142 Bill Clinton, in Montreal, calls for 'Communitarianism'

(1) Bill Clinton, in Montreal, calls for 'Communitarianism' - from Niki Raapana
(2) Reply to Niki Raapana on Communitarianism - Peter M.
(3) "You sound just like defenders of communism" - Nikli Raapana
(4) Reply to Niki on my "Communist" ideas - Peter M.
(5) Disabling Professions, by Ivan Illich
(6) For comparison - Amitai Etzioni's Communitarianism

(1) Bill Clinton, in Montreal, calls for 'Communitarianism' - from Niki Raapana

From: Niki Raapana <nikiraapana@gmail.com> Date: 26.10.2009 06:42 AM

When do you think the topic of communitarianism will become worthy of discussion? Do we wait until after it's been fully implemented across the globe and we've all advanced into our communitarian consciousness? It's been a while but I was rather horrified when I read you supported Obama for president; were you not aware of his training and committment to communitarianism? For some reason I figured your research skills would have revealed his roots. A Communitarian Network Platform signer and founder of Asset Based Community Development Institute at Northwestern University signed Obama's Harvard Law School ap and made a video where he revealed his mentorship of the Obamas. John McNight trained them in community activism and then sent him off to Harvard. Check it out for yourself.

Hope all is well for you and your family these days. I'm still in Alaska making gertees and finding ways to live without having to become a born-again communitarian saint.

Niki

P.S. I think Atzmon could have explained a lot more in his last article if he told us a little bit about Etzioni's philosophical ethos the Zionists share with the Chinese (and the Soviets).

From http://www.thesuburbannews.ca/content/en/2513

Clinton in Montreal calls for 'Communitarianism'

Cotler calls speech "one of the most inspiring"

By Joel Goldenberg

Former U.S. president Bill Clinton put out a clarion call for people to engage in "communitarianism", doing one's part for those on the disadvantaged side of the inequality that exists around the world.

Clinton was at Centre Mont Royal downtown Friday morning to receive an honourary degree in Doctor of Laws from McGill University for his achievements in leadership, as part of McGill's Leadership Summit '09. McGill principal Heather Monroe-Blum, who introduced Clinton, noted that only one other U.S. president received a McGill honourary degree — Franklin Roosevelt in 1944.

After opening with some self-deprecating remarks, and noting that he was happy that Quebec and the rest of Canada "didn't get a divorce" back in 1995, Clinton focused on the work of his William J. Clinton Foundation, which tackles the challenges of global interdependence, helping people with HIV and AIDS, fighting climate change and develop sustainable economic growth in Africa and Latin America. Clinton has also been, sometimes with former president George H.W. Bush, raising funds for recovery efforts after recent devastating natural disasters.

Clinton told the appreciative audience that he likes Canada because "in many ways, it was like America but with one fundamental difference over the last 25 years.

"There's a great appreciation for individualism, a great belief in the power of free enterprise, and yet there was a certain communitarianism that persisted in Canada that has been lacking in America, but has been building steadily there for the last 10 years," he explained.

"Communitarianism is neither left nor right, it simply recognizes that we are mutually dependent on each other, that it is inconceivable that we can find personal fulfillment or family success unless we have some concern or care for the general conditions under which we all live.

"The whole world is interdependent to an extent it has never been before.

 "I would like to make the argument today that this is basically the mission we have to undertake for the world... We have to have a world consciousness. In the absence of that, we will not make good decisions."

The former president added that one focus of his foundation is to rectify a 25-year-old policy that saw developed countries deliver food to famine-stricken nations, which became impractical and expensive, rather than promoting the development of local agriculture. He credited Canada for moving away from this policy and noted that former president George W. Bush also wanted to do so.

In general, Clinton said the world is "too unequal, with half the world living on less than $2 a day, a billion people who go to bed hungry, a billion having no access to clean water, 2.5 billion having no access to sanitation and 130 million who will never go to school. One in four people this year will die of AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and infections related to dirty water. Eighty percent of the people who die of water-borne diseases are five years of age or younger." And yet, he also related stories of children and adults either impoverished or devastated by death or natural disaster who choose to persevere.

In the 21st century world, "citizens have the power to affect the course of their own destiny, and the world's destiny is greater than it has ever been." He cited the numerous NGOs — non-governmental organizations— around the world as taking such initiatives that governments do not.

"They believe they can change the world from the ground up... When you have the ability to do something that is good, you have a moral responsibility to try and do it. Most of what I spend my time doing now is trying to get people to understand that you don't have to be president, a member of Parliament or Congress, or a prime minister, to have a positive impact around the world. You don't have to be rich... if a large number of people with a limited amount of money each agree that something is a problem, they can move the world." Mount Royal MP Irwin Cotler, one of those in the audience, said the speech was "extraordinary."

"One of the most inspiring I've ever heard — moving, with great content. He summed it up by saying we live in an interdependent world and we have to see ourselves as a communitarian people, and look out for one another or the nature of the universe in which we live with its instability, injustice, inequality and the like will take us down the road to disaster. That plea for working on behalf of our common humanity, the stories he told, this was one of the greatest speeches I've ever heard."

(2) Reply to Niki Raapana on Communitarianism - Peter M., October 27, 2009

Niki, I supported Obama as the lesser of two evils. But no longer support him.

Similarly, I supported Kevin Rudd, but now oppose him.

These days, we do not so much vote FOR one candidate as AGAINST another. The candidates have already been pre-selected to screen out ones that would really serve ordinary people, so we lose faith in new leaders fairly quickly.

Bill Clinton says he supports the poor, and promote local agriculture. Yet he promoted Free Trade, which allows US Agribusiness to displace local producers, and allows East Asian manufacturing to drive local factories to the wall.

I don't use the word "Communitarian"; but I do talk of the need for the "Common Good" to take precedence. Here are some examples of how I would implement that:

- cut the Pharmaceutical Industry down to size. Sever the ties between it and the Medical Profession.

- greater recognition for Alternative Therapies, removing the monopoly of the Medical Profession, eg over the diagnosis of "syndromes" (ADHD etc) and certification of Mental Illness. Medicare benefits would cover the cost not only of visits to doctors, but also visits to nurses and some alternative therapists. Practitioners would have to offer bulk-billing (as part of Medicare), but Patients would have to make a small payment each visit (eg $5; no more than $10), as a brake on over-servicing.

- remove the power Professional Associations have to regulate an industry.

Ivan Illich, in his book Disabling Professions, pointed out that Professionals, whom we rely on so much, get themselves into positions of power over lay people, forcing them into dependence and extorting money from them.

Doctors, lawyers, accountants, bankers, teachers, the building industry etc are very powerful, especially when they operate as a group. They are able to impose "standards" on the rest of us - policed by themselves. The alternative is to re-empower the individual, by curtailing the power of these bodies. This requires a Strong State - a Socialist but not Communist system.

Modern "Libertarianism" is akin to a Feudal system where local Lords and Barons held power rather than the King. The Magna Carta, which "Libertarians" make so much of, was actually an instrument by which the Barons curtailed the power of the King to control them.

Today, Big Business, Media Moguls and Professional Associations play the role the Barons took. To contain their power we need a Strong State, hence centralized power, but the main function of that centralized power is to control the Barons - and thereby release the citizens from their grip.

Suppose that you are rearing young children. If you have a television, how can you stop them watching it when they would be better-off playing outside? Or reading a book inside? How can you shield them from ads enticing them to eat junk food?

We should not allow the broadcast of school-age children's TV programs before or for a couple of hours after school. When kids watch TV before school, they turn up at school with minds already dull. After school, kids should be playing (and later doing homework), rather than watching passive "entertainment". It's appropriate to have a small amount of children's programming each day, but within strict limits. Getting rid of junk programs is like weeding your garden. What's left would be quality programs, just as your flowers & sbrubs grow better once freed of competition from weeds.

(3) "You sound just like defenders of communism" - Nikli Raapana

From: Niki Raapana <nikiraapana@gmail.com> Date: 27.10.2009 10:44 AM

Peter, You seem to assume that the word communitarianism can also mean something good, as in how you see it. The problem with that assumption is there is a more "real" meaning of that word, one that is already in serious play on the global to local level. To give it your own, nicer meaning, well that just hides the fact that what it actually means is global slavery to a global set of communitarian laws. You sound just like defenders of communism, who insist communism never "worked" because people didn't evolve properly, that it was selfish individuals who ruined it for the common good and gee if all those greedy egotistical people would just shut the fuck up and die, maybe then the communist system "could" work.

The only proven political system that protected the common people from the "experts" is the American system of protecting and promoting individual rights. The original system wasn't the British free trade or capitalism crap the Libertarians promote. It was protecting local markets and local producers... the exact opposite of communitarian values. And the critical element here is that the original US system was the law of the land, not some vague, hopeful, more enlightened Utopian theory based in the Hegelian dialectic.

BTW, I am not a Libertarian, I know that ideology came from the same people who led us to their left v right synthesis, called communitarianism. This is what Orwell meant by doublespeak, and Clinton is only one of many communitarians who speaks it fluently.

Communitarianism is the synthesis in the Hegelian dialectic, that's my thesis and it's yet to be disputed. Unlike your nicer vision of communitarian central control, my version is fully referenced with overwhelming evidence to support it, including a quote from your former brothers, the Jesuits. If someone as educated and caring as you has been hoodwinked by the promises these liars make, I can finally see why my work on this topic has been ignored. Please step back from what you want it to mean and look at what it does mean.

I'm so glad we're finally getting to the heart of this issue, and hope you will appreciate what it's taken for me to challenge you over it. After all these years you are still one of my favorite people I met through the ACL, and I would hate to think you were supporting my enemies all along.

And, sorry, but getting rid of junk people is like weeding your garden too. It's a UN-federal HUD-COPS program called Weed&Seed. What's left would be wealthier tenants in upscale housing becaue the rich always grow stronger once freed of competition from lower class, free individuals. Seattle police went around the poor neighborhoods pulling "bad weeds" throughout the 90s. You may want to find a better example for your limiting television shows theory. I was in a W&S pilot test in 1999. Researching it led me to communitarianism.

(4) Reply to Niki on my "Communist" ideas - Peter M., October 27, 2009

> hope you will appreciate what it's taken for me
> to challenge you over it

When I first read through your Anti-Communitarian-League (ACL) material some years ago, I was aware of the difference between your ideas and mine, but I, too, did not want to challenge you over it.

I'm glad to see you distance yourself from the Libertarians. What can I call your position? Anarchist? I don't mean in a derogatory sense; Anarchism had respected intellectual credentials - Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin.

For readers who don't know you, let me tell them about you. You are the "Alaskan tent lady" (look that up in Google) . You live in the wilderness in Alaska, in a Yurt you made yourself. You're a Home Birth nut like me. You've had two kids by Home Birth (I understand), and (as a lay midwife) helped your daughter Nordica to give birth that way too.
http://nikiraapana.blogspot.com/2009/09/contemplating-another-alaskan-winter-in.html

You're single now, and don't seem to believe in marriage.

Like the Communists, I place the Common Good first. But let me try to clarify my differences with them.

Suppose you have kids who play soccer. Would you send them onto the playing-field without a Referee? There would be mayhem - the big kids would run over the little ones. Injuries, blood, a brawl.

So I believe in the Strong State. Strong, but not Totalitarian. Authoritarian, yes, but bestowing new freedoms too.

Although no state is perfect, we had good Governments in Australia in the 1950s & 60s. Admittedly, that system was racially based, but that was no reason to abondon the good aspects too. So I'm not just dreaming this up.

Take policy on Gambling. I believe that liberalizing the Gambling laws has been disastrous. Poker machines have ruined countless lives. We didn't have them back then. Nor were Casinos legal. There was horseracing, but that was comparatively harmless. At least horseracing got people outdoors, to the racetrack. There's nothing more depressing that walking into clubs & pubs where people are feeding those machines. It's so mindless, and devoid of social interaction - unlike, for example, playing poker around a table.

But the Casinos and other forms of Gambling are Big Business. They cannot be brought to heel, except by a Strong Government. If I were running the country, I would give pubs, clubs etc one month to destroy all their poker machines. After that, a fine of $1000 a day per poker machine on the premises.

I'd stop the media from corrupting the minds of our young people by imposing fines in the form of shares (ie ownership of the company). Each serious breach would attract a penalty of 1/10th of a % of the capital of the company (meaning that existing shareholders would have their holdings reduced by the same amount). After 1000 breaches, the company would be state-owned.

In doing so, I would be freeing the families and the young people from destructive influences.

We would get rid of Free Trade, and restore Tariffs instead. The Free Traders blame Tariffs for causing the Great Depression, but they never mention that we had Tariffs all through the boom years of the 1950s & 60s - without a Depression. Contrary to their mantras, it's Laissez-Faire which causes Depressions.

Companies would not be allowed to drastically Downsize or Offshore their workforces, unless there was already full employment. This is because the economy belongs to everyone, not just those who "own" it. Economic statistics would be calculated the old way, not as at present where unemployment is hidden.

Call me a "Communist" or "Communitarian" if you wish. But I don't do so - I call myself "Socialist".

About 1991, I attended a media weekend in Canberra run by a Green group, the Australian Conservation Foundation. I happened to mention to Phillip Toyne (head of the ACF) that in the days when I lived in the Tasmanian bush I'd eaten a snake (two actually).

"Were you with Aboriginal people?" he asked.

"No", I replied. But he meant that it was illegal for a white person to do it. I might have mentioned that I've eaten a couple of possums too (these are quite different from the American O'possums). And a Tiger Cat (quoll) and even a Feral Cat - I caught them in rabbit traps.

All illegal now. But who's made them illegal? Greens and Marxists - that's who.

It used to be legal to travel in the back of a ute (pickup). Now it's illegal - except for Aborigines.

I've also built rural buildings, and done rural plumbing, without Government "approval". So in many respects my values are like yours.

Back in the 1950s & 60s, we had strong central governments to control the Barons, but we didn't interfere in the minutiae of people's private lives the way we do now.

Many local Councils in rural areas used to allow owner-builders to build unapproved houses. Now, that's suppressed with the uniform (federal) "Building Code of Australia". Brought in my Bob Hawke, the same Prime Minister who Deregulated and Privatized the economy. We lost out at both ends of the stick.

Yet, although "Standards" are supposedly rising, buildings are weaker than ever before. Hardwood (eucalypt) has been replaced by Pine; the cross-sections of the studs which hold houses up has been reduced. Owner-builders of the old kind never built such weak houses.

Similarly, refrigerators and washing machines don't last as they used to. Even servicemen tell me so.

As a result of our discussion, I have scanned in the writings of Ivan Illich.

(5) Disabling Professions, by Ivan Illich

Disabling Professions

Ivan Illich
Irving Kenneth Zola John Mcknlght
Jonathan Caplan Harley Shaiken

Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd.
London
1977

{p. 9} The professionals, that is the skilled and learned experts who apply their knowledge to the affairs and in the service of others, are traditionally held in high esteem. For generations, divinity, the law, medicine and even the military and now the newer professions in the fields of education, welfare, architecture, industrial management etc. have been acknowledged as being selflessly devoted to the good of the weaker and less knowledgeable members of society, thus enabling those who lack the capacity to fend for themselves to lead fuller, safer and healthier lives. However, the question must now be asked whether the professions in fact provide their services so altruistically, and whether we are really enriched and not just subordinated by their activities. There is a growing awareness that during the past twenty years or so, the professions have gained a supreme ascendency over our social aspirations and behaviour by tightly organizing and institutionalizing themselves. At the same time we have become a virtually passive clientele: dependent, cajoled and harrassed, economically deprived and physically and mentally damaged by the very agents whose raison d'etre it is to help.

But the debate about the beneficence of the professions must not express itself merely in vague frustrations. We must make an organized attempt to understand what the professions' power consist of and by what they are motivated. And we must examine the nature of our own submission to the professions' disabling effects, now and in the future. This symposium, whose contributors are as disparate as as social philosopher and factory worker, presents, as is the the intention of the Ideas in Progress series, a true parliament of ideas: it analyzes and traces the history of professional power in many fields; it demonstrates specific disabilities which have been created by modem professions; it pinpoints the political dangers of oligarchic and self-appointed eltist institutions, and it sounds a clarion call for professionals to stop making a monopoly of their vocations and for

{p. 10} people to be more discriminating in their choice of alternatives.

Each of the essays provides a basis for the author to expand his ideas and solutions into a fuller treatment at a future occasion. It is hoped that readers will avail themselves of the opportunity given in this publication to enter into the debate by accepting the invitation to communicate with the authors and to express their views, hopefully as much in disagreement as in agreement.

THE PUBLISHERS

{p. 11} IVAN ILLICH

Disabling Professions

One way to close an age is to give it a name that sticks. I propose that we name the mid-twentieth century The Age of Disabling Professions, an age when people had "problems", experts had "solutions" and scientists measured imponderables such as "abilities" and "needs". This age is now at an end, just as the age of energy splurges has ended. The illusions that made both ages possible are increasingly visible to common sense. But no public choice has yet been made. Social acceptance of the illusion of professional omniscience and-omni-

{p. 12} potence may result either in compulsory political creeds (with their accompanying versions of a new fascism), or in yet another historical emergence of neo-Promethean but essentially ephemeral follies. Informed choice requires that we examine the specific role of the professions in determining who got what from whom and why, in this age. ...

{p. 15} DOMINANT PROFESSIONS

Let us first face the fact that the bodies of specialists that now dominate the creation, adjudication and implementation of needs are a new kind of cartel. They are more deeply entrenched than a Byzantine bureaucracy, more international than a world church, more stable than any labour union, endowed with wider competencies than any shaman, and equipped with a tighter hold over those they claim as victims than any mafia.

... But gangsters, for their own profit, corner a basic necessity by controlling supplies. Today, doctors

{p. 16} and social workers—as formerly only priests and jurists—gain legal power to create the need that, by law, they alone will be allowed to satisfy. Unlike yesterday's liberal professions that provided ethical backing for high-status hawkers, the new dominant professions claim control over human needs, tout court. They turn the modern state into a holding corporation of enterprises which facilitates the operation of their self-certified competencies: equal needs are laid on the citizen/client, only to be fulfilled in a zero-sum game. ...

{p. 21} When a craftsman,

{p. 22} such as a gunmaker, was called into court as an expert to reveai to the jury the secrets of his trade, he apprenticed on the spot the jury to his craft. He demonstrated visibly his limited and circumscribed expertise and enabled the jury to decide for themselves from which barrel the bullet might have come. Today, most experts play a different role. The dominant professional provides jury or legislature with his own and fellow initiates' global opinion, rather than with factual self-limiting evidence and specific skill. Armed with an aura of divine authority, he calls for a suspension of the hearsay rule and inevitably undermines the rule of law. Thus, one sees how democratic power is subverted by an unquestioned assumption of an all-embracing professionalism.

{p. 27} The disabling of the citizen through professional dominance is completed through the power of illusion. Religlon finaily becomes displaced, not by the state or the waning of the faith, but by profssional establishments and client confidence. The professionals appropriate the special knowledge to define public issues in terms of problems. The acceptance of this claim legitimizes the docile recognition of imputed lacks on the part of the layman: his world turns into an echo-chamber of need. This dominance is reflected in the skyline of the city. Professional buildings look down on the crowds that shuttle between them in a continual pilgrimage to the new cathedrals of insurance, health, educatione and welfare. Homes are transformed into hygienic apartments where one cannot be born, cannot be sick and cannot die decentIy. ...

{p. 28} Beyond a certain level, medicine engenders helplessness and disease; education turns into a major generator of a disabling division of labour; fast transportation systems turn urbanized people for 17% of their waking hours into passengers, and for an equal amount of time into members of the road gang that works to pay Ford, Esso and the highway department. Social services create helplessness and legal agencies injustice. ...

(6) For comparison - Amitai Etzioni's Communitarianism

http://www.gwu.edu/~ccps/etzioni/B262.html

 262. "Nation in need of community values" The London Times, (February 20, 1995).

Communitarian thinking has recently been subjected to some spirited criticism in this country. The communitarian call to restore civic virtues, for people to live up to their responsibilities and not merely focus on their entitlements, to shore up the moral foundations of society, is said to endanger individual liberties.

Communitarians stand accused of being "nostalgic" about an orderly past that never existed, and immobilised by a "neurotic" fear of the future in their quest to save the family from extinction. Some of the criticisms themselves illustrate the breakdown of civility, about which communitarians express alarm. The claim, in The Sunday Times, that I "do not understand the past", and therefore pave the way for a new Mussolini, is ugly name-calling rather than an argument. For The Economist, a leading libertarian magazine, to declare the ideas of this Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany akin to those of a Nazi pamphleteer is an attempt to establish guilt by phony association. However, behind these incivilities lie serious questions, deserving careful answers. These are increasingly necessary as a wide spectrum of political leaders are expressing communitarian ideas with growing frequency - although they rarely utter the six syllable word. In the United Kingdom, Tony Blair and David Willetts, a Conservative MP and author of Civic Conservatism, often use communitarian language. In Germany such ideas are found in the arguments of Kurt Biedenkopf, the Christian Democrat prime minister of Saxony, Norbert Burger, the Social Democrat Mayor of Cologne, and party intellectual Thomas Meyer; and a leading Green, Joschka Fischer. In France, Jacques Delors, the former European Union President, speaks like a born again communitarian. In the United States, President Bill Clinton and Vice-President Al Gore and Republicans such as Lamar Alexander and Jack Kemp have expressed strong communitarian sentiments.

The main criticisms levelled against communitarians are that community is a vague, fuzzy term and that rebuilding strong communities will curb individual freedoms. As I see it, communities are social webs of people who know one another as persons and have a moral voice. Communities draw on interpersonal bonds to encourage members to abide by shared values, such as, "Do not throw rubbish out of your window" and "Mind the children when you drive".Communities gently chastise those who violate shared moral norms and express approbation for those who abide by them. They turn to the state only when all else fails. Hence, the more viable communities are, the less the need for policing.

In some earlier periods, in some communities, such moral voices proved to be unduly demanding, harsh, and confining. They led groups of British dissenters to establish the American colonies where, in turn, they engaged in the relentless promotion of virtue, taking its most extreme form in witch hunts. Communities can of course over-react. But the same is true of most medications: they must be ingested in fair measure. One can overdose. But no one in his right mind would seek to ban all medicine.

The course of community should be compared to a bicycle, forever teetering in one direction or another - towards the anarchy of extreme individualism and the denial of the common good or toward a collectivist ethos that makes the collective group morally superior to its individual members. Hence, communities constantly need to be pulled toward the centre course, where individual rights and social responsibilities are properly balanced.

In the contemporary West, there is an urgent need to rebuild a sense of personal and social responsibility, a sense that we are not only entitled but also must serve, that the individual good is deeply intertwined with the needs of commons. To argue that the contemporary United Kingdom need be anxious about the development of strong communities for fear that they turn out to be domineering, say, run by the right-wing religious groups, is like arguing that we should forgo heating in the winter because a hot summer may follow. The West is in the cold season of excessive individualism and yearns for warmth of community to allow human relations to blossom.

True, the United Kingdom has not yet reached the levels of moral anarchy that we witness in the United States, but the trends are clear. Increases in rates of violent crime, illegitimacy, drug abuse, children who kill and show no remorse, and political corruption are all significant symptoms. It matters little of these portents are old or new, or that other societies are more decayed; it only matters that by any measure the readings of social ill health are far too grave for a civic society. The best time to reinforce the moral and social foundations of institutions is not after they have collapsed but when they are cracking. Does anyone truly believe that they have not yet cracked in the United Kingdom?

Communitarians, the libertarians say, are dreaming when they claim that to change a society's course one must focus on changing the habits of the heart, on a grand dialogue in which people come together to agree upon a new direction. Compare the way the United States tried to curb alcohol consumption without prior dialogue, leading to the socially devastating failure of Prohibition. The United States is now much more successful in curtailing smoking because legislation came largely after a quarter century of public debate. Similarly, to ban divorce now, or even make it significantly more difficult, would backfire. We need to allow the debate about the importance of the family to mature before we enshrine the conclusions in legal terms.

Ultimately a community can and may draw on the state. But in what Daniel Bell, in his review of my book The Spirit of Community in the Times Literary Supplement, called our most original contribution, we developed four criteria whose explicit purpose is to limit the state in those occassions when we must call upon it. There must be:

 * Clear and present danger - such as the Aids epidemic - rather than some drummed up fear

 * No alternatives to state involvement available - try public education first

 * The involvement must be as unintrusive as possible

 * And damaging side effects must be mopped up

"One may quibble with the details, but pace Normal Stone, I do not know of any theorist of fascism who has formulated similar guidelines," writes Bell. The argument that communitarians are majoritarians and hence will vote to over-ride minority considerations, is a position that we systematically rejected. The reason we called our platform a bill of rights and responsibilities, and named our quarterly The Responsive Community: Rights and Responsibilities , is precisely because we firmly hold that communities should be governed by constitutional democracies and not simply by majority rule.

For this reason, we oppose hate codes that allow the majority to define certain forms of speech as insulting and hence outlawed. We favour one-to-one meetings across racial and ethnic lines and intensified community dialogue to deal with intolerance.

"Reinforcing one sort of community means weakening another" pronounce the libertarians at The Economist. They mock: So which community is yours - the local, regional, national or what? True, there is a danger of tribalism, of communities turning on one another. However, the history of the United Kingdom shows that, despite some stresses among various levels of community, local communities can thrive within regional ones. Despite all the rhetoric, Scotland and Wales combine regional identities with society-wide loyalties. Communities nestled within more encompassing communities are the wave of the future and at the heart of the communitarian agenda.

Communitarian thinking is not an American import. Its roots sprout from ancient Greece and the Old and New Testaments.(I was trained by Martin Buber in Jerusalem.)While each society must evolve its own communitarian answers, the challenges are similar. Man and woman do not live by bread alone; it is unwise to believe that all we need is economic rehabilitation. We require our daily acts to be placed into a context of transcendent meaning and their moral import made clear.

We should not allow libertarians, who see in all attempts at community dialogue the shadow of an overpowering state, to hinder the development of a British and, ultimately, European communitarian agenda for social and moral reconstruction. Unless civil and moral order is shored up, more and more people will call for strong-armed leadership. Moral anarchy, not the excesses of community, is the danger we currently face.