At the Democratic National Convention, our now President Elect spoke and showcased Communitarian beliefs when he talked at length about both the rights we possess as American people and the responsibilities that we must follow through on.

 

Barack Hussein Obama said “That's the promise of America ‑ the idea that we are responsible for ourselves, but that we also rise or fall as one nation; the fundamental belief that I am my brother's keeper; I am my sister's keeper¼we must also admit that fulfilling America's promise will require more than just money. It will require a renewed sense of responsibility from each of us to recover what John F. Kennedy called our ‘intellectual and moral strength.’”

 

I chose this topic for this date oblivious of its relevance and proximity to the national election. In one of those amazing convergences, however, I have become aware that on election night and since, many have commented on President Elect Obama’s Communitarian orientation, and the likelihood that his presidency will implement Communitarian notions. So, it turns out that it is more fitting that we address this topic today than it was when I chose the subject. Dumb luck. Go figure!

 

So what is Communitarianism anyway? I am no expert on the topic, but I will tell you a little of what I have learned, and time will only permit me to scratch the surface this morning. My primary sources have been this book, The Spirit of Community, written in 1993; the website of its author, Amitai Etzioni; and the website for The Communitarian Network. As always, of course, I must give a shout out to Google for its role in helping me to prepare for this morning. Not surprisingly, when I goggled the words “Communitarian” and “sermon”, I found a UU sermon on this very topic from a 1996 service in Charlotte, North Carolina.

 

(Pause for Commercial break: We interrupt this program to invite you all to talk to Tom Sullivan after this service and to ask him to give you a date when you can present a service on a topic of interest to you. It’s easy. So long as you have access to Google, you too can put together a Sunday morning presentation! And just think, if all of our members and friends took just one service a year, our sundays would be covered, the program committee budget would be zero and we would all get to know each other better. (I’m sure we would still have the occasional visiting speaker, with actual professional credentials, but you get my drift). And I can assure you that those of us who conduct more than one service a year are perfectly willing to cede the lectern to others!. Act now!

 

But I digress . Back to our regular programming. . )

 

So, what is this Communitarian business? First, as the intergenerational moment suggested, the definition of community is broad and flexible, and can and probably should include most groups in which we function. Thus, Communitarianism can be followed in any community, be it a neighborhood, a work place, a congregation, a school, a town, a county, a nation or a world. It is not exclusive to nations, though the remainder of my remarks will concentrate on the national stage. On a substantive basis, JFK’s famous words from his Inaugural address captured the concept pretty perfectly, when he said “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” In other words, Communitarianism is (1) the recognition that being in community imposes responsibilities to the community on every member and (2) the belief that the community and its members should share certain universal values and morals.

 

Amitai Etzioni is the father of the Communitarian movement. He is a professor of Sociology, past president of the American Sociological Association, and he taught at Columbia and was a Brookings Institute Scholar, before becoming in 1980 the Director of the Institute of Communitarian Studies at George Washington University, in Washington, D.C.

 

In 1990, he and a group of academicians and social thinkers came together to formulate the core ideas they shared which they spelled out in the Responsive Communitarian Platform, and to spur the movement toward a recasting of the social and moral foundations of society. A quarterly journal was founded in 1991 to provide a forum for the development and exploration of Communitarian ideas and in 1993, Amitai Etzioni formed The Communitarian Network, which is a non‑partisan, transnational, not‑for‑profit network of Communitarians.

 

In some ways, Communitarianism grew out of the me generation. Prior to and during the 1950's in this country, authority figures were generally afforded a great deal of respect and were infrequently questioned. Folks accepted what the doctor told them, what the priest and nuns said, what the status quo was. The 60's in this country saw the beginning of the disintegration of all that, as everything was open to question and institutional figures lost their moral authority - in many cases probably rightly so. By the 70's and the 80's the focus had morphed again. Tom Wolfe dubbed the baby boomers in the 70's as the “me” generation - where the focus was on ourselves; and I have always thought of the 80's as the “mine” generation where our focus was on acquiring things and making money.

 

Another contributing factor to the development of Communitarianism was the shift in our population from rural areas to urban areas. Smaller communities in rural areas have their own self-reinforcing ways of enforcing moral behaviors, in short, because people actually know one another. I noticed this when I moved from the Baltimore-Washington area to Marquette. I found that life here was more, for lack of a better term “civilized” – that I was less likely to rail at someone who cut me off in traffic or had more than 20 items in the quick check out line, because I might know them, or meet them shortly, or they might know me or know someone who knows me. A community of our size tends to make us behave better to one another, because our paths all cross so often. But in larger cities, people, like me, often do not even know their neighbors and people feel isolated and alienated from those around them and there is simply less civility as a result. Here, you think twice before going off, because that person in front of you in line at the grocery store might just be the dentist you have an appointment with next week, and making an enemy of someone with access to dental tools who knows how to use them is a big mistake.

 

What Etzioni and others saw as an outgrowth of these societal changes in our country was an over-emphasis on individual rights and entitlements and concerns, without a corresponding commitment to the responsibilities that accompany those rights. Some examples follow.

 

First - and this one really gets me on a personal level. How many of us have heard someone, or perhaps have spoken ourselves of, “getting out of jury duty”? Given my 27 years as a trial lawyer, when those words are uttered within my radius, my antennae go on high alert, so my ears are attuned and unfortunately I hear this thought expressed fairly often (and as you might imagine, I do not suffer in silence when I do). How many people who want to “get out of jury duty” would expect a jury of their peers should they be the one on trial or with a matter in court? All of them I submit. Why have they no sense that jury duty is an honor and a privilege and a duty that they owe to those who would serve for them? Why then have they no sense that we are very lucky in this country to have a Constitution that affords us the right to trial by jury of our neighbors rather than by professional jurists? Why then have they no gratitude for this wonderful system and for the chance to be a part of it? Perhaps because they haven’t been taught at home and in school to value the right to trial by jury and to honor their concomitant rights to the jury system?

 

Another example from the 90's. This is how one citizen responded to the Savings and Loan crisis: “The taxpayers should not have to pay for this, the government should.” I personally see this attitude all the time in my job as a tax preparer - the complete disconnect in peoples’ minds between the many services their governments provide for them (to which they feel a sense of entitlement), and the taxes they pay.

And yet another example from the present. Think of all the sub-prime mortgages sold to individuals who would not reasonably be able to afford the increased payments when the rates changed, and whose property did not truly qualify for amount of debt created. Those who sold those loans made their money and moved on, seemingly feeling no moral obligation to the borrowers. They thought of their own pockets and perhaps thought they had done good by putting unqualified borrowers in homes, but they wore blinders about the likely future of those borrowers. Or think of the (to me) insane money that people have made during the last twenty years on Wall Street, as traders and the like. Multi-million dollar annual bonuses were common and debt instruments (such as those that included sub-prime mortgage portions) were created and sold for enormous immediate profit to the traders without any regard for the seemingly inevitability that those sub-prime mortgages would enter default and that others would pay the price -- in terms of evictions for the borrowers, and ownership of nearly worthless securities by the buyers. There is an obvious moral component missing here.

 

My first job in government was working on public corruption cases and now, some 35 years later, I have seen politicians commit the same types of crimes over and over again, each generation thinking they thought these schemes up and feeling invincible. What do we do to teach public servants about their moral obligation to serve ethically and lawfully? I saw a tv show about an MBA program where the professor took his students to Allenwood Federal Prison, a minimum security institution where many convicted politicians and white collar crooks serve their time. This professor taught ethics as a component of the MBA program and believed that, if nothing else, the tales of the convicted might serve to deter his students from comparable transgressions. But examples like that professor’s are rare.

So, what would the Communitarians do? For one thing, they would have us expand the teaching of morals and values in the home and in our schools. Of course, this controversial, as it means that we must reach consensus about what morals and values to teach, not always an easy task, as UU’s know all too well.

 

In short, Communitarianism is a social movement aimed at shoring up the moral, social and political environment by changing hearts, renewing social bonds, and reforming public life, and the moral values that Communitarians emphasize on a national basis are not unlike our own UU principles: the democratic process, the Bill of Rights, and the golden rule.

 

Communitarians believe that we have to match our rights with the exercise of responsibilities. For example, we must do more than vote, we must make our voices heard in the halls of government. (Here is a good example of how President Elect Obama’s campaign and organizations like MoveOn.org have built a wonderful network, through the internet, that should help us express ourselves on issues in the future so that the voice of the people can be heard along with the influence of well-to-do special interests). And those in public office also have a moral responsibility to be open to the voices of the people they serve.

 

Dr. Joan Konner, dean of the Columbia Journalism school, was trying to understand the notion of Communitarianism, and she said to Etzioni “It sounds like one part church sermon, one part reassertion of old values, one part political campaign, one part social movement.” Etzioni replied “I could not have put it better myself!”.