Is Peter Costello’s interest in social capital ‘soft politics’ or a courageous attempt to explore the rejoining of politics and community? Let’s hope it’s the latter, because cynicism about politics and distrust of our institutions are now the most striking features of Australian public life.
Our age is marked by a diminishing circle of trust. Corporations, trade unions, churches and politicians all find themselves on the outside of this circle. Our stocks of social capital (our capacity to trust others and to act on this trust in expectation that it will be reciprocated) are indeed diminishing. The results are everywhere to see: disengagement, insecurity, downwards envy, and the shrinking of our social networks to people like ourselves.
The traditional politics of Left and Right cannot help us in understanding this new world. The flow of trust and reciprocity in the community cannot be adjusted by pulling levers in government or adjusting economic management devices. It cannot be legislated for. Trust and reciprocity are generated primarily in civil society, in the relationships and institutions of civil life – families, neighbourhoods, churches, clubs, and voluntary associations. >From there they shape the effectiveness of other institutions such as the market and government. Without the trust and reciprocity born of civil society, governments and the marketplace will rub uneasily against the social fabric in which they're situated.
The problem is that our politicians and press gallery don’t quite understand this. They have grown up thinking of politics as the manipulation of government levers and the management of markets. Their working ideologies were framed in the contest between market and state divorced from their civil society settings. The Right wanted to increase the role of the market. The Left wanted to increase the role of the state. Together, Left and Right supervised the steady expansion of both market and state for a century.
But as market and state have grown, the space available for civil society has contracted. Its output of belonging, community and trust has diminished. With the output of trust spiralling downwards, cynicism and detachment have spiralled upwards.
Churches were once one of our prime generators of social capital. It is not surprising that Peter Costello, a practicing Anglican, should be one of the first of our politicians to remember this. But the story of Australia’s churches in the past century highlights the crisis in social capital that now confronts us.
Churches were once points of community gathering across ages and across ethnicity. They were non-instrumental forms of association – that is, people did not get any financial or career benefit from their association in a church – but they gained a point of belonging, and opportunities for interaction with people who might not necessarily be their friends.
In turn the contribution of the churches to the wider community was conducted through a plethora of interactive forms of association in civil society: mutual benevolent societies, amateur sporting and social clubs, charities, women’s groups, working men's clubs and adult self-education groups, kindergartens, co-operatives, schools and youth clubs.
But as the state and market grew in the twentieth century, Christian social thought moved steadily away from these interactive forms on a personal scale. As the state assumed more functions and powers, it seemed proper to add the voice of the church to those wanting the state to look after the poor, provide security and education, and act to ensure social cohesion and even 'community'.
Three things happened in this process. First, the social message of the church was increasingly directed, not to the community or to individual persons or even to parishioners, but to the government of the day. The duty of a church member became one of barracking for the state to make a good society on behalf of us all. Former Deputy Prime Minister and Uniting Church minister Brian Howe typified this thinking in its late twentieth century heyday.
Secondly, the relationships between people in civil society (the level of trust, belonging and co-operation between us) dropped out of the equation. The character of persons and their sense of obligation to each other in civil society disappeared from the public agenda. These notions have now virtually disappeared from the social pronouncements of the churches.
Moreover, the church's own community (parishes, clubs, women’s groups) became sidelined in the social thinking of the church, no longer central to their social vision or how to achieve it. Instead, church welfare agencies became the key, transformed as service delivery instruments for governments, funded by governments, serving government objectives. These contractors to government have now become the means whereby the churches make their contribution to society.
These are profound changes in one of our key institutions over the course of a century. One of the key generators of social capital in the community has almost shut down.
Why does this matter? Not everyone will lament the decline of the churches, but we are yet to see new mechanisms emerge that can generate social capital on this scale. Governments have been slow to realize that the so-called ‘community sector’ is primarily a contracted service delivery sector for human services, and its value as a generator of social capital is limited. Communities and governments alike need to explore whether this sector can be re-invented, or whether new forms of association and mutual service provision need to be constructed outside it. In the interim, we continue to run down the capital built up by previous generations.
Corporations have also been slow to realize that engagement with communities can be good business strategy. The Bendigo Bank stable of ventures is leading this now rapidly changing field, though it remains one of only a few that can confidently and publicly articulate why communities of high social capital are good for business.
Understanding the dynamics at work in these processes is the first requirement for renewal, which is why Peter Costello’s interest, as Federal Treasurer, is so important. Unless we rediscover civil society we cannot rediscover the source of community and the source of social capital and trust. But here’s the rub - we cannot rediscover civil society without a new politics that makes space for it.
We need a new politics that is about making visible the relationships and institutions of civil society and remaking political processes as if these matter. We need a reinvention of government so that everything a government does strengthens, or at least does not harm, our tenuous bonds of association and reciprocity. We need a strengthening of governance throughout society and a drawing of limits to big 'G' Government so that the institutions of civil society may flourish.
This is a major challenge to the Right's pre-occupation with market relationships and the Left's pre-occupation with citizen-state relationships. It is a challenge to the elites who have ridden the rise of the market and the state to their present ascendancy, as if these mechanisms are the only ones that matter.
Social capital and trust are good things. A politics that takes them seriously is not ‘soft politics’. It is revolutionary politics.
Vern Hughes is Development Manager of the Social Entrepreneurs Network.
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Stephen Webb Media Officer Communications Unit NSW Synod, Uniting Church in Australia Box A2178, Sydney South, NSW 1235, Australia email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone: +61 2 82674308; Fax: 92674716; Web: nsw.uca.org.au/cu/ & insights.uca.org.au/ ------------------ The Communications Unit publishes the monthly magazine Insights, conducts public relations for the NSW Synod of the Uniting Church, and provides a variety of communications services. These include writing, editing, web consultation and development, desktop publishing and graphic design, public relations and advertising. For a consultation or free estimate on your project call the Communications Unit at (02) 8267 4307.
