The Spirit of Community by Dr. Amitai Etzioni

Author:Dr. Amitai Etzioni
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-10-30T16:00:00+00:00

Personal Responsibility, Self-Help, and Social Justice

Community service is a fine thing, say the liberals, but it is far from enough. What America requires, they say, is massive “reallocation” (a code word for taking from the haves and giving to the have-nots) within each community and, above all, among them: take from the rich and give to the poor. Above all, liberals balk at the suggestion that people ought to take responsibility for their own lives and that communities should be the first to take care of their own.

In his book The Content of Our Character, Shelby Steele, a black writer, argues that blacks ought to stop complaining and cease placing demands on white society. They should give up the mindset of the helpless victim and instead take responsibility for their future, learn to help themselves. Steele is particularly critical of calling poor blacks the true blacks. This, he points out, suggests that those who make it into the middle class are somehow less black. L. Douglas Wilder, the first black to be elected governor of Virginia, takes a similar position. He pointedly observed that black Americans must face the long hard road of making it on their own.

Some black critics, such as Roger Wilkins of George Mason University and Ronald Walters of Howard University, argue that Steele, Wilder, and their intellectual associates disregard what they call the repressiveness of the social structure. The socioeconomic conditions of blacks, they argue, even today are significantly affected by pervasive discrimination that is built into American society. As a result, they maintain, it is much harder for black Americans to make progress than for whites. And minorities in general ought to demand that the social structure be changed, as a major way to open the doors for their advancement. Finally, they say, advancing as a group, by means of such collective acts as protest demonstrations, provides a psychological lift that is badly needed by individual blacks. Indeed, they point out, other groups—Jews, Asian-Americans, Irish, Italians—help and sustain their own. Blacks should do no less.

William Julius Wilson, a black sociologist at the University of Chicago, points here to the curse of either/or, the distorting effects of intellectual polarization. As he sees it, there is a need to call on black people not to wallow in self-pity and to blame “the System.” At the same time, there is no denying that structural factors still inhibit minorities, and that changes in these factors would ease the advancement of minorities in American society.

A Communitarian position on social justice (for all groups) includes the following elements: First, people have a moral responsibility to help themselves as best as they can. At first it may seem heartless to ask, say, disabled people, older people who have lost their jobs, and minority young people who have suffered discrimination to participate actively in improving their lot. There is a valid sense that we owe them, that they are entitled to our help. But the laying of a claim to participate actively in

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