The Spontaneous Order of American Life

In discussions about religion and public life, there is often a well-intended emphasis on commonalities among traditions. Shared moral values such as compassion, charity, or human dignity are put front and center in efforts to reinforce support for liberal principles. While I wholeheartedly embrace these commonalities, we should be careful not to flatten religious distinctions in the name of pluralism.

The recent backlash against liberalism—particularly from more conservative circles—stems in part from a perceived hollowing out of religion and community in the service of liberalism. Patrick Deneen has argued that liberalism creates a kind of “mono-anticulture,” an acid that dissolves the traditions, customs, and culture of any particular people or place. For committed believers, theological distinctions matter. And they often do not appreciate when their faith is co-opted for other ends, especially when that process seems to dilute the integrity of their beliefs.

This concern is not limited to theology only. Religion is a central part of what we call civil society. Journalist Tim Carney has defined civil society as “the stuff bigger than the individual or the family, but smaller than the central government.” It includes churches and religious organizations, but also schools, neighborhood organizations, and other voluntary institutions. They are the things we do together; the primary generators of social capital. The worry is that liberalism—especially economic liberalism—undermines this “associational life.” Globalization may make us citizens of the world, but does it also make us worse citizens at home? Is the social capital of local communities outsourced along with everything else? I understand the concerns behind these questions, but I think there are good reasons to be far more optimistic about the sociality of liberalism.

Political scientist Robert Putnam famously argued in his book Bowling Alone that participation in America’s civic institutions has eroded over the years. And Carney has placed the blame for this erosion at the feet of several culprits, including over-centralization in both business and government. “Walmart’s America,” according to Carney, undermines the creation of local community. Local bars, coffee shops, restaurants, and mom-and-pop stores are victims of the market’s creative destruction and the establishment of big chains. On the other hand, Carney has also argued that big government crowds out civic institutions through similar means. The welfare state, for example, makes charity through local churches and organizations obsolete. Civil society can’t compete with big business and big government.

I find Carney’s analysis to be mostly correct. I am certainly concerned about economic centralization and the possibility of big businesses currying protectionist favors from the government. But this concern is over a lack of market competition and liberalization, not the mere existence of successful big retailers. Large retail stores such as Walmart improve consumer welfare (especially for low-income consumers), mainly through their low prices. These outcomes led former Obama economic adviser Jason Furman to describe Walmart as a “progressive success story.” Carney has acknowledged these important outcomes while simultaneously bemoaning the loss of smaller, allegedly more civic-oriented businesses.

But empirical work with state-level data has found that Walmart’s community penetration has no real impact on the small business sector (such as mom-and-pop stores) or self-employment in the long run. A 2009 study published in the journal Public Choice used various indicators for social capital—including church attendance, team sports, club meetings, family dinners, voting, volunteering, etc.—and found that Walmart has no statistically significant effect on them. Similarly, economic freedom has been found to have no statistically significant impact on memberships in community organizations, voting, or volunteering. (The associations it does negatively affect are rent-seeking ones like unions.) Big retailers like Walmart aren’t leaving ghost towns with shuttered stores and decaying churches in their wake. They’re literally just increasing people’s purchasing power. Commerce may make people less parochial, but this is hardly the same thing as destroying local communities. In fact, commerce seems to undermine the worst tendencies of localism: exchange across communities and borders leads to more cooperation, tolerance, and peace with a wider array of people. 

So concerns about economic liberalism’s erosion of civil society aren’t really borne out by the evidence. But there are good reasons to be concerned about economic centralization through government power. Recent research using the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) dataset has looked at how state ownership of the economy affects civil society institutions and found that greater state ownership of the economy leads to repression of and lower participation in civil society organizations and religion. State ownership of the economy also reduces the autonomy of civil society organizations and increases state-sponsored monopolies among them. Finally, civil society organizations are less likely to have influence among policymakers where there is greater state ownership of the economy.

Similarly, Ginny Choi and Virgil Henry Storr of the Mercatus Center found that more people in market societies report being active members in recreational organizations compared to nonmarket societies. According to their data, religious affiliation is about the same in both market and nonmarket societies. Overall, they showed that those in market societies have stronger personal relationships, social network support, and more civic engagement. Healthy, influential civil societies are found predominantly within market economies. Markets provide the space in which civil society, social capital, and associational life thrive. Adam Smith’s commercial society and civil society go hand-in-hand.

And while many tend to associate social capital with participation in non-work institutions, we should not discount the social capital generated within workspaces: those realms of business competition. A report from AEI’s Survey Center on American Life found that over half of Americans met someone they consider a close friend through work. Work friendships also increase job satisfaction, meaning, and a sense of appreciation and value. Strong relationships at work are associated with strong relationships at home and within the community. This is likely why Peter Drucker believed “the work bond” to be “the most powerful human bond” next to family. Or, as Adam Smith put it, “Colleagues in office, partners in trade, call one another brothers; and frequently feel towards one another as if they really were so.”

Another report from AEI’s Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility demonstrated a strong relationship between income and social capital, but the source of income matters: a $10,000 increase in market income is associated with a 0.23 standard deviation increase in social capital. However, a $10,000 increase in government transfers is associated with a 0.08 standard deviation decrease in social capital. Working and earning a living in the competitive market boosts social capital. Government welfare, on the other hand, crowds it out.

What this demonstrates is that a liberal, commercial society is bubbling with social activity. And it reveals the true reality of liberalism: pockets of varying associations all competing with one another; keeping each other in check, but also tolerating one another to some degree. These voluntary associations have their own boundaries, values, and community rules that are typically pretty restrictive. In some sense, liberalism consists of a multitude of competing illiberalisms.

Think about your own associations. You can’t just not show up for work or refuse to do your job. (Well, you can, but you’ll end up getting fired.) Universities have honor codes and academic standards. If you break the rules or consistently make poor grades, you will no longer be a student. Churches have certain beliefs and practices. Severe violations of these can lead to excommunication in some traditions. And the list goes on, from club memberships to online groups and so on. Each of these associations has its own unique ways of being and its own sets of expectations for participants. Each has its own form of orthodoxy. The voluntary nature of a liberal society allows participants to choose their community.

What this means is that liberalism is not opposed to orthodoxy. It is opposed to a dominant and coerced form of orthodoxy. Liberalism’s genius is that it creates space for multiple orthodoxies without allowing any single one to reign unchecked. Ironically, it may allow orthodoxy to remain more purely orthodox. In the case of religion, as James Madison argued in his “Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments,” one must be free to worship as one chooses in order to truly worship. Government influence, he warned, risks corrupting “the purity and efficacy of religion,” transforming it into a tool for “upholding the thrones of political tyranny.” This amounts to “an unhallowed perversion of the means of salvation.” As one scholar has noted, Madison feared that government interference with religion would “harness the Church to serve governmental purposes rather than divine purposes. It thereby tempts the Church with a form of idolatry.” The paradox is that only in a liberal and pluralistic society can orthodoxy remain truly faithful to its own highest claims and ideals. 

The political philosopher Chandran Kukathas described these competing orthodoxies and associations as an archipelago: a series of somewhat illiberal islands floating in a sea of liberalism. These associations remain voluntary, and the barriers to exit are low. People are able to associate and disassociate how they choose, which makes these associations competitive. But competition isn’t the only thing that liberalism produces. It also produces compromise and cooperation across different associations. As we engage in all three, we begin to discover that we actually need each other; that we all matter. The late economist Julian Simon argued decades ago that the ultimate resource isn’t oil, gas, or some other natural resource. It’s us. It’s the ingenuity that emerges when we work together.

Jazz has been humorously described as a series of “wrong notes.” But others argue this is incorrect: there’s no such thing as wrong notes in jazz. That’s what makes it jazz. The sound of jazz music is dynamic, but often dissonant. It’s inventive and unwieldy. This is why it can be an acquired taste. There is a lot of improvisation, with each musician playing off of each other in a respectful give-and-take. It sometimes feels like it is going to descend into chaos, but the underlying chord structures and melodic motifs hold it together. By the time it’s over, you’re awestruck by the brilliant complexity of the piece, some of which was done on the fly. I would argue that if jazz were a society, it would be a liberal one.

Of course, this has been the point of some conservative critics. In Ideas Have Consequences, Richard Weaver described jazz as “the clearest of all signs of our age’s deep-seated predilection for barbarism.” And it’s true that jazz can sound unruly at first, especially compared to something like classical music. But beneath the surface is a deep, often invisible structure. Improvisation is the result of incredibly disciplined musicians acting within a number of musical constraints. Yet, the style of jazz allows for the display of practiced skill, mutual responsiveness, and shared but implicit norms. The result is not chaos: it is a living, breathing, negotiated order. (An order that Weaver himself came to recognize as preferable to the alternatives.)

Georgetown professor Paul Miller has noted that “Jazz emerged precisely because of the blurriness and fluidity of cultural boundaries—fluidity which nationalism [and identity politics] seeks to eliminate.” For Miller, “Nationalism is the identity politics of the majority tribe; identity politics is the nationalism of small groups.” The “cultural fluidity, intermingling, and change … was the essential precondition for jazz.” Cultural fluidity, intermingling, and change are the essence of a liberal, pluralist, commercial society. In the midst of competition, compromise, and cooperation, we learn to see the humanity in those who think differently. And we just might make some new friends along the way.