Regenerating Societies in Europe

In an interesting article written a few months ago (http://www.respublica.org.uk/item/The-%E2%80%98Big-Society%E2%80%99-is-here-to-stay-%E2%80%93-but-we-must-be-patient-with-its-intentions-idrv), Caroline Julian offered a thoughtful explanation on how British society might be rebuilt. In short, a new emphasis on communities and what we might call intermediate bodies and groups was needed. Or put in another way, a change in perspective, under which society was not only an agglomeration of individuals facing, on the one hand, the markets, and on the other hand the state. 

Indeed, real people, even today, are not just “individuals”, but they exist always in a social context that gives meaning to their lives and provides them with a social place to live, a community—something much smaller than the state, but larger than an isolated individual.

Underlying Julie's constructive arguments was an awareness made evident with the English riots: as the country—and the world—watched astonished how violence sprouted in Tottenham, Birmingham, even London, it occurred to many that the British society had somehow become fragmented (or in David Cameron’s terms, “broken”).

The riots have been attributed to different causes. One, the austerity measures of the new government; another one, racial tensions and the abandonment of multiculturalism. But a closer analysis of the rioters does not confirm either of those causes. The gangs that disturbed shops, streets, and restaurants for days did not belong to a specific ethnic group, nor did they profess a specific ideology. Alas, many of them were around 10 years of age! A third possible explanation might be too simplistic: they were just criminals that must be rigorously punished. Yet that does not explain much.

They were young people whose actions revealed the symptom of a deeper problem in British society. Or so have said, according to Julian’s account, several important voices (http://www.respublica.org.uk/item/ResPonses-to-the-Riots). The reason might be not only (if at all) political or economic, but moral (as well).

Liberalism, or at least a certain kind of it, present both on the right and on the left (though obviously manifested differently), implicitly relies on a certain context for the development of freedom. And freedom as we understand it today has been a great value of the Enlightenment, and of the Renaissance before it. But freedom is always a freedom for something: a project, a career, a specific plan in life (even if the plan is a “carpe diem” one). And the something pursued thanks to freedom is perceived as good, as worth pursuing.

That context for freedom is “the community”. Not that the community determines (or should determine) the person. Rather, that the community provides an atmosphere which favours the flourishing of freedom and indeed of the whole person. We all make our choices in a certain context—either in accordance with or diverging from it. Such context, essential for the flourishing of free persons, has often past being given by what we could call intermediate communities: nuclear and extended families, volunteer groups, churches, non-profit community service organisations, societies addressing specific needs—education, nutrition, care for the sick and the old—and many others.

Now even if we agreed that problems like the riots in England require a renewed sense of morality, ideas about what is good, personal excellence founded in virtue, and so forth, who is going to do the job? Who will imbue with morality, sense of self-dignity and purpose in life, enthusiasm for great projects, desire to achieve personal goals, awareness of others’ needs, love for one’s own culture and country and openness to those of others? We all know those things are needed. Here we come back to Julian’s ideas at beginning of this article. In a society of atomised individuals, the only possible moral force is the state, the markets (?), or the intermediate communities.

The problem that the riots in England reveal is terrifying because it is not “an English thing” which everybody else can disregard. It is symptomatic of Western societies, certainly many in Europe. Liberal democracies have achieved wonders. Not for nothing so many people want to study in them, visit them, even live in them. It has been a widespread assumption that liberal democracies are morally self-sustainable, emerging from some sort of social contract operated from a situation of ethical vacuum. But maybe this is not so.

Maybe liberal democracies in the West have been relying on moral sources come from intermediate communities. As a certain kind of liberalism erodes the role or disregards the importance that those communities have in providing meaning and civility to citizens, who are not just “individuals”, but at the very least “individuals in context,” persons.

This of course does not mean a reverse in time (neither desirable nor possible), but a renewal of our societies, as they are, in our time. In Europe it might mean tapping into old and new moral sources: Judaism, Christianity, secular humanism, Islam, and others. Freedom needs a moral context that cannot be provided by freedom alone. Tottenham, Birmingham, and London should be a wake-up call to societies all over Europe to reflect about, re-value and foster intermediate communities. And in carrying out this task the “developing” East, for once, might be better prepared than most of the “developed” West of Europe.