Listening to an interview with Elinor Ostrom on NPR's Planet Money podcast, I was delighted to learn that one can, in a way, be awarded a Nobel Prize for theology.
Technically, Ostrom was awarded the prize in economics "for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons." But the gist of that work, it turns out, is an affirmation of the principle of subsidiarity.
This is the idea, developed over the centuries since St. Thomas Aquinas, that decision-making ought to take place as close as possible to those directly affected by and responsible for the decision. Formally, subsidiarity is described as the principle that "a community of higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need and help to coordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good."
That higher and lower business in the official Catholic phrasing reflects the origins of this idea from a more hierarchical time. That formulation troubled later Protestant thinkers who reworked subsidiarity into the idea of "sphere sovereignty" -- restating the notion without reference to higher and lower, but rather in terms of "spheres" of sovereignty closer to or further from the decisions in question. Think of it kind of like a 3-D Venn diagram.
The implication of subsidiarity and/or sphere sovereignty is that responsibility is pervasive and complementary -- that it is shared by every sphere, or by all levels or orders of society. No order or sphere or actor is irresponsible, but the form and the priority of responsibility varies depending on each level/order/actor's relation to the matter at hand.
I've written a good bit about this on this blog -- see, for example, "More on subsidiarity" and "Who is You?". The latter post there offers a look at how this principle can be seen at work in the way society seeks to care for orphans. Since that discussion was from more than five years ago, it might be worth running through that again briefly.
Parents have the primary responsibility for caring for, feeding, sheltering and nurturing children. Orphans, by definition, have lost their parents, so this primary responsibility moves farther out to the next-best option and the next order or sphere. The primary responsibility for those orphans next falls, in other words, to other relatives or close friends. Those heroic grandmothers we often hear about raising their grandchildren on behalf of their dead, absent, addicted or incarcerated parents are subsidiarity in action. These grandparents may have previously played only a subsidiary role in raising these children, but when the parents are out of the picture, they step up to play the primary role.
If no such relatives are willing or able to care for our hypothetical orphans we turn to the next-best, next-closest alternative -- to foster parents who had previously been only distantly, tangentially subsidiary to the lives of these children but who would be next in line to take over as primarily responsible for their care. In the absence of any such capable foster parents, the care of these children would fall to some actors or agencies even more distant or higher-order, until ultimately -- should all such subsidiary actors fail -- we would reach the final, most distant, highest-order actor, the federal government.
The failure to appreciate subsidiarity results in a great deal of the thudding stupidity that infects our political discourse. Almost every topic is addressed as though the world consisted of two and only two actors -- the individual and the federal government. And those two actors are regarded as mutually exclusive, having no shared or complementary responsibilities. This creates a world in which our hypothetical orphans above can only be imagined to exist in either an intact, two-parent nuclear family or else as wards of some monolithic centralized federal orphanage.
This either/or absurdity shapes arguments about everything from health care to education to employment. Either the individual is solely responsible for X or else the federal government is. This form of argument allows for and imagines no other agencies, levels, spheres, orders, communities or possibilities. Nor does it allow for the underlying, fundamental reality, which is that none of these various responsibilities are exclusive or even competing. No one is ever irresponsible.
The illustration with our hypothetical orphans above shows how each higher or more distant actor has the responsibility to step in and take a greater responsibility when the lower/closer actors fail, but before that happens, these more-distant actors first have the responsibility to support and sustain the closer, "lower-order" actors and thereby to prevent them from failing. The federal government is not only responsible for providing a last-desperate-measure National Home for Unwanted Children -- it's responsible for supporting Grandma so that she will be able, in turn, to care for her grandchildren. This is better for the children and cheaper for the government. It can and should support Grandma both directly and indirectly, by helping to create a context and climate in which she is better able to meet her new responsibilities to these orphaned children.
So -- sticking with the more Catholic hierarchical approach, just because it's easier to visualize -- the higher orders have a responsibility not just to step in when the lower orders fail, but to bolster and support those lower orders so that they do not fail, and to ensure a broader context that makes their failure less likely. The lower orders, in turn, have to meet their responsibilities so as not to bog down the higher orders with having to take a greater role in what ought to be, for them, subsidiary, distant and tangential functions.
This is true not just for the very highest and the very lowest, but for every level in between. The dual role of direct support and improved context applies not just to the federal government as the agent of last resort, but to every other actor at every other level or sphere as well.
What I found most endearing and admirable about Elinor Ostrom in that interview with Planet Money was her fierce anger and frustration with the blunt stupidity that tries to take her work on subsidiarity and cram it into their pre-existing arguments against "Big Government," as though the cooperative, local governance she describes among Swiss farmers were some sort of Randian libertarian utopia.
I share that same anger and frustration. Particularly with the obtuse Randian types whose own agenda can only lead, perversely, to the very kind of Very Big Government they're always going on about. If everyone adopted their way of thinking, then the very thing they claim to oppose would inexorably come to pass. By advocating a form of radical individualism that denies all mutual, interdependent and differentiated responsibility, they guarantee the failure of every level/sphere/agency other than the agent of last resort. They create a world in which only that agent of last resort -- the federal government -- has any responsibility, and therefore a world in which it must have every responsibility.
A world of irresponsibly detached individuals, families, neighbors, neighborhoods, charities, clubs, associations, corporations, unions and congregations can only result in those farthest from the situation being forced to take up the responsibilities those other agents have abandoned. If people will not accept the responsibility of being citizens and neighbors, then the government will be forced to act in their stead.
My greatest frustration with the alleged opponents (and unwitting advocates) of "Big Government" is that they have it backwards. Government is not expanding because its usurping the responsibilities of those other, nearer actors. It is getting bigger because those other, nearer actors are abdicating their responsibilities, foisting them off onto the actor of last resort.
When there exists a healthy civil society -- which is to say, a responsible one -- it is unnecessary and nearly impossible for the government to take over the rightful functions of all these other spheres and agencies. But if they refuse to play their role it becomes nearly impossible for the government not to do so. If we refuse to be our brother's keepers, we're inviting Big Brother to take over the job instead.
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