A solitary man, Aristotle says, must be either a beast or a god. Since not many of us are godlike, we live in communities, lest we grow bestial. Community is a great good; it makes civilization and moral growth possible; and when community weakens, it is replaced not by anarchic freedom, ordinarily, but by a stifling collectivism. Aristotle reminds us that we are naturally gregarious, taking pleasure in other people’s company. Therefore, the man who disrupts the true community is depriving us of a great part of our human nature.
Although we Americans have always been intensely attached to privacy and private rights, we also have been a nation conspicuous for a hearty and successful spirit of community. Our city, township, and county governments; our flourishing voluntary associations; our innumerable fraternal and charitable bodies—these are the forms which have been realized by our desire for true community. Tocqueville found the genuine desire to serve and promote the community stronger among us than in Europe, despite our American proclivity for moving about. It is this combination of local independence with neighborliness and voluntary association that has made possible what Orestes Brownson called “territorial democracy” in the United States—that is, local free government, as distinguished from the centralized and fanatical democracies that arose in Europe out of the French Revolution.
Now real community is detested by the radical social reformer, in our century, who would like to see society forced into a single rigid mold, characterized by central administration, rule through executive decree, uniformity of life, and eradication of all personal and local distinctions. The radical—especially the Marxist—knows that healthy community is the enemy of his schemes, for community encourages variety of opinion and custom, sheltering all those voluntary associations which oppose centralized despotism. Accordingly, the radical doctrinaire, once he is in power, endeavors to stamp out the vigor of local community, as Hitler tried to do in Germany, and as the Communists have done with dismaying thoroughness in Russia and elsewhere.
The radical reformer is not the only enemy of true community nowadays. Certain great blind tendencies in modern technology and economic life also threaten traditional community—the centralization of production and distribution, the decay of rural patterns of living, the excessive mobility of population, the standardization of amusements and customs, the well-meant (though mistaken) drift in many quarters toward consolidation of local political and charitable functions into state and federal bureaucracies. Against these influences, more subtle though less directly malign than revolutionary political doctrines, the intelligent conservative contends.
The true conservative is public-spirited: he believes in community. That does not mean that he is in any sense a collectivist. The public-spirited man or woman, in this country, believes in a Republic, a nation in which nearly all activities are carried on voluntarily, by private individuals or local groups, for the general benefit. The collectivist, on the contrary, believes in a Mass-State, a consolidated unitary domination in which compulsion is the order of the day, and in which every aspect of life is regulated by some central body, theoretically for the general benefit, but really for the benefit of some clique or class. If community is disrupted, then collectivism usurps the functions which community formerly exercised, and return to voluntary community becomes next to impossible.
In a genuine community, the decisions which most directly affect the lives of citizens are made locally and voluntarily: the administration of justice, the police function, the maintenance of roads and public buildings and communal amenities, the assessment and collection of taxes, the management of charities and hospitals, the establishment of schools, the supervision of economic development. Some of these functions are carried out by local political bodies, and others by private associations: so long as they are kept local, and are marked by the general agreement of the citizens, they constitute healthy community. But when they pass by default or usurpation to centralized authority, then community is in grave danger—and, with community, private rights and social well-being are in peril. Whatever is beneficent and prudent in modern democracy is made possible through vital community-sense. If, in the name of an abstract “Democracy,” the functions of community are assigned to central authority, then real government by the consent of the governed gives way to an impersonal leveling and standardizing process that is hostile to freedom and human dignity.
The influences which make community healthy still are strong in America. We have more voluntary organizations than has any other nation; we generally are jealous of our local rights; we retain a constitutional structure which puts formidable impediments in the way of the radical reformer who would crush society into an amorphous mass. Yet we cannot afford to be complacent. Community can be lost in a fit of public absence of mind.
For it is tempting and easy to let centralized power assume the burdens which necessarily accompany the privileges of community. To escape the demands of local taxation, we may tolerate an increasing shift of the costs of schooling, public improvements, charitable functions, and even police-functions to state and national administration. In some respects, we are already far gone on this road. In the earlier stages of this process, it may seem that we have retained most of the benefits of community even though we have shifted to other shoulders the responsibilities that the community has long performed. It may take decades or generations for the consequences of this surrender of rights and duties to make itself fully felt. Yet the consequences of the process, if that process is not arrested, may be predicted by anyone with some knowledge of history. The late Albert Jay Nock, in his Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, suggested the usual course of events:
Closer centralization; a steadily growing bureaucracy; State power and faith in State power increasing, social power and faith in social power diminishing; the State absorbing a continually larger proportion of the national income; production languishing; the State in consequence taking over one ‘essential industry’ after another, managing them with ever-increasing corruption, inefficiency, and prodigality, and finally resorting to a system of forced labor. Then at some point in this process a collision of State interests, at least as general and as violent as that which occurred in 1914, will result in an industrial and financial dislocation too severe for the asthenic social structure to bear; and from this the State will be left to ‘the rusty death of machinery’ and the casual anonymous forces of dissolution.
I may add that this disintegration of community, and its supplanting by centralized authority, commonly have been accompanied by a proportionate decay of culture and morality, which seem to flourish only when local community teaches men and women standards of civilization and decency.
For a nation is no stronger than the numerous little communities of which it is composed. A central administration, or a corps of select managers and civil servants, however well-intentioned and well-trained, cannot confer justice and prosperity and tranquility and decent conduct upon a mass of men and women deprived of their traditional responsibilities and institutions. That experiment has been made before, notably in ancient Rome; and it has been disastrous. It is the performance of our duties which teaches us responsibility and prudence and efficiency and charity and morality. If someone else assumes these duties, or is forced to shoulder them, then we atrophy, socially and morally, for lack of exercise. And the bureaucracy which has assumed those social responsibilities, besides, does not long remain high-minded and diligent; the managers and civil servants must be recruited from the society in which they live; they cannot escape corruption and indolence, if they have their being in a time of disintegrated community.
Doubtless it often is vexatious to serve on local school boards, or to have to attend the meetings of private charitable societies, or to pay for local improvements out of local funds, or to put down crime through local reform. But if these duties are shifted from the community to some centralized agency, before long true community will cease to exist. And, some form of cooperative action being necessary to every civilized people, we shall not go back to the days of the Noble Savage: we shall find ourselves thrust, rather, into an epoch of collectivism. That new domination may seem beneficent at first; but it will be neither efficient nor mild, after the elapse of some years.
So, the thinking conservative does his duty by his community—his town, his country, his business-organization, his civic association, his union, his church-group, his professional body, his school or university, and his charitable fund. All these are parts of real community. He does not believe that he will have done his duty as a citizen if he merely votes for positive legislation calculated to let someone else, afar off, perform all the functions of these vital associations. Community is essential to freedom, to private rights, and to the whole fabric of the civil social order. Without it, men and women become less than human—either the solitary beasts of Aristotle’s phrase, or the servile mass-people of the unitary state. The conservative does not pose as an anarchist, despising his duties toward other men. And he does not propose to exchange his birthright of community for the pottage of centralized Utopia.