Posted 20 November 2002 - 02:26 AM
Communities exist because they have a reason to exist, some core of functions around which the affiliations that constitute a vital community can form and grow. When the government takes away a core function, it depletes not only the source of vitality pertaining to that particular function, but also the vitality of a much larger family of responses.
By hiring professional social workers to care for those most in need, it cuts off nourishment to secondary and tertiary behaviors that have nothing to do with formal social work. An illustration: In the logic of the social engineer, there is no causal connection between such apparently disparate events as the establishment of a welfare bureaucracy and the reduced likelihood (after a passage of some years) that, when someone dies, a neighbor will prepare a casserole for the bereaved family’s dinner. In the logic I am using, there is a causal connection, and one of great importance.
I am arguing ultimately from two premises, that the practice of a virtue has the characteristics of a habit and of a skill. People may be born with the capacity of being generous, but become generous only by practicing generosity. People have the capacity for honesty, but become honest only by practicing honesty.