced in America by Horace Mann, it is likely to meet strong resistance, and to be widely and vigorously criticized as an overly-intrusive arm of the state into our individual and familial privacy and autonomy. And like public education, if successfully implemented (a big “if,” and a long-term project), it holds the promise of being an enormous investment that pays off enormously with far-ranging benefits, eventually to be taken for granted and utterly depended upon as an indispensible social institution.
The analogy to public education isn’t just an analogy: This new legal entity, “Community,” is in many ways an extension of the public education model. One of the great weaknesses of our public education system, just in terms of providing education, is that it misconceptualizes education as something that occurs within a precise location during precise hours. In reality, our schools cannot be as successful as we would like them to be until we recognize that their mission extends to working with parents and the community to facilitate their mutual success in a shared endeavor.
The “Community” in this statute takes that notion, and extends its responsibilities to the full range of those that communities have always served, aided by and in partnership with both the state and individual families.
I view this reincarnation of community as a legal construct, different from incorporated towns and other corporate entities in both purpose and composition. People could select their Community (capitalized to distinguish the legal entity from the attenuated traditional entity), either geographically (by default or choice), or culturally (people living with some degree of geographical dispersion, but probably not too much, who share a sub-culture or a set of values and beliefs). The purpose of the cultural option is not to reify or glorify separate sub-cultures, nor to preserve them as entities unto themselves, but rather to seek the optimal balance of cohesion and individuation, permitting individuals to choose their Community rather than have it thrust upon them, if they so desire.
The functions and purposes of the Community are manifold, its potential benefits to human welfare increasingly and surprisingly broad and deep as its implications are explored, its potential downsides significant and worthy of cautious attention (after all, local communities, historically, can be the most tyrannical and spirit-crushing of all social entities), but a catalyst for a discussion that, wherever it leads, is likely to lead to some good and immediately implementable ideas.
As I’ve designed it, the Community is an artifice which can increase the efficiency and efficacy of the delivery of social services; improve the flow of information between individuals and families on the one hand, and the state on the other; empower, to a greater degree, those who have been most marginalized (including children, in terms of their ability to participate in weighty decisions that often determine their fate), protect diverse approaches and subcultures from excessive state intrusion while diminishing the insularity of families within which far more abuse and neglect occur than most of us are willing to acknowledge or confront.
Of course, community has not entirely disappeared: It still exists, to some extent, both in its traditional form, and in new incarnations. One new incarnation is the “virtual community,” such as that which exists on this site. There are also, similarly, special-interest communities, who share a cause or a common interest, such as a game or topic. And there is a concept called “invisible colleges,” in which people of shared orientations or frameworks communicate and work together in a decentralized, geographically dispersed way. Such communities serve some small subset of the functions that physical communities do, but fail in general to serve its most vital functions of mutual support and assistance across the spectrum of human needs.
It is easy to anticipate some of the concerns, that of the overreaching state being central among them. Some might compare this model to the local “soviets” that were at the core of the horribly failed and human-suffering-inducing Russian Soviet experiment initiated almost a century ago. In fact, there are some parallels, but there are also some very crucial differences.
As I see it, there are, in one sense, two types of error, existing, as is common, at the poles of a continuum, to which humans who incompletely examine and apply historical experience and social institutional analysis commonly submit: The error of repeating historical mistakes, and the error of creating new ones by learning exaggerated and distorted lessons from the failures of the past.
Designing well-functioning, human-welfare producing social institutions requires a more subtle approach, and more willingness to look at issues anew, fully informed but without prejudice. Whatever the merits or defects of the very raw and minimally developed idea being presented here, examining and evaluating it in detail and on its own merits, rather than on principle and through a process of categorical reduction, is certainly the most useful and productive approach.
In this re-published diary, I will post, as comments immediately following this introductory text, the hypothetical statute itself for reference (four pages single spaced), which introduces Community in the context of child welfare policy, and the first several paragraphs of my discussion of the statute. These will hopefully clarify the nature of the proposition, for those who are interested. At core, though, beneath the specific proposition itself, is a more fundamental challenge: How to balance liberty and interdependence, serving the human needs both of individual autonomy and expression, on the one hand, and of state facilitation and protection both of that autonomy and of other needs not served by it, on the other.
I would be delighted to see parallel discussions of both the broader topic and the specific application. I believe the broader topic is the one we often dance around on this site, digging ideological trenches on one side of the debate or the other, but failing to discuss it in any meaningful or mutually informative way. Let’s use this forum, beyond just sharing information about, and vying over the ideological framing of the political narrative in our state, as a means to move past assumptions and in the direction of insights.
It is incumbent on people of all ideologies, whether libertarians, progressives, or social conservatives, to give careful thought to the questions of what balance and blend of Liberty and Leviathan is optimal and why, since all or most ideologies start with an assumed answer to those questions. And maybe, instead of talking past each other, lost in respective false certainties, repeating well-worn platitudes, we can aspire, for a change to explore these questions in earnest, suspending the pretense, each in his own way, of a unique wisdom that those who agree with us understand and those who disagree are ignorant of. If there is one thing intelligent people should be able to agree on, it is that it really is a subtle and complex world after all.
If, for instance, the well-worn, but too shallow answer is “the least government is the best government, because government is inefficient,” explain how markets (or other non-governmental social institutions) will better address true public goods issues (ie, externalities), or why they need not be addressed. If, on the other hand, the well-worn but too shallow answer is “government is needed to internalize externalities and attend to issues of social justice,” explain how government better addresses these needs than markets, and why they need to be addressed. And try to listen and address the reasoning of those on the other side. We can continue to talk past each other, or we can start to talk with each other. Most reasonable people, I suspect, will move from the poles of making a fetish out of either absolute liberty or complete reliance on the social welfare state, and toward a more moderate position.
For those who are interested in reading or perusing the entire discussion of the hypothetical statute (21 pages double-spaced), email me at steven.harvey@colorado.edu and I would be glad to send it to you.
The Child Welfare through Family and Community Facilitation Act (the Act):
(1): The Family and Community Facilitation and Child Welfare Administration (the Administration) shall be established to execute this Act and all of its provisions.
(a): The Administration shall be staffed by Community Facilitators (CFs) and Family Support Case Workers (FSCWs), trained and licensed in the skills necessary to implement the provisions of this Act.
(2): Current Parents, Expectant Parents, Foster Parents, Prospective Adoptive Parents, Legal Guardians, or primary care-givers (collectively, “parent,” whether referring to one parent acting alone or more than one parent making decisions together), along with their children, shall either formally belong to a Community, as defined in subsection (a), and participate in Community Parenting Support Meetings (CPSMs), or shall attend a Parental State-Disengagement Determination (PSDD) conducted by an agent of the Administration according to section 2(c) below. (Non-parents are encouraged, but not required, except as specified below, to belong to a Community and attend CPSMs). If a parent declines to attend either CPSMs or a PSDD, then an FSCW will automatically be assigned to that parent.
(a): The Administration shall create regulations to ensure that parents, both expectant and actual, follow procedures incumbent on parents in accord with this Act as soon after being informed of impending or actual parenthood, or beginning adoption proceedings, as is reasonably practicable.
(b): A Community, for the purposes of this statute, is either geographically or culturally defined.
(i): A parent shall by default belong to his/her geographical community, unless that parent selects a cultural community to belong to.
(ii): The upper and lower numerical limits of such Communities, the boundaries of Geographical Communities, the degree of geographic dispersion permissible for Cultural Communities, and the criteria of what constitutes a Cultural Community, shall be determined by the Administration according to guidelines designed to ensure that each Community is so constituted as to be capable of satisfying the functions described in the provisions of this Act, and of advancing the goals defined as the purpose of this Act (following the provisions described in subsection (iii) to protect parents utilizing culturally variant practices from ethnocentric presumptions of abuse or neglect).
(iii): Culturally variant practices that might be technical violations of the law, or presumptively harmful from a prevalent American cultural perspective, shall constitute grounds neither for refusing definition to a Cultural Community, nor for invoking the provisions in sections 4 and 5 of this statute, if they do not unambiguously create objective harm or deprivation to the child, if all or nearly all members of the Cultural Community would find the practice harmless and inoffensive, and if the Cultural Community has an independent existence and is not an artifact of convenience designed primarily to insulate its members from legal constraints to which they would otherwise be subject.
(iv): Communities shall be assigned the task of ensuring, with the organizational resources allocated and with the oversight of the CF, that the basic needs of parents and children in the Community are attended to by
(I): assisting parents in accessing the relevant family support programs established by complementary legislation, which provide children and families with adequate material support and vital services,
(II): facilitating mutual cooperation among Community members to provide one another with the moral, emotional, and informational support conducive to the long-term welfare of all of the children and parents in the Community, and
(III): providing children with age-appropriate means for expressing their views and preferences regarding their own upbringing and disposition, and having those views and preferences known and taken into consideration in any proceedings that involve them.
(c): CPSMs shall be held at a frequency to be determined by the Administration for each Community in consultation with the members of that Community, not to exceed one time per week nor be less than one time per month. By similar means, the Administration shall establish a mandatory attendance rate for parents in each Community, not to be less than 30% nor exceed 70% of all meetings, applicable to each parent individually, except in particular cases in accordance with subsection (ii) below.
(i): Each Community shall arrange on-premises child-care during the meetings by having three or more parents, on a rotating basis, undertake child care responsibilities during each meeting.
(ii): The Administration shall assist individual parents and Communities to make special arrangements in cases of particular scheduling problems, exercising a substantial commitment to accommodating parents with such verified scheduling problems, so long as the conflict involves an obligation that substantially contributes to the family’s material welfare.
(d): The Administration shall conduct PSDDs at the time and location most convenient for the parent whenever possible, and with substantial deference to the parent’s presumed right to direct the upbringing of the parent’s child(ren) as the parent sees fit. The Administration shall determine at the PSDD whether there is any compelling reason not to permit the parent to voluntarily disengage from the Family and Community Support apparatus established by this Act.
(i): The Administration shall establish a fully delineated set of criteria by which to make such determinations, and will do so under guidelines designed to prevent the influence of prejudices on the part of its agents, such as those regarding race, ethnicity, culture, class, gender, or sexual orientation.
(ii): If such a compelling reason is not found to exist, the parent will be allowed to disengage from the state involvement delineated in this Act, except for the provisions of sections 2(d), 3(a)(5), 5, and 6.
(iii): If such a compelling reason is found to exist, the parent will be assigned an FSCW.
(3): Family Support Case Workers (FSCWs) are entrusted with the responsibilities of monitoring families for evidence of Child Abuse or Neglect (as defined in 20-8-140 of the SHF Revised Statutes); working with parents (always deferential to parents’ preferences short of child abuse or neglect) and children to improve coping skills and devise more effective strategies to deal with the challenges of child-rearing; identifying particular family problems, challenges, and needs that are having or can reasonably be expected to have a significant impact on the child’s welfare; and recommending to the Administration interventions and assistance that are conducive to the continued provision of a safe and healthy home environment for the child.
(a): An FSCW shall be assigned to a parent when
(i): a parent requests it,
(ii): a Community Facilitator (CF) recommends it,
(iii): the Administration deems it necessary through a Parental State-Disengagement Determination,
(iv): a parent declines to participate in CPSMs or, alternatively, to attend a PSDD,
(v): the Administration deems it necessary as the result of an investigation into an allegation of Child Abuse or Neglect, or
(vi): to prospective adoptive parents upon initiation of adoption proceedings.
(b): An FSCW shall be authorized to recommend targeted financial and material assistance to parents, according to criteria to be developed by the Administration.
(i): An FSCW shall be authorized to predicate the receipt of such assistance on the parent’s participation in CPSMs, if the parent is not already participating in them.
(ii): The FSCW shall assist the parent, with substantial deference to parental autonomy, in self-monitoring parental choices, considering how well or poorly those choices serve the child’s welfare, and contemplating alternatives that might serve the child’s welfare better. The FSCW will be trained to be a parental resource rather than an imposing authority in this process.
(4): If either the FSCW or CF determine that a child is not in imminent physical danger but that the child’s long-term welfare is being substantially compromised (according to the definition of Abuse or Neglect defined in 20-8-140 of the SHF Revised Statutes) by the child’s current home environment, (a): the parent can voluntarily submit to a process of Intensive Community Intervention (ICI), or
(b): the Administration shall investigate and determine if, by a preponderance of the evidence, the Administration’s determination accords with that of the FSCW or CF.
(i): If the Administration finds by a preponderance of the evidence that the child’s long-term welfare is being substantially compromised, the Administration shall initiate ICI.
(ii): If the Administration does not find that the child’s long-term welfare is being substantially compromised, then all adult parties will be brought together for a determination of how to proceed, which might include reassigning the parent to a different community, reassigning a new FSCW to the parent, or, if the parent prefers, maintaining the current FSCW and Community (and thus CF).
(c): Intensive Community Intervention (ICI) requires the voluntary involvement of Community and extended family members, as well as of teachers and others involved in the child’s life, working with the parent to rectify and remedy the problems that have been identified as substantially compromising the child’s long-term welfare. ICI strategies always include the determination of a designated period after which the case will be reviewed, and can include any combination of the following:
(i): parental behavior modification efforts, closely monitored by Community and extended family members, utilizing whatever institutional assistance is required (such as drug rehabilitation programs),
(ii): temporary in-home residence of Community or extended family member to assist the parent,
(iii): temporary placement of the child with a Community or extended family member,
(iv): limited or monitored parental contact with the child, and/or
(v): professional assistance in concert with the Community and extended family assistance.
(5): If as the result of an investigation into allegations of child abuse or neglect, or if an FSCW or CF determines that a child is in imminent physical danger; or if, after the designated period for an ICI, both the FSCW and CF determine that the ICI has been unsuccessful; or if an ICI was impossible due to a lack of willing extended family or Community members, the Administration will initiate a child custody hearing, adhering to the following guidelines:
(a): The Administration must find, by clear and convincing evidence, that the child’s long-term welfare is being substantially compromised, or that the child is in imminent physical danger, before parental rights can be wholly or partially terminated.
(b): The value of affective bonds and remaining in the child’s familiar home shall be given full weight as important, but not entirely decisive, factors in consideration of the child’s custody arrangements.
(c): Parental rights shall be terminated or limited only to the extent necessary to preserve the child’s safety and to secure the child’s long-term welfare.
(i): This Act imposes no presumption concerning the number of people that may be granted parental rights regarding a particular child, nor the precise scope of such rights in any given instance.
(ii): Preference will always be given to preserving and encouraging established healthy affective bonds between adults and the child, rather than severing such bonds in pursuit of parental exclusivity.
(iii): Partial, delineated parental rights may be granted to various adults, who must devise decision making guidelines commensurate with their various parental rights, with the assistance of an FSCW.
(iv): The Administration shall generate guidelines for relinquishing the rights and responsibilities associated with partial parental rights commensurate with the extent of those rights and responsibilities, and in accord with the child’s best interest, ensuring continuity of comprehensive parental services.
(v): “Parent,” for the purposes of this statute, does not refer to anyone with limited parental rights, but only to those with primary custodial rights, to be fully defined by the Administration.
(d): Consideration of custodial alternatives shall be given concurrently with consideration of the parent’s, and others’, custodial rights.
(i): The termination or diminution of parental rights do not necessarily result in an immediate or eventual loss of physical custody: The child will always be placed in the best available home, all factors considered, even if parental rights have been revoked from, or not yet granted to, the adult in whose custody the child is placed.
(ii): Preference will be given, in order, to (1) extended family members who are also members of the same Community as the parent, (2) other Community members, and (3) other extended family members, in any change of custody of the child, whether it is a temporary arrangement, the placement of the child in a foster home, or an adoption proceeding. The Administration has the authority to supersede or alter the ranking of these preferences in accord with particular circumstances.
(iii): No racial preferences beyond those implicit in the preferences above shall be implemented.
(iv): If the child can not be placed in a home according to the above preferences, and the Administration determines, by clear and convincing evidence, that the child’s safety or welfare is too drastically compromised in his/her current home to leave him/her there, the child will be placed in foster care and adoptive parents will be sought, with the parent retaining those rights of visitation, if any, that the Administration finds contribute to rather than detract from the child’s long-term welfare.
(e): Prospective adoptive parents must be members of a Community for one year prior to adoption, and must be recommended by their FSCW and the CF of the Community, and by a majority vote of both the community to which they belong and the Community from which the child is being adopted.
(f): A mother may not put her child up for adoption until 36 hours after the birth of the child if the decision was made in writing at least two months prior to birth, or three weeks after the birth of the child if the decision was not made in writing at least two months prior to the birth of the child.
(6): Extended family members, as defined in subsection (a), have the right to maintain a relationship with the child, subject only to the limitations delineated in subsection (b).
(a): An extended family member is, for the purposes of this statute,
(i): any blood relative of any parent (as defined in section 2 of this Act) that the child has ever had, who has formed a healthy affective bond with the child, as determined by clear and convincing evidence, according to criteria to be delineated by the Administration,
(ii): any other individual who, in a relationship sanctioned by any parent (as defined in section 2 of this Act), has formed a healthy affective bond with the child, as determined by clear and convincing evidence, according to criteria to be delineated by the Administration.
(b): The legal rights of extended family members (as defined in subsection (a)) to access to the child are limited in the following ways:
(i): No parent shall ever be obligated to relinquish temporary physical custody of a child to any current non-parent, unless by a formal hearing of the Administration the non-parent’s ability to have occasional temporary physical custody of the child, as opposed to mere visitation rights with parental supervision, is held, by clear and convincing evidence, to be vital and indispensable to the child’s long-term welfare, though the parent can rebut this finding by demonstrating by a preponderance of the evidence that any occasional relinquishment of temporary custody to the petitioning non-parent would be contrary to the child’s long-term welfare. If a finding in favor of the petitioning non-parent is made, the amount of occasional temporary physical custody shall be limited to the least possible to satisfy the needs of the child’s long-term welfare. The parent has the right of appeal; the non-parent has no right of appeal.
(ii): Non-parents with rights of access to a child are required to exercise reasonable self-restraint regarding the amount of access they demand, the degree of inconvenience they impose on the parent and other family members, and any disruptions or tensions that their relationship with the child may cause to or among the parent, family, or child. The Administration shall draft explicit guidelines regarding these issues.
(iii): Non-parents with rights of access to a child, who do not belong to the parent’s Community, shall be required to attend the Community Parent Support Meetings (CPSMs) at a frequency to be determined by the Administration, taking into consideration all relevant factors, though the frequency required may not be more than once per month nor less than once per year.
(iv): The parent can file complaints regarding non-parents with rights of access to the child, which the Administration is obligated to investigate, preliminarily through the agency of the child’s FSCW and CF. If the problem cannot be resolved to the satisfaction of all parties through the agency of the FSCW, CF, and CPSMs, a hearing must be held to determine if, by a preponderance of the evidence, the non-parent has abused his/her right of access to the child according to the criteria established by the Administration. If such a finding is made, then the non-parent shall have his/her right of access to the child revoked. Neither the parent nor the non-parent has the right of appeal regarding the determination of the Administration.
(7): (20-8-140 includes conventional definitions of Abuse and Neglect, plus extreme emotional abuse).
This Act addresses the care and custody of children, including the rights and responsibilities of extended family and community members involved in a child’s life, the procedures for identifying and responding to child abuse and neglect, and the procedures for reassigning legal custody of a child. The purpose of this Act and the responsibility of the Administration is to facilitate communities and families in providing healthy and stable homes for children by means of mutual support, encouragement, involvement, oversight, and, in the last resort, reassignment of a child’s custodial arrangements, among family and community care givers. It is based on the principle that the state should be a proactive agent and vehicle of the people, to be utilized in conjunction with other social institutions in the facilitation of the welfare of its residents, rather than a reactive intervener of last resort, standing aside to permit preventable failure and subsequent suffering, and only then stepping in to pick up the pieces at greater public expense and with less efficacy.
This Act accordingly reconceptualizes the state’s role, relinquishing its theoretical commitment to initial minimal intrusion on family autonomy until a threshold is reached triggering a sudden extreme and generally inefficacious intervention (see Clare Huntington, “Mutual Dependence in Child Welfare,” 82 Notre Dame L. Rev. 2007, 1485: 1497-1505), and, in its place, constructing a state-family-community system which institutionalizes support to families prior to, and in prevention of, the failure of a family to provide for a child’s welfare.
The Act is characterized by two essential innovations: 1) a legal construct called “Community,” which mediates, buffers, and articulates the primarily coincidental and only marginally or superficially conflicting real interests of parent, child, and state; and 2) a proactive rather than reactive approach to child welfare policy. The Act meets the challenge of reconstructing and refining, through legal artifice, a traditional and organically produced social institutional form (i.e., community) that has grown increasingly attenuated with the growth of modern individualism, while not violating the Constitutional 14th Amendment liberty interests of parents (and others) which give that cultural individualism legal teeth. It does so in order to meet the corresponding political and legal challenge of increasing the constant and constructive involvement of the state in family and community life in order to decrease the extreme and often destructive involvement made more frequently necessary by its absence (or less comprehensive and humanized presence).
The central innovation of this Act is the introduction of the legal reincarnation of the Community, which serves, with focused intentionality in its new form as a legal construct, to mediate the tensions and alliances among the interests of parent, child, and state, and as a buffer coordinating the functions of family and state in more cooperative and mutually accommodating ways. It provides an arena of support, communication, negotiation, and resolution. It is a medium of both state coercion and parental resistance, the conflict between the two channeled, filtered, or dissipated according to the moderating, focusing, or amplifying influence of a middle-range of social organization through which both the individual wills of parents and the corporate will of society, via the agency of the state, must pass. It provides a familiar and intimate zone in which children have an increased opportunity to formulate and express their will, in which subcultural diversity can hold out against an often overreaching and categorically biased state demand for conformity, but in which authentic child abuse and neglect has reduced opportunity to hide. While no law or institution can either eliminate child abuse and neglect or erase all errors of overcontrol or undercontrol, of false positives and false negatives, the Community is designed to lower the rate of both child abuse and neglect itself and of errors in detecting it at both extremes, and to coordinate the freedom of parents to raise their children as they see fit with the desire of the state to ensure that those children are raised in a safe, healthy, and nurturing home.
The Community, as defined in this Act, 1) humanizes the state, 2) provides parents with improved due process protections, 3) channels information to the state to assist in accurate administrative decision making, 4) accommodates and protects diverse practices, 5) reduces institutionalized bias on the basis of race, ethnicity, English language proficiency, or social class, 6) mobilizes and moderates local normative control in service to child and family welfare, 7) channels relevant information and guidance to parents to improve parental decision-making, 8) facilitates continuity without sacrificing flexibility, 9) preserves and fosters rather than severs healthy affective bonds, 10) provides a buffer for strained relationships among adults involved in a child’s life, 11) provides a vehicle for including the child in the process, and, most fundamentally, 12) provides a vehicle of proactive state support of parents and families instead of state reaction to structurally-facilitated family failure.
devoted solely to talking to yourself.
I’ll stop trying, and the problem you perceive to be caused by my trying to add a new dimension to this forum will be resolved. In the meantime, I’m going to see if the range of discussion here can be extended beyond ideologically entrenched sound-bites echoing familiar and mundane assumptions, to include ideas that are more imaginative and aspirational.
I also would like to see more substantive discussions here, especially about proposed policies. But, society is what society is and that requires writing in a manner to get a critical mass to read, and respond.
Your long posts tend to be hard to follow. I think part of that is you assume we have all of the back story you know. And part of it is it is drinking from a firehouse.
My suggestion is to pare down like crazy, summarize, and less details. People won’t know as much, but that doesn’t mean they will make poorer decisions.
My $0.02 worth…
the idea has to exist in some published form before it can be discussed in parred down bite-size chunks. I am making a final, last-ditch effort to extend the purpose of this forum to that of being a platform for the introduction of such ideas.
Of course, fully fleshed-out policy ideas can continue to be relegated to academic journals and legislative offices of legal counsel, emanating from and contemplated by a narrower pool of minds, from where only reduced and distorted versions can leak out into the public domain. And you may be right: Popular venues for political discourse will not tolerate anything else.
The difficulty of following the presentation, the fire-hose without back-story, is a legitimate critique. But challenging minds with thoughts that need to be cut and chewed and digested at one’s leisure, where there are minds interested in being so challenged, is part of the nature of what I am trying…and failing…to introduce to this forum. The alternative approach, of presenting it in small pieces over time, could conceivably work (though, conversely, the individual pieces might have even less chance of holding anyone’s interest than the complete idea), but, for a number of reasons, that’s not an option I’m going to pursue.
If people here aren’t interested in these ideas, fully laid out and posted for their perusal, costing no more than the time they wish to invest in return for the amount of information they wish to extract, then they’re not interested, as is their right. And the challenge of being a successful, thoughtful progressive society, in which ideas like this one are discussed as broadly and deeply as possible, critiqued, refined, responded to with alternatives, in a robust collective process of thought and action, is that much more weakly and meekly met.
I agree completely that my strategies for adding a new dimension to the conversatoin here have failed in every attempt I’ve made. It may be that the problem is intractible, or it may just be that I lack the skill to successfully accomplish what I’m trying to accomplish.
But here’s what I have in common with a lot of other Polsters: I have an ideology that I believe in very strongly, that I want others to believe in or at least consider, and that I am convinced will, on balance, increase human welfare and social justice to the extent that it is contemplated and implemented.
Here’s the difference: It’s not a failed ideology from the past, that has survived as a quasi-religious dogma that its adherents have grown comfortable with, and so defend almost reflexively, but rather a living ideology that incorporates the best analytical tools and the lessons of the most successful social experiments human history has produced; an ideology that, in many ways, takes the thesis and antithesis of those polarized political dogmas of the past and moves forward with their synthesis.
I am also convinced that the more people who contemplate it and engage with it, the less it will look like what I have imagined it to be, and the more it will benefit from the genius of the many.
One of the greatest political and social challenges we collectively face, more fundamental than perhaps all others, is, akin to the challenge of creating a robust, successful system of public education, creating a robust, successful system of moving the subtlest and richest ideas out of their little insular enclaves, where they whirl and eddy in an intense discourse among a small fraction of the human population, only rarely and partially entering the sluggish stream of popular discourse, and so being similar to a powerful generator most of whose energy-output is dissipated into space rather than captured and channeled to where it can be utilized.
After I give up here, I’ll try something else, somewhere else. Maybe some day I, or someone else similarly obsessed, will get lucky, and this oh-so-useful habit of investing effort in (rather than just dallying in) the contemplation of how to refine our social institutions for our collective benefit will catch on.
Politics, as we know it, has become, or maybe always has always been, about 99% form and about 1% substance. The form is fascinating and important, the vehicle of all else. But it isn’t everything, or, more precisely, shouldn’t be.
I’ve had to train myself to take an interest in the form, and I’m glad I did. But we will be proportionately better off, as a society, the more we get past the tail-chasing obsession with shallow partisanship, and the concommitant reduction of politics to just one more spectator sport, and move, instead, in the direction of investing more interest, time, effort, and enthusiasm in the more essential challenge, the one of applying imagination and analysis to the task of designing ever more effective, need-fulfilling, mutually eddifying, spirit-liberating ways to frame and facilitate our collective existence.
I’m sincerely committed to that. If I’m talking to myself, then, yes, I’ll have to find another way or another medium for pursuing that goal. But I’m really not ashamed or embarrassed to invest my time and energy, for no compensation other than the satisfaction it gives me, to fleshing out fresh new ideas that I think are good fodder for that process.
I’m delighted to see, and, occasionally, join a group of people like this one, interested in our political process, in the people involved in it, in the narrative of state and national politics. This blog, and others like it, are fine the way they are.
But wouldn’t it be nice if, just barely creeping into the periphery of political discourse, we talked not just about the politicians, and their gaffs, and the horse races for office, and the policy initiatives on the table that, by necessity, are mostly deferential to the status quo and only marginally innovative, but also about the conceivable, the imaginable, the possible, not just as flights of fancy, but as an analytical exercise exploring what could best be done with the political power that we are all obsessed with acquiring (whether personally or vicariously)?
I know: It all comes down to the number of words I use. I’m sorry, but I’m going to repeat what I’ve said before: It’s a complex and subtle world we live in. Meaningful ideas, starting with just an analytical framework and a blank slate on which to write with it, require some exposition. The challenge isn’t in imagining broad brush strokes, which are often unrealistic precisely because they are not fully fleshed out, but rather in delineating ideas in fairly complete detail.
Providing that degree of detail isn’t meant to offend, or to burden. I, myself, am a frequent skimmer rather than in-depth reader of informational materials that I am expected to absorb, and here, no such expectation is imposed on anyone. I am merely making it available. As I said in the text of the diary itself, I posted the statute and discussion for reference, for anyone who was interested in exploring and commenting on the idea encoded in them.
Frankly, I do indeed talk to myself a lot, as most people with active minds do, and they are not bad conversations. I also talk with others quite a bit, and those are often excellent conversations as well. I decided to share the product of a conversation I had with myself, hoping it would become part of a larger conversation with others, one which might help to liberate the captive giant just a bit more.
and say I read anywhere near this whole…uh…”installment,” but what I did read was interesting. Yeah…interesting is the word…
My only constructive thought is as follows.
When discussing the balance between liberty and necessary government intervention, the question that comes to mind is, can a state actually, statutorily, create a good balance between the two?
I agree that they, the balance between “liberty and leviathan,” don’t have to be mutually exclusive constructs. Liberty doesn’t disappear just because there’s “more government” anymore than liberty flourishes when state intervention ends. But to put that balance into writing, to the extent that you do…or I assume you do since I sure as hell didn’t read it all…seems downright impossible.
Your “hypothetical statute,” an interesting starting place in itself, would be rewritten and revised again and again before any lawmaking body. What you’ve created would come out in what I can only assume would be an unrecognizable mess of ideas that may not help a soul. Asking people, let alone lawmakers, to “suspend pretense” when discussing issues like this just doesn’t happen.
Anyway, interesting topic, Steve…
they are processed and implemented, and yet history is laden with their implementation and evolution. Public schools were in fact instituted, and transcended, in many ways, the highest hopes of the most optimistic visionaries. Democracy, republics, complex markets relying on complex forms of currency and exchange, are all institutions that are in part the result of innovative ideas that contribute to a collective, evolutionary process.
The notion that the state has no role in implementing ideas of this sort is antithetical to the purpose of this site, to the purpose of government, and to the purpose of intentional human endeavors in the public policy sphere. Of course the state has a role, and of course it goes beyond the ritual of maintaining the status quo, and doing so rather inefficiently at that.
No, this idea would never be legislated as is, and would not began to achieve any degree of acceptance until after decades of it winding its way into discourse and consciousness, just as has happened with all similar social innovations of large magnitude and great importance.
Double yikes. Well intentioned but you need an editor, Steve, since I’m guessing that is not something you excel at. Take David and Fidel’s advice–it was given out of kindness, not malice. If you want to grow a readership, pare down your writing and your replies.
Nor do I completely disagree with the suggestion. But I believe (in fact, I know) that to some extent it is based on a false assumption, an implicit commitment to an inflexible normative rule which is incompatable with my purpose for making the “offending” posts, and so impossible for me to comply with to a satisfactory degree without defeating the purpose of the post.
Could these discourses be better edited, and parred down significantly? Absolutely. It would require much more time spent composing them than I currently spend, with the result that the same people, with the same degree of certainty, would still complain that my posts are too long and poorly edited, due to the underlying assumption I referred to above. It is not that I am incapable of editing better: It is that, following a cost-benefit analysis, I would have to conclude that it will almost always be more in my interest either to post them as they are, or to stop posting altogether. If the ideas I am proposing are not interesting enough to readers here to consider in their current form, then it doesn’t make sense for me to spend more time and effort to arrive at a similar result.
From my point of view (rightly or wrongly), I am holding out uncut gems still encrusted with other minerals and offering them for the taking, because I want them to be taken and put to use. In response, I hear, “if you cut them and polish them, maybe then we’ll take them off your hands (but probably not).” Fair enough. But it’s not a response that motivates me to comply: I don’t see my communication of ideas as a favor I am asking of others, such that I should strive to package them (which simultaneously constrains and sometimes deforms them) according to the preferences of the intended ambivalent recipients.
Human existence is caught in a tension between individual autonomy, and mutual interdependence. Social institutions emerge and evolve in response to that tension. Typically, they overshoot and undershoot the mark in multiple ways, overcontrolling and undercontrolling individuals, granting too little and too much individual discretion, swirling toward improvement of an elusive blend of liberty and constraint.
Modernity has distilled these institutions into increasingly “rational,” decreasingly “traditional” forms. The rational forms exhibit increased impersonalism, relying primarily on markets and hierarchies (eg, governments, corporations, and other formal organizations). The traditional forms continue to exist, but more on the margins, and less aligned with the purposes of the formal overlay.
The traditional social forms, family and community, are more intimate, and are often as much an expression and extension of the individual as they are an imposition of “society.” It is where individual and state meet. If treated more intentionally, it holds the greatest promise for being the zone in which that elusive blend of liberty and state imposition can most effectively meld into a mutually reinforcing configuration.
The statute above is an attempt to begin (or continue) the process of refining that medium (community) to accomplish that task (more effectively and subtely articulate state and individual).
Over 150 years ago, a great visionary, Horace Mann, led a movement to establish a revolutionary new social institution, a movement which met with enormous resistance, but one which culminated in the realization of what has become a fundamental and indispensible fixture in our social institutional landscape: Free, universal, compulsory public education.
As a former high school social studies teacher, I came to recognize that one of the great current weaknesses of that institution is its isolation. Too many people see education as a process that occurs, and a service that is rendered, within a designated location, during designated hours, by designated professionals. But, to be most successful, it must be a process that occurs in all locations that children (and adults) occupy; throughout the day, the week, the year, and the entire course of a human lifetime; rendered by everyone to everyone in a continuous process of mutual enrichment, serving the increased importance of providing the young with excellent educations in part by never losing sight of the great importance of continuing to seek and provide educational services to others throughout our adult years as well.
This is just one reminder of the importance of community, as a context within which and through which our collective endeavors can be effectively pursued, and as, in many ways, an extension of, and completion of, that first wonderful step taken in the establishment of local but ubiquitous public schools.
More recently, my mind was turned to the task of designing a child welfare statute, in light of the failures of our existing child welfare policies. And I found myself arriving at the same place by a different path: The importance of community. I ended up writing a statute that reinvented Community as a legal construct, to serve as a conduit between individuals and families, on the one hand, and the “state” (ie, both state and federal government) on the other.
The underlying challenge that Community (the legal construct) addresses is, in many ways, similar to the one that public education addresses: How to articulate state intervention and individual liberty in ways which are more mutually reinforcing than mutually antagonistic? Libertarians, for instance, frame “liberty” as “freedom from” the state, but it doesn’t require much imagination to realize that complete freedom from the state results in a very widespread loss of individual liberty resulting from the lack of an intervening state protecting people from one anotherand facilitating people’s range of opportunities. So the question isn’t just what balance to strike between liberty and state intervention (as libertarians falsely frame it, supplying the answer that the balance should be the least government possible), but also, and more importantly, what blend of liberty (narrowly defined) and state intervention provides the most real liberty (broadly defined), that is, the most opportunities in life.
I see “Community” (again, the hypothetical legal construct) as a vehicle for arriving at an improved balance and blend of individualism and collectivism. Of course, it is (or would be) more of a movement than a bill, and could not be passed into legislation in the form that I have proposed it any time in the foreseeable future. But I think that it is a useful thing to think about, and just that process of contemplation and application could yield many useful, more modest and poltically practical, legislative ideas, addressing more circumscribed challenges.