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To Empower People: From State to Civil Society

To Empower People: From State to Civil Society. Peter L. Berger and Richard John Neuhaus. Central Problem. Desire for government services Strong dislike of government and bureaucracy. Societal Conceptions. Megastructures Private Life Mediating Structures. Examples of Megastructures.

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To Empower People: From State to Civil Society

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  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

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