The Caregiving Society

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/archive/8/lawler.htmA few weeks ago, reporting on the Foundations of Freedom conference at the University of Portland, I expressed some doubts about the very interesting paper, "President Bush, the Ownership Society, and the Catholic Understanding of the Common Good,” presented by Dr. William Hudson.  Also relevant to the "Ownership Society" debat is this new essay, "The Caregiving Society," by Peter Augustine Lawler and available at The New Atlantis.  Here is a taste:

In his stirring second inaugural on “

America

’s ideal of freedom,” President Bush called upon us to build “an ownership society.” “By making every citizen an agent of his or her destiny,” he declared, we “will give our fellow Americans greater freedom from want and fear.” With that vision in mind, he proposed to reform Social Security by bringing it under the control of each individual agent. Certainly, some reform is needed as individuals live longer, children become scarcer, and the baby boomers retire. And surely there is a large potential upside to making today’s workers active investors in their own retirements and deploying today’s assets in the entrepreneurial economy.

But there is also something deeply inadequate about viewing old age in terms of individual “ownership” of one’s own destiny. The aging society, after all, will confront us with the realities of human neediness. Freedom from “want and fear,” to the extent such freedom is humanly attainable, will require the old accepting the inevitability of their growing dependence on others, and it will require others who willingly accept the burden of caring for their elders, even at the expense of their own independence. The ownership society only makes sense if it prepares us to be care-givers and care-receivers, and if it does not encourage us to see ourselves as unencumbered individuals. . . .

Self-reliance, of course, is a great American virtue. America is a middle-class nation, and it continues to become more middle-class all the time. This does not mean that we are all equal economically, or that we are all equal when it comes to intelligence and virtue. It means that we all work because we have to work, and that we are all free. We believe that all human beings have an equal right to work and no right to expect the fruits of other people’s labors. And we believe that freedom means not being dependent on others or constrained by others. We are against all forms of servitude and dependence, and we often see no real difference between paternalism and despotism. Even the rights and responsibilities of parents are quite limited and temporary; our children are raised to be free and independent, to achieve on their own, to go their own way.

More than ever, we experience ourselves simply as individuals, distinguished by our freedom from what nature has given us. We are freer to escape the constraints of bodily limitation, of gender, senescence, and decline—or at least to live for an extended period of time as if we could do so. The world exists, the individual thinks, for me. In the beginning, there I was, and after me there is nothing.

But this view of ourselves as individuals remains far from complete. Despite our pretensions, we remain in many ways dependent beings.

Rick