Subsidiarity is the recognition that when a
problem exists at any level, the resolution of that problem ought to be dealt
with at that level. What is it to talk
about levels and problems at these levels?
Subsidiarity is built upon the idea that
people interact with each other through various social strata, or layers. The base of all, the foundational level is that
the family. The first interaction a
person has with others is within the family into which they are born. The father, mother, siblings, grandparents,
aunts and uncles, and cousins, all interact with the newly born, they all are
responsible for and contribute to the child’s growth and development. As a result of increased mobility and
opportunities, this level of society has been undergoing tremendous change as nuclear
families, a set of parents and their children, move away from the grandparents,
aunts, uncles, and cousins. The concept
of the extended family is disappearing and to now speak of family is to mean
simply the nuclear family. The influence
of grandparents, along with the diversity brought by aunts, uncles, and
cousins, is slowly disappearing. Yet,
even with the diminution of the extended, subsidiarity recognizes the first
level of society as the family rather than the individual.
The next level of society is the
neighborhood, the grouping of families living in close proximity to each
other. It is in slightly wider setting
or level that both individuals and families interact for support, development,
and well-being. This level, as well, is
undergoing change. There was a time when
families communicated with each other much more than is the case today. Air conditioning has moved people indoors to
avoid the heat rather than sitting on the porch of an evening, lost is the
contact neighbors once had seeing each other out and about. Few people know much about their neighbors
beyond their name. It has become
increasingly difficult to know whether or not you can trust your neighbors and
homes have become secure fortresses with alarm systems. Children do not play with other kids in the
neighborhood, they are taken to playdates with people the parents know better
from work or school than the family next door.
The levels continue to ascend: various
neighborhoods close to each other form a town, towns form a county, counties
are part of a state, states together form a nation, and the community of
nations creates the global level. There
can be levels that form within levels, levels that address a specific area of
concern. For example, a school district
is a level above a neighborhood yet different that a town. Fire protection districts would be another
example of a level within a level addressing a specific issue.
Subsidiarity deals with the ability to
solve problems. Subsidiarity is the idea
that problems should always be solved at lowest social level possible. Consider security; when families where more
open to their neighbors, there was a sense of security in that everyone watched
out for everyone else. However, there
were always threats that could not be addressed by neighbors watching over
neighbors and towns stepped in to provide police protection. Towns were able to provide streets among the
neighborhoods of their borders, but linking itself to another town by roads was
difficult and county road crews were established. The Civil Rights Act is a good example of
subsidiarity properly applied. After the
Civil War, there were (widely scattered and few in number) neighborhoods where
racism disappeared, but the problem of discrimination was still widely
practiced. A few, very few, cities tried
to make conditions better for blacks, but still the problem persisted. Some states, but not many, also tried to improve
the lives of black men and women yet the problem of discrimination
persisted. The evil of racism, which
originates at the level of neighborhoods, could not be removed by actions at
the neighborhood level. The problems were not adequately addressed at the
community level or at the state level.
Attempts to solve this problem which was a local problem (at nearly all
localities) could not be put in place until it reached the national level and
even then it took one hundred years before it happened. The passage of the Civil Rights Act in the
Johnson Administration was a higher level of society addressing problems of
much lower levels of society; this was a true act of subsidiarity.
However, a higher level of society can
overstep its bounds and violate the spirit of subsidiarity if it attempts to
solve problems that could be solved at the lower level. The current imbroglio over education is
sometimes seen as an example of a higher level interfering with something a
much lower level could solve. Has the federal
government, a part of the national level of society, overstepped its reach in
establishing curriculum standards for local school districts? St. John Paul, in discussing the development
of the welfare state[1],
wrote:
By intervening directly ad depriving
society of its responsibility, the social assistance state leads to a loss of
human energies and an inordinate increase of public agencies, which are
dominated more by bureaucratic ways of thinking than by concern for serving
their clients, and which are accompanied by an enormous increase in
spending. In fact, it would appear that
needs are best understood and satisfied by people who are closet to them and
who act as neighbors to those in need.
(CA, 48)
Of course this raises the question of whether or not it is really
possible to address many welfare needs at a neighborhood level. Before the Great Depression, much assistance
for the poor came from churches and local communities; neighbors helped
neighbors. What happened to end
that? What was the failure that kicked
the responsibility up to higher levels of society? Families began to decrease their
participation in communal efforts to aid others.
Just as the permanent principle of the
common good implied the principle of the universal destination of goods and
which led to the development of the preferential option for the poor, the
permanent principle of subsidiarity strongly implies the duty of
participation. Participation deals with
the acts of individuals which contribute to the cultural, economic, political,
and social life of the civil community to which they belong. These acts can be individually performed or
in cooperation with others. Participation
is a duty to be fulfilled with responsibility and with a view towards the
common good. Failure to vote, even when
one feels their vote would not matter, is a failure to participate. Failures to participate can lead to the establishment
of groups with hidden privileges and creates conditions where some citizens
could make deals with institutions to serve their own needs rather than the
common good. In short, failure to
participate creates the conditions under which higher levels can overstep their
boundaries and violate the principle of subsidiarity.
There are, then, two areas of concern: first,
are problems being solved at the lowest possible social level; and second, are
people responsibly participating for the common good? With respect to the first, orthodox economics
generally fails to recognize societal levels because everything is modeled upon
the interaction of the representative agent, homo oeconomicus, and individual firms. There are sub-disciplines within economics
broadly defined such as Institutional Economics and Public Choice Theory that
could recognize and address the ideas of societal levels. However, the high school economics curriculum
and the principles courses most college students take are based upon the models
and contain policy ideas which ignore societal levels. Regarding the second, orthodox economics
generally assumes that everyone participates in market activity and that
nothing else matters. The decision to
vote or not is a response to a optimization problem rather than a
responsibility to participate. The idea
that large segments of people are excluded from participation is not logically
possible in economics because discrimination is not considered rational
behavior and since homo oeconomicus
always acts rationally, discrimination simply cannot occur.
CA refers to St. John Paul II's encyclical, Centesimus Annus, and the number is the paragraph in which the quote was found.
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