222
PARTISAN REVIEW
stone.
In contrast, my own view is that both the individual and the community
have the
same basic primary
moral standing. Hence, all specific positions -
whether on the rights and duties ofAIDS patients, pornography dealers, or
the press (versus national security) - must be worked out with careful
attention to both. One cannot use the needs of society - or individual rights -
to shut out the other considerations, as, for instance, do First Amendment
absolutists.
Three considerations, empirical, moral-philosophical, and pragmatic,
support the I
&
We paradigm. First, while it is possible to theorize about ab–
stract individuals apart from a community,
if
individuals were actually without
community, they would have very few of the attributes commonly
associated with the notion of the autonomous person. Clearly,
the individual
and the community "make" one another,
and individuals are not able to func–
tion effectively without deep links to others, to community.
Many sociologists have contended that community has weakened
within modern society, adversely affecting individuals. Eric Fromm, for ex–
ample, has argued that individuals won excessive autonomy as industrializa–
tion, or more precisely, urbanization transformed society. He believed that
this extreme autonomy was gained at the cost of weakened social bonds in
both the family and the community, leaving the individual highly anxious,
even hysterical, looking despairingly for synthetic affiliations to replace the
lost bonds. Hence, totalitarian political movements provide a proxy for such
bonds. And the decline of religion and "traditional values" left people yearning
for firm direction, provided by demagogues and dictators. In a similar vein,
David Riesman agrees that people have become other-directed, seeking to
conform because they have lost inner orientation.
The
I
&
We position also finds support in that radical individualism or
collectivism taken alone lead to policy conclusions that even their own advo–
cates are often uncomfortable with. For those who recognize only the pri–
macy of the community, who consider individual rights either secondary and
derivative or assert simply that "there are no such rights," as MacIntyre does,
open the door to the intolerance, or worse, the tyranny found not only
in
to–
talitarian ideologies but also in absolutist theology and authoritarian political
philosophies.
Equally unacceptable are positions that focus exclusively on individual
rights, particularly the extreme libertarian stand; few endorse policies, as
Nozick does, that allow individuals the right to choose whether or not they
wish to defend their country. The same challenge to the libertarian position
holds for other common goals very widely endorsed, from concern for future
generations to the condition of the environment.
Finally, there are pragmatic considerations: will the I
&
We paradigm
facilitate the development of both public policy and norms of behavior that
