Creating a society of enablement
Enablement is one important avenue to social justice. The experience of enablement and the capacity to choose and fulfill “reasonable” goals go a long way toward increasing personal satisfaction and the perception of justice. The “culture of poverty,” “underclass” mentality, and disordered and chaotic family backgrounds greatly impair enablement. Children from such backgrounds do not develop faith in their capacity to shape their lives. They cannot take advantage of education and other opportunities, or they lack the values and motivation to learn or work hard. They have no stake in the community and therefore no concern for the communal good. On the other hand, stable families with their basic needs fulfilled have a stake in society and a belief in the possibilities it offers.
Programs such as Head Start, a government-sponsored preschool enrichment program for disadvantaged children that proved successful in preparing them for the schools, offer one avenue to enablement. Children do better in these programs when the parents are also involved. Parents who participate may come to value education more and learn modes of interaction with their children that enrich the children’s experience and improve their skills and self-esteem.
Social justice requires that some people accept less materially. This means finding contentment and satisfaction less in material wealth and more in connection and community. People must be more willing to devote themselves to improving the welfare of others and more interested in the intrinsic values of excellence, creation, and cooperation, as well as aesthetic and other nonmaterial pursuits. Satisfying connections among individuals and communities can evolve into deeply held values and increasingly become realities of life.
Individualism and community
In the United States an ethic of individualism is a potential barrier to feelings of connection and responsibility to others. Bellah and his associates, writing about contemporary American values and mores, note that individual freedom is interpreted as freedom from restraint. They identify two dominant forms of individualism: economic and expressive. Americans have long valued the pursuit of economic gain and have come to value the pursuit of knowing, developing, and enjoying the self and its potentials. As they found in their interviews, expressive individualism can be narcissistic, or self-centered. People can selfishly cultivate themselves and believe that they have no responsibility even for their spouse or children.9
Alternatively, people can see self-actualization in relationship to other people, as part of a community. In my view Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow, the psychologists regarded as fathers of the current cultural movement of expressive individualism, believed this. Maslow found that the people he regarded as advanced in self-actualization were also willing to act for the common good.10 Rogers said that as people in therapy accept and love themselves more, they also accept and love others more. Maslow also believed that “uncovering” therapy leads to more caring and even that this was probably evidence that human nature is basically good.11
People who fully develop and harmoniously integrate their capacities, values, and goals will be connected to others. The full evolution of the self, the full use of the human potential, requires relationships and the development of deep connections and community – as well as the capacity for separateness.
Along with an ethic of individualism there is widespread volunteerism in the United States.12 People collect money for the United Way, volunteer in hospitals, help with youth activities, and join to work for political causes. Still, the overall sense of community is limited. Subgroups have strong feelings of differentness, and many Americans are isolated. Individualism accounts for this in part, but the complex technological society we live in and the traditional U.S. pattern of mobility are also important. Americans move more than people in most other highly industrial societies. An analysis reported in the 1960s found that the average American moved about fourteen times in life, the average Briton about eight times, the average Japanese about five times. In other countries populated by immigrants, such as Australia and Canada, the rate of moving is similar to that of the United States.13
Our experience of connection and community shape who we are, how we experience other people, and how we bear the stresses of both ordinary and extraordinary events. For example, in Korea, prisoners of war were “brainwashed": through isolation (e.g., solitary confinement for long periods) and extreme psychological pressures, their captors tried to get them to confess to crimes by their military and government and to endorse the communist system. Amitai Etzioni writes that American prisoners of war were more susceptible than prisoners from other counties.14 For example, thirty-eight out of fifty-nine air force men “‘confessed’ to nonexistent U.S. bacteriological attacks on Korea” and many collaborated with their communist captors. In contrast, almost all Turkish prisoners withstood the pressure of isolation. According to military investigators, they “stuck together as a group and resisted as a group.”
When a Turk got sick, the rest nursed him back to health. If a sick Turk was ordered to the hospital two well Turks went along. They ministered to him hand and foot while he was there, and when he was discharged, brought him back to the compound in their arms. They shared their clothing and their food equally.15
In contrast, many Americans thought of themselves “not as a group bound by common ties and loyalties, but as isolated individuals.”
Individualism has advantages as well as disadvantages. Young American children are less affected by the presence of teachers, for example in subscribing to standards of good conduct on questionnaires, than children in other cultures.16 Perhaps in “normal” times Americans are more able to preserve their own views and resist authority.a Without support by connection to others, however, one’s views may collapse under the pressure of difficult life conditions.
We must strive for an ideal of individuals with strong, independent identities who are also supported
