5/7 A Civil Society - POLARIZATION, OR, DIVERSITY WITHOUT TRUST

3.1 DIVERSITY WITHOUT TRUST

The United States 330 million strong population forms many groups. This associational life is a cultural distinctive of the country, observed early on in the eighteenth century by de Tocqueville, and recognized too in the research by Putnam, cited above, that saw America as a leading country for its strength of civil society. Groups, such as defined by political party, hobbies, interests, income brackets, faith, race, geography, age cohort, sports teams, provide an almost limitless combination of affiliations.

This has helped to explain American innovation. A modern society like America’s contrasts with rigid, traditional societies precisely because they “consist of a large number of overlapping social groups that permit multiple memberships and identities.” This creates bonding social capital, or what Fukuyama calls “weak ties”, but the opportunities for the sharing of information and ideas that beget new ones.

In Figure 1 we illustrate how these diverse groups might look. Some are smaller than others. Many overlap. Many do not. These groups co-exist because they are bound together by society-wide trust. This figure affirms the reality and social value of group diversity—tribes—within the generosity of society-wide trust. We also observe “fringe” groups, who have moved outside the norms of social trust.

In Figure 2, we see these same groups but without society-wide trust. Here the diverse groups are distinct, with nothing to join them together. They perhaps gravitate to form clusters of groups, as like attracts like. Here, a broader range of individuals is a threat. Such groups may now describe polarization: the existence of diverse factions and opinions in a country, where, without society-wide trust, co-existence is not possible.

Instead, as in Figure 3, we see that there are different forces that may keep disparate groups together. Trust is needed to bind different individuals together into groups, for the sake of a primitive sense of safety in numbers. If a society-wide trust cannot be found, groups will find another source of trust, or what Fukuyama describes as a “radius of trust”. Opposition to another group may help to be an identifier to such binding.

This is important when considering polarization. Tribal groupings of people are not, in and of themselves, a bad thing. It is actually a good thing—a social good that generates society-wide trust. However, when society-wide trust goes into decline, and there is not enough of it to contain all imagined groups at a national level, we experience polarization. Different groups become hostile to each other. Different opinions are perceived as a threat.

3.2 E PLURIBUM UNUM:
Ending Polarization Doesn’t Mean Ending Differences

Often, efforts to end polarization only contribute to this polarization. In the absence of society-wide trust, calls to end polarization often become calls to join a single group’s way of thinking. This bias is seen operationally too where, as Chris Stackaruk notes in The Philanthropy Chronicle, “Most pluralism nonprofits have progressive leanings and are normally hesitant to hire staff who do not share all their values.”

On the Left, this call to share the same beliefs is expressed as a call to join a diversity of backgrounds sharing the same opinion. A failure to adhere to this one particular set of opinions puts you on the “outside”, perhaps even as a hate-group. From this point of view parents can be labelled domestic terrorists for taking an interest in their local school boards, White people can be considered racist for existing, socially conservative religious beliefs are considered hate speech.

On the Right, such intolerance can be summed up in the car bumper sticker, “F*ck your feelings”, an unwillingness to engage with the wider citizenry.

Neither of these responses celebrates a diversity of opinions, which can only be afforded by the generosity of society-wide trust.

As previously stated, in more primitive societies a singular religious belief system has historically been one way of providing trust to combine clans. For the Left, a low religious attendance with high trust in federal government and national media, means secular state-centric solutions win their trust, especially for the protection of characteristics against attacks from their fellow citizen. These efforts to promote a new pluralism, or to tackle polarization, often make the fundamental mistake of forgetting that celebrating diversity means celebrating difference of opinion, not eradicating it.

On the Right, a strong faith affiliation and skepticism of federal government and national media can tend toward populism delivered by a Strong Man. Andrés Velasco, reflecting on the rise of populism in Latin America and elsewhere, suggests declines in trust are key to the rise of populism, because, “Populism is an approach to politics which denies the complexity of the world. As a result it tends to disqualify the legitimacy of other people’s opinions. Because if the world is simple, I’m right and others are wrong, which pretty soon leads to an erosion of democratic checks and balances.”

Bridge-building projects are useful too in helping individuals from a variety of backgrounds to meet, to dialogue, and to improve their understanding of a shared humanity. And yet this may not be enough to build society-wide trust. In-person facilitation perhaps works to build “seen” trust, but 330 million people cannot be facilitated into a discussion. What needs to be built is society-wide trust, which is fostered by supporting associational life and individual, community and local social capital and civic organizations that allow communities to access political and democratic apparatus at the local level. Critical to this is the need to de-escalate the arms race in political and philanthropic funds associated with the centralization of power and wealth.

However, these anti-polarization efforts can themselves be perhaps part of the problem. Usually funded by wealthy donors or a multinational corporation’s foundation, they are a source of super-charging the center.

Yuval Levin recommends a shift in emphasis for foundations to consider a “we the people” approach that assumes “the problems our society faces as problems for us all”. Sadly, this is an approach that “may not come naturally to the philanthropic sector in the United States. But they are the essential measures of civic engagement, social responsibility, and political renewal for the coming years.” Instead, a foundation’s attempts to monitor and evaluate free individuals and grassroots community groups into compliance with elite and usually left-of-center views, run the risk of further alienating communities who are living with the decline of social capital created by a super-charged center.

3.3 THE SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE

It is precisely to protect diversity of opinion that the Constitution allows for the separation of church and state.

This separation is often misapplied by some to assume the dominance of a secular state to which religion must be subjugated to. Yet what it expressly does not mean, as Tim Carney has pointed out, is “that government ought to discriminate against religious institutions” as the Supreme Court Justices believed in dissenting the ruling to award public dollars for funding of all schools, including religious ones, in Maine.

Yet, freedoms of conscience, assembly, speech, and religion were all established in order for the United States to allow for a diversity of sects and beliefs. Not just Protestant ones. Thomas Jefferson enacting a freedom of religion statute in Virginia was glad to see legislators acknowledge that the point of it was to protect “the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and Infidel of every denomination.”

So that the provision of separation was for two main priorities, as they relate to this report. Firstly, that there should not be one orthodoxy fused with the power, application, and adjudication of the state. Secondly, to separate church from the state, precisely in recognition of the need for a vibrant civil society to exist outside of the control of the state.

Separating church from state meant that America was, and continues to be, able to avoid the role of the state as “priesthood.” Having a fixed belief system, and one orthodoxy aligned with the state, creates a powerful role for those who interpret the application of this orthodoxy. While this mechanism worked for smaller societies, it is America’s ability to move beyond monochromatic belief and priesthood, to celebrate a diversity of beliefs and opinion outside of the control of the state from its founding, that has allowed it to become the country it is today.

Any group that seeks to use the power of the state to establish one true faith and orthodoxy policed by true believers or priesthood has violated the separation of church and state. A priesthood can, after all, be a group of academics, public health scientists, journalists, or the aristocracy of our time—celebrities—who guard right thinking and its application, excommunicating apostates in “cancel culture” as it relates to a new state religion of diversity. Likewise, it can just as easily be said of true believers in a President who wish to cancel apostates by calling them RINOs (Republicans in Name Only).

The separation of church and state is meant to avoid such ideological dominance, but rather to allow for a plurality of ideas. Therefore, there is room for groups of every persuasion to be involved in America’s civil, civic, and public life, and for this range of participants to inform policy discussion.

What the separation of church and state perhaps did not account for was a loss in religious belief or affiliation. While plural faith beliefs are accommodated for in the founding of America, today’s current decline in religious belief and faith affiliation is a new phenomenon. According to Our World In Data, interpersonal trust is so strongly correlated with religious affiliation, even after controlling for other characteristics, that religion is used a proxy for trust. In the absence of religious affiliation it is not clear if similar trust can readily be created by secular alternatives. Tim Carney argues, therefore, that, “The various assaults on religious liberty aimed at driving religion into solely the private sphere—out of the civic square, out of the marketplace, out of politics—need to end if we hope for civil society in American to have a chance.”

It does not, therefore, transgress this separation for a faith-group to be in receipt of public funds to provide welfare, public services, or schooling. As long as the state does not co-opt the “church” by making it an extension of the public sector forcing its adherents to defy freedom of conscience, and vice-versa, this is legitimate activity.

But what primarily needs to be borne in mind, is that the danger, the felt-need in separating church from state, was as much as to protect the vitality of civil society as it was the ability for the state to remain detached from it, even while benefiting from it. The pumping of federal or philanthropic grants to nonprofits should, therefore, not be used to disenfranchise faith-based groups.

When it comes to the limits of policy in the creation of social capital, we do well to remind ourselves of Fukuyama’s observation that national governments “do not have many obvious levers for creating many forms of social capital. Social capital is frequently a byproduct of religion, tradition, shared historical experience, and other factors that lie outside the control of any government.” Further, to heed his warning that governments “can have a serious negative impact on social capital when they start to undertake activities that are better left to the private sector or to civil society. The ability to cooperate is based on habit and practice; if the state gets into the business of organizing everything, people will become dependent on it and lose their spontaneous ability to work with one another.”

It is this lack of spontaneous ability to work with one another that is so clearly described above in the decline of society-wide trust. The growth of federal government, the growth of very unequal wealth accumulation (together, the center) and the supercharging of philanthropy and political funding to the center, have all worked to undermine the vitality of civil society. Collapse in society-wide trust and polarization, is the result.

In this light, the seemingly positive traits of higher rates of trust at the “small” and “local” level may in fact be a further dynamic in polarization. After all, 30 percent of Americans want their state to secede the Union at the same time only 38 percent of Americans value patriotism.

However, if the periphery is where the stocks of trust are, it is the starting point for America’s social capital recovery. The problem has described the solution, to which we now turn.