The principle tells us that lower level associations such as families and local communities should carry on the greater part of the life of society, and higher level associations such as the state should facilitate their efforts. The point is to make social life more truly human, since face to face communities are more human than the stock market or the Code of Federal Regulations.I'm not yet an expert in distributism but one of the elements that appeals to me is the understanding that every system has the potential to be corrupted. Knowing that we cannot eliminate corruption (in both the political and sinful sense), we must work to minimize it.
Subsidiarity--the principle of assigning responsibility to the lowest, smallest and most decentralized authority--attacks the problem from two angles. When corruption occurs, it is confined to the smallest area possible. At the same time, the corrupted are in direct contact with those they harm.
The latter I find the most exciting. The same bankers that have no problem vacuuming the funds out of Cyprian accounts probably could not stand to face a man and wrestle away his wallet. Subsidiarity forces the victimizer to face his victims and this alone does much to prevent corruption.
In the cases of the severely disordered, subsidiarity limits their ability to inflict mass harm by keeping the scope of their possible power small. He will be a member of the very community he damages and will face whatever consequence develops.
But that smallness has another benefit--it creates a dynamic larger society. With one hundred counties facing similar municipal issues, subsidiarity allows one hundred solutions. Out of those one hundred, several are bound to be more effective than others and, because smaller communities can change policies more quickly, those solutions are likely to be adopted.
Contrast that to our current system. Mega-corporations have no qualms about abandoning the communities that rely on them and relocating across the globe. A world-wide economic crisis was triggered by a small cohort of greedy, short-sighted and incompetent financiers. The federal government dictates education but doesn't care what your child finds interesting or how he learns best.
But most important is the fact that subsidiarity realigns the social and administrative worlds with that from which they came: the interactions of individuals. It allows the people of a community to support what they believe is important and not simply submit to the designs of a distant authority.
Ordinary human beings don’t look at the world in the radically simplified terms the official outlook requires. It takes a great deal of training, and an innate or acquired lack of imagination, to do so. Untutored views bring in distinctions—man and woman, God and man, what is good and what is preferred—that motivate institutions other than the state, but have no official standing and therefore count as prejudiced and even bigoted. For that reason the people have to be propagandized, re-educated, and subjected to ever closer supervision to eradicate the effects of such views.There is much more to be said, and to be learned, about distributism. I feel that it is the only political philosophy that tries to manage humanity's enormous capacity for evil while cultivating its equally-enormous capacity for good.
Kalb asks how we can advance subsidiarity, both as a principle and as a reality. As the idea arises from Catholicism, he answers:
Like other aspects of Catholic social teaching, what subsidiarity requires most of all is that Catholics live as Catholics.I do not work myself up over political wrangling, or poli-sci arguments or the end of government as we know it. It's because of this--we are already surrounded by our communities and, though the edifice of the USG looms far above us, that sweeping power is really an illusion. If it disappeared tomorrow, our world would still be us, our families and our neighbors.
No comments:
Post a Comment