Chapter 7

The Layman in Society

A great deal has been written, and more seems to be written as time goes on, about the social function of the Church, and by implication the social duties of Christians, until the impression is given that what Christianity is all about is social justice, which amounts to some kind of social work--or even a Marxist-Leninist "struggle" for the overthrow of the oppressor, a la Liberation Theology. I imagine that if you are still with me, you have the same misgivings I have about this interpretation of Christianity, and are with me in the old-fashioned notion that Christianity is about saving your soul, and heaven and other-worldliness and all the rest of it.

Nevertheless, we do exist in society, and civil society is about justice, and justice involves rights; and so as human beings we cannot be indifferent to rights and their violations; and so social justice is by no means alien to the Christian, because we must look on the world, not only with God's eyes, but with the eyes of Jesus, who is human as well as Divine.

[There is an extended discussion on society in Modes of the Finite, Part 6, Section 3.]

The phenomenology of society

So our first task, as Christian laymen, is to look at what it is to be in a society, and what society--any society--is.

What is the experiential difference between being on a bus going from Cincinnati to Cleveland, where everyone has the goal of getting to Cleveland, and being in a car pool going from home to work, where everyone has the goal of getting to work on time? The first is not a "getting to Cleveland society," but the second is a "getting to work society."

What makes the difference is that each of the people in the first case has the same goal as the others (and so, in a sense, they have a "common goal," which is what I was taught was what made a society a society); but they don't have the goal as together, in the sense that they are not doing anything to or for each other to achieve the goal. They are "in league" with the bus driver, in a sense; but really he is serving each, and there is not really a society there either.

But in the car pool, John drives everyone on Monday, Frank on Tuesday, Henry on Wednesday, and so on; and on the day you don't drive, you get picked up and driven. The difference here is cooperation; that is, co-operation. Each one is doing something at some time that benefits the others more than it benefits himself; and this time and the conditions under which he does his task is chosen by the group, irrespective of the benefit to the individual.

That is, John is assigned to drive on Monday. This means that the other four people expect not to have to drive on Monday, and not only that, they expect John to be the one who is going to use his car and come around to pick them up, and that John will be there, in Frank's case a half hour before work, and in Henry's case, twenty minutes before work, and so on, and Frank and Henry are expected to be there, ready to meet him when they hear his horn.

On Monday, this is all very convenient for Frank and Henry and the others, but it is a nuisance for John; he could do much better for himself on Mondays if he just drove to work and forgot the others--except that he realizes that if he does this, then he can expect an irate phone call from Louis, who organized the pool; and if he does it more than once, he can forget about anyone picking him up on the other days of the week; he's out of the pool.

Therefore, the point of cooperation, which is what makes a society a society, is that at some time, a person does for the group some act that is generally not beneficial for him--or at least an act whose benefit to him is irrelevant. That is, if John happens to like driving on Mondays, so that for some reason he'd rather drive than be picked up and driven, that's fine, but not the point (though it may be a reason why John was assigned on Mondays); the point is that whether he likes it or not, whether he gains by it or not, he is the one who is to drive on Mondays--or else.

This is rather interesting, when you consider it. An act deliberately done for the good of others, or an act for which one's own benefit is not the motive, is an act of love. And so it sounds as if the basis of society is love.

And it is, in a sense; but only in a sense.

The problem is that, though John might in general be willing to drive others on Mondays, things occur that may very well make him feel less generous on a given Monday; and so if we rely on his generosity, we may be able to count sometimes (and even pretty often) on being picked up on Mondays; but we can't really rely on it. But a car pool is worthless if you have to be worried whether John is going to be generous this week, or if you have to get the car out yourself and then be late. It would be worse than having no pool at all.

Hence, something has to be done to guarantee, or at least make likely, that John is going to do what we expect him to do, whether he feels like it or not. But since the act does not benefit him, there's nothing in what he is doing that could serve as a guarantee; the act, in itself, is an act of love; and love, being non-rational (because not self-advantageous), cannot be counted on to occur systematically.

So what a society requires is acts which are objectively generous (i.e. don't in fact benefit the doer), and are to occur systematically. This is what the sociologists call "patterned behavior." But generous acts by their very nature are not systematic. What to do?

Obviously, you have to provide motivation for the act; that is, you have to attach a threat of punishment (punishment, because rewarding the desired acts gets you into the economic realm, and is not cooperation but service--and is a whole other story) to the non-performance of the act ("You do that again, and you're out!"--meaning deprived of the advantages of being driven four days out of the five), so that if generosity and love fail, the act will be advantageous to the one who does it.

Thus, though the act in itself is an act of love, it need not be done out of love, and we can't expect people to be acting out of love all the time, because love is transrational, and therefore unsystematic and sporadic. So the objectively generous act expected by society can actually be done for any or all of three reasons: (a) because it benefits the others in the society (in which case it is a true act of love); (b) because instead (or also) there is the long-term advantage of being in the organization, whatever it is, which either replaces the other-directedness of the motivation with this self-centered motive, or at least adds it; and/or (c) because if you don't do the act, something bad will be done to you as punishment--which, of course, is also self-centered.

Let me point out that there is nothing wrong with self-centered motivations; self-fulfillment and avoidance of self-harm is morally good, and in fact defines moral goodness. We have got so used to thinking of Christianity as a "super-morality" that we tend to think that only love is a "worthy" motive, and everything else is bad. Love is Christian, when it is a certain kind of love; love is morally good (in the sense of not morally wrong) when it does not choose harm to the self for the benefit of others; but it does not follow that love defines moral goodness. When we are most divine, we are beyond being human; and morality means doing what is human.

But with that said, it is instructive to notice that the actions which are involved in interpersonal relationships (if you ignore the motives why a person would do them) are in themselves other-directed, not self-fulfilling. And the two types of interpersonal relationships, the economic and the social, are really defined by the two types of motivations attached to the acts to make them not solely generous and other-directed, but to make it rational for a person to do them. The economic relationship, as we saw, is defined by compensation, that is, reward for doing the act desired; the social relation, we now see, is defined by a threat (called a sanction) connected with not doing the act which is expected.

It is not surprising that the extremes of the libertarian theorists are anarchists. They think that society and its threats takes away freedom (which it does, as we will see), and that the economic relationship leaves you free; and therefore, they think that civil society ("government"), which you can't avoid belonging to, is evil and also unnecessary, because any motivation you want to give to people can occur on the economic level, and the people will still do what is expected, but freely.

In critiquing this, let me first note that the basic premise that reward leaves you freer with respect to the act in question than a threat is in one sense true. When you refuse to do something for which you are offered a reward, then you are no worse off than you are now; whereas if you refuse to do an act which has a punishment attached to the refusal, you are going to be worse off. Further, rewards allow you to pursue freely chosen goals, which you can adopt or give up as you choose; punishments imply damage to your present condition, which gets you into the realm of choosing harm to yourself, which we are morally forbidden to do. Thus, you are freer to do an act and accept the reward or not do it and forego the reward than you are to do an act and avoid harm or not do it and incur harm.

Nevertheless, it is not all that simple. Generally speaking, when an act is rewarded, that act and no other is what will be done; there is no reason for doing anything but that act. On the other hand, when something has a punishment attached to it, then you can do anything you please except that act. Thus, punishing a given undesirable act leaves the whole range of human activity open to the person, whereas rewarding a given desirable act tends to restrict the subjects' behavior to that act alone. In this sense, punishment leaves you freer than rewards.

Now of course, in something as simple as a car pool, this makes little difference, because it is doing the act of driving on Monday which is expected, and therefore not doing it is the "undesirable" act; hence the threat actually threatens doing anything else but the act, and in practice motivates doing just this act, in the way rewarding the act would. But it makes the "reward" stronger, in the sense that doing it is a way of avoiding harm, not just getting something you want. But when society becomes complex, involving many people doing all sorts of things--especially in civil society--then the society doesn't care so much what you do, so long as you avoid doing things which prevent others from doing things. Hence, in complex societies, the threats are more apt to allow freedom than restrict it. We will see more of this later.

As to the problem with anarchism, leaving everything up to the economic type of motivation of reward, we saw in the chapter on money that, given that people have necessities as well as values, the "reward" of compensation is not always something that can be accepted or rejected without damage; very often, if you don't work for a salary, you die of starvation; and so you are just as "unfree" as you are when you are explicitly threatened with punishment; the punishment in this case has the disguise of a reward withheld; but when a reward is a necessity, not a value, it is not really a reward.

So the economic relationship can be threatening, even though it does not look threatening. That's one thing. The other difficulty with anarchism is that the assumption is that people will respect each others' rights; but it doesn't follow that people for whom there is considerable advantage in not doing so will be motivated to do so (because they are, by and large, already the economically powerful) by economic factors; and secondly, given the different evidence people have, it does not follow that people will even know they are violating someone else's rights, because they won't be aware that the person has these rights. We Whites kept Black slaves for centuries, because we didn't think they had the right to be free.

Hence, if there is going to be a respect for people's rights and a lack of exploitation of some by others, then there has to be cooperation to ensure that everyone's rights are respected. That is, there has to be a society whose precise function it is to see to it that one person's "freedom" doesn't trample on others' rights.

And this society is by definition civil society. So anarchy is self-contradictory. You can't get rid of "government" (the sanctioning power of civil society--its ability to threaten--its authority) and rely solely on economic motivation.

And by the same token, the "hippie" ideal of "let's get together and love each other," which led to the communes of the 'sixties, doesn't work. Why? Because love--true love--is not systematic, and systematic things, like cleaning up and taking out the garbage, have to get done. What happened in the communes was that the more generous among the group got tired of seeing the place in a mess and did the chores, while the rest of the people "loved" and loafed; and finally, the generous ones got tired of being used all the time and left, and the others wallowed in filth for a while until they found it wasn't worth it--and the commune disbanded.

No, we are loving creatures, but we are also rational creatures; and our rationality has to be taken into account. We are, of course, also fallen; and thus to count on love is doubly absurd, because there are those who will take advantage of the generosity of others and exploit it to their own benefit and others' harm. Society exists in part to see that this is not done.