The Spirit of Community: Rights, Responsibilities, and the Communitarian Agenda.

A few years ago the social scientist Amitai Etzioni and a number of like-minded colleagues began reminding Americans that our individual rights must be interpreted in conjunction with our duties to the community. These new "communitarians" note that we have come to think of rights as things we possess only in opposition to our communities. American "rugged individualism" had degenerated into the insistence upon our individual right to do as we wish--regardless of the effect on anyone else. The result is that the families, churches, and local associations in which we learn to treat one another decently are ignored and undermined in the name of each individual's "right" to create his own lifestyle.

At the heart of the communitarian agenda set forth in this book is a renewed commitment to family and neighborhood. Mr. Etzioni castigates the ACLU for preventing police from setting up checkpoints in troubled neighborhoods to keep out drug dealers. He also calls for a return to community policing--cops on the beat--and for the use of neighborhood-watch groups. These programs would help fight crime by encouraging cooperation between citizens and police. More important, they would teach Americans to care for and serve their communities.

Mr. Etzioni rightly argues that divorce, crime, and the general moral sickness of our society stem (at least in part) from our refusal to recognize that our rights carry with them responsibilities. In short he recognizes that the rejection of moral standards undermines our morality. That is an important truth, familiar to conservatives. So it is surprising that Mr. Etzioni does not recognize, indeed he explicitly rejects, any conservative role in repairing the moral order. He repeatedly refers to conservatives as "McCarthy-types," "puritans," and "authoritarians."

More fundamentally, the communitarian project itself is explicitly anti-conservative. Mr. Etzioni's goal is to create "a new moral, social, and public order based on restored communities." Agreed, America's moral problems render the restoration of community imperative. But the attempt to create a new moral order assumes 1) that the traditional moral order should be rejected as fundamentally unsound, and 2) that we, or at least those of us who are communitarians, have the right and the capacity to create morality out of whole cloth and impose it on the rest of society.

Mr. Etzioni repeatedly identifies America's traditional moral order with the 1950s and then rejects it as "rather authoritarian" and "unfair," to women in particular. Americans in the 1950s managed to stay married, stay off drugs, stay out of jail. But, as Mr. Etzioni sees it, this cannot justify a decade that allowed sexual and racial inequality, and moral and religious "authoritarianism."

Despite his call for community and a common-sense approach to individual rights, Mr. Etzioni seems to see his real opponents not as the radical individuals who he says undermined the traditional order, but rather as those, conservatives in particular, who defend traditional morality, especially on the grounds of religious truth.

Tradition is "unfair" and religion is "intolerant." Thus Mr. Etzioni rejects the two necessary bases of any moral order. Philosophers, statesmen, and common folk have all recognized, through the ages, that we must look outside ourselves to nature and to God if we are to discover the rules by which we must live. Societies differ on many specifics of religious worship and proper conduct. But, by whatever name they are called in a given society, the religious precepts embodied in such Biblical texts as the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule constitute the bases of civilization. Civilization is impossible without such rules, and without the fundamental character-forming institutions of family, worship, and local association they promote.

Differences in doctrine and social arrangements are not, however, unimportant. They reflect each people's attempt to maintain moral order in its particular circumstances. Tradition is a rich source of moral knowledge precisely because it constitutes a storehouse of institutions, beliefs, and practices that have stood the test of time. Mr. Etzioni denies, however, that either religion or tradition contains any transcendent moral truth. But what is left? On what basis are we to restore our communities?

Mr. Etzioni himself has trouble with this question. Rejecting tradition, he nonetheless argues that we posses a moral consensus upon which to build a just society. We all "know" that we should take care of our children, value diverse "lifestyles," and sort our garbage. How we know these things is not explained. Indeed, at times Mr. Etzioni reverts to a half-hearted traditionalism, praising Western civilization for spawning democracy, while criticizing its failure to provide sufficient equality.

He says we are held together by our "democratic values." Thus moral rules themselves ought to be worked out democratically. We must decide what is moral through a "multilogue"--through discussion at work, at home, and through the media, which Mr. Etzioni confuses with an open public square. (He seriously cites Larry King Live as an important locus of the "multilogue," allowing citizens to call in and shape our morality.)

But we must take care to listen to the right public opinion. We must learn our morals from such voices as Ralph Nader, Betty Friedan, Norman Lear's People for the American Way, and Common Cause. We definitely must not listen to "interest groups" such as business organizations, the NRA, or, of course, the Moral Majority. In short, Mr. Etzioni's multilogue is univocally liberal.

Clearly, his goal is to re-educate us. Communitarianism began at a "1960s-style teach-in." And the methods of the teach-in, of sensitivity training, of role-playing games intended to "raise our consciousness" on issues from cultural diversity to "date rape" and "sexual harassment," are at the center of Mr. Etzioni's program.

Despots Mr. Etzioni would criticize, from Stalin to the swaggering academic minions of Political Correctness, have championed these methods at least since the French Revolution. But Mr. Etzioni assures readers that his movement will be warm and inclusive. Coercion--at least physical coercion--is to be forsworn. Even religion will have a role to play. After all, worship services help us "bond" with one another, and clerics can facilitate the multilogue by helping us get in touch with our feelings. And, as Mr. Etzioni puts it, "community facilitators may be a modern necessity."

Mr. Etzioni wants to be your facilitator. He is unambiguous on that point, although he is reluctant to admit the enormous power "facilitators" would wield in a society bereft of tradition and belief.

There is something unsettling about the self-promotion in this book. The opening chapters contain self-satisfied recitations of polls and news reports on the growth of the communitarian "movement." The dustjacket displays a picture of Mr. Etzioni sitting beside Vice President Gore at the founding teach-in of communitarianism. Mr. Etzioni even provides a toll-free number so that we may subscribe to his communitarian magazine or leave messages of support.

With this book, Mr. Etzioni hopes to found a popular, as opposed to merely academic, social movement--one akin, in many ways, to two earlier movements: feminism and consumerism. All three, in their various ways, seek to convince us that what we desire is what is right. To flatter men's appetites and baser instincts in that way is very "democratic." But one may wonder whether such "democracy" is the best route to the restoration of a truly moral order.