Americans today learn a great deal about how to function as individuals, but not about how to work together. At the workplace, managers tell us to do our job and not to worry about the next guy. Within communities, even when we have the time to participate, it's not easy to determine what we might do with our neighbors, or how we might do it. Grassroots political organizations are becoming rare, leaving citizen participation in government to pollsters who tell politicians what we think without our ever talking to them directly. This is hardly what early Americans had in mind when they insisted that the "freedom of assembly" be included in the Bill of Rights.
"A community," St. Augustine observed, "is a group of people united by the common objects of their love." Building community, then, involves identifying these "common objects," or shared goals, and working together to achieve them. We build community to strengthen the things that we value--or, phrased differently, to promote the values that we share.
"Yes, but whose values?" some people ask today, as if they arrived from another planet, without reference to anyone but themselves. The founding citizens of the United States gave us clear answers to that question. In the Declaration of Independence, they insisted that we work together to preserve human equality --the rights of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," for each individual. They insisted that our Constitution include a Bill of Rights, detailing the freedoms that every citizen would enjoy. Today, most of us can recite the opening lines of the Declaration and express pride in the Bill of Rights, even if we can't recall every amendment. These are most certainly "common objects" of the "love" that all Americans share.
Our founding citizens also established the grounds on which they--and we--should work together in our communities and as a people. They defined these principles in the Preamble to the Constitution:
We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
If the major purpose of the Constitution was to define the structure and powers of the government that would enable "we the people" to achieve these goals, the Preamble was a statement of the shared values and goals that the government and the American people were expected to uphold.
Sadly, much of what is said about American values today flies in the face of these fundamental principles.
Many of us still talk about different racial, ethnic, and economic groups as if they were strangers in our midst, not part of "we the people," even though the entire force of American Constitutional history over two centuries has been to expand the document's conception of who is to be included in "the people." In 1789, it was white men. Under the Constitution today, it is everyone.
We're all for security--personal security and national secuity. We rally together when we believe our security to be threatened. Yet the Preamble of the Constitution talks about security not merely for ourselves and the nation, but "the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity"--that is, all future generations, as well as the present one. Despite this commitment, how many of us today feel that we have no obligation to anyone's children but our own?
Over the past two decades, we have heard that it's OK to "look out for No.1" without regard to other people. The Preamble calls for government and the people to work together to "promote the general welfare."
Protecting "us" against "them" has become an obsession for many groups in this society threatening a total breakdown of the culture. The Constitution was designed in the hope of creating "a more perfect union" among diverse localities and groups.
Almost every day we read about people and institutions that think that they're entitled to as much power as they can get, to do whatever they want. Under the Constitution, each succeeding generation was supposed "to establish justice."
The framers of the Constitution were painfully aware that a free society would face either anarchy or tyranny unless guided by a commitment to the public good. They understood that as conditions changed, the application of these principles would change. The principles themselves were to be timeless.
The citizen planning program that follows uses concepts from the Preamble to the Constitution to help neighborhood activists, government, and business leaders design real social contracts outlining mutual obligations to promote the general welfare of their communities. We are especially concerned to involve all citizens in the neighborhood in the discussion--tenants as well as landlords, public housing residents along with homeowners. They are all part of "we the people."
As a starting point for the discussion, we offer a generally worded new social contract--one that expresses our commitment "to promote the general welfare" and to "establish justice" in terms of preserving viable neighborhoods and promoting economic opportunity for everyone.
From there, we challenge participants to recognize that "we the people" in America means all members of a community, however and wherever they live--poor people as well as the middle- class and the rich; citizens of every color, nationality, and faith.
Then we ask participants to identity the conditions in their communities that threaten their ability to "secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity."
Based on their assessment of these conditions, we then help the participants develop social contracts specific to their own neighborhoods, defining how they can work with government and the private sector to promote the "general welfare" in relation to safety, the physical environment, children, and economic opportunity.
Once participants have drafted a social contract, we ask them to explore how it might build unity, a "more perfect union" in the neighborhood.
Finally, the participants define what they must do to "establish justice" as the fundamental principle guiding the social contract that they have drafted.
Americans are now searching for a shared set of beliefs to unite us as citizens without stifling freedom or destroying diversity.
That is what America's founders intended to give us in the Preamble to the Constitution.
As this program makes clear, the principles are as relevant now as they were over 200 years ago, and a renewed commitment to the social contract can help us keep them alive.
Edward Schwartz, President
Institute for the Study of Civic Values
July, 1992
"Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance
between us. The blessings in which you this day rejoice are not
enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty,
prosperity, and independence bequeathed by your fathers is shared
by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to
you has brought stripes and death to me."
--Frederick Douglass, "What to the Slave is July 4th," 1852
"It was we, the people, not we, the white male citizens, nor we,
the male citizens; but we, the whole people,who formed this
Union. We formed it not to give the blessings of liberty but to
secure them; not the half of ourselves and the half of our
posterity, but to the whole people--women as well as men."
--Susan B. Anthony, "On Women's Suffrage," 1873
"Education generates habits of application, of order, and the
love of virtue; and controls, by the force of habit, any innate
obliquities in our moral organization...Education, in like
manner, engrafts a new man on the native stock, and improves what
in his nature was vicious and perverse into qualities of virtue
and social worth."
--Thomas Jefferson, Report of the University of Virginia, 1818
"The charity visitor may say that every American man can find
work and is bound to support his family. He soon discovers that
the workingman, in the city at least, is utterly dependent for
the tenure of his position upon the good will of his foreman,
upon the business prosperity of the firm or the good health
of the head of it; and that, once work is lost, it may take
months to secure another place."
--Jane Addams, The Subtle Problems of Charity, 1899
"It is too early for politicians to presume on our forgetting
that the public good, the real welfare of the great body of the people,
is the supreme object to be pursued; and that no form of
government whatever has any other value that as it may be fitted
for the attainment of this object."
--James Madison, The Federalist Papers, 1787
"The Americans...are fond of explaining almost all the actions of
their lives by the principle of self-interest rightly understood;
they show with complacency how an enlightened regard for
themselves constantly prompts them to assist one another and
inclines them willing to sacrifice a portion of their
time and property to the welfare of the state."
--Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1833
"We believe that this class of American citizens should protest
emphatically and continually against the curtailment of their
political rights...We believe also in protest against the
curtailment of our civil rights...We especially complain against
the denial of equal opportunities to us in economic life...Common
school education should be free to all American children and
compulsory. High school training should be adequately provided
for all, and college training should be the monopoly of no class
or race in any section of our common country...We plead for
health--for an opportunity to live in decent houses and
localities for a chance to raise our children in physical and
moral cleanliness...And while we are demanding the rights
enumerated above, God forbid that we should ever forget to urge
corresponding duties upon our people: The duty to vote. The duty
to respect the rights of others. The duty to work. The
duty to obey the laws. The duty to be clean and orderly. The duty
to send our children to school. The duty to respect ourselves,
even as we respect others."
--The Niagra Movement Leading to the NAACP, 1895
"Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do
for your country."
--John F. Kennedy, "Inaugural Address," 1961
Following these questions, we offer specific examples of programs addressing neighborhood problems that presume a social contract. Can the leadership of the neighborhood build a comprehensive "social contract for the general welfare" on this basis?
--Residents agree to patrol the streets and watch out for each others' homes as part of a Town Watch organization.
--Residents work with the police and the courts in developing strategies to deal with crime and drugs as part of a community policing system and establish their own neighborhood justice system in cooperation with the courts to adjudicate minor juvenile offenses.
--Residents join a Clean Blocks Program whereby the City performs special trash collection in response to organized block cleanups and participate in a City waste recycling program.
--Residents work with the City and banks to develop a strategies for rehabilitation and occupany of vacant housing in the neighborhood and seek access to vacant land for community gardens.
--Parents work in partnership with the neighborhood school to insure that young people are doing their homework and that the teachers are meeting their educational needs.
--Residents cooperate with the City Recreation Department in developing and managing programs in area recreation centers and work with City anti-graffiti programs to find locations for former wall writers to paint murals.
--Neighborhood businesses agree to hire neighborhood residents and City job placement and training agencies agree to recruit trainees from neighborhood job banks.
--Neighborhood residents agree to volunteer in adult literacy programs aimed at helping disadvantaged members of the neighborhood improve basic civic and vocational skills.
"This picture of the consequences of disunion cannot be too
highly colored, or too often exhibited. Every man who loves
peace, every man who loves his country, every man who loves
liberty ought to have it ever before his eyes that he may cherish
in his heart a due attachment to the Union of America and be able
to set a due value on the means of preserving it."
--James Madison, The Federalist Papers, 1787
"Citizens who are individually powerless do not very clearly
anticipate the strength that they may acquire
by uniting together; it must be shown to them in order to be
understood... In politics men combine for
great undertakings, and the use they make of the principle of
association in important affairs practically
teaches them that it is their interest to help one another in
those of less moment...Political associations
may therefore may be seen as large free schools, where all the
members of the community go to learn the
theory of association."
--Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1833
"What we need in the United States is not division; what we need
in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United
States is not violence or lawlessness, but love and wisdom, and
compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice towards
those who still suffer within our country, whether they be
white or black."
--Robert F. Kennedy, 1968
"Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil
society. It ever has been and ever will be pursued until it be
obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit. In a society
under the forms of which the stronger faction may as truly be
said to reign as in a state of nature, where the weaker
individual is not secured against the violence of the stronger;
and as, in the latter state, even the stronger individuals are
prompted, by the uncertainty of their condition, to submit to a
government which may protect the weak as well as themselves..."
--James Madison, The Federalist Papers, 1787
"The American Constitution does resemble the Spanish Inquisition
in this: that it is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth
with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of
Independence, perhaps the only piece of practical politics that
is also theoretical politics and also great literature. It
enunciates that all men are equal in their claim to justice, that
governments exist to give them that justice, and that their
authority is for that reason just...It is the pure classic
conception that no man must aspire to be anything more than a
citizen, and that no man shall endure to be anything less."
--G.K. Chesterton, What I Saw in America, 1903
"White America must recognize that justice for black people
cannot be achieved without radical changes in the structure of
our society. The comfortable, the entrenched, the privileged
cannot continue to tremble at the prospect of change in the
status quo.
--Martin Luther King, A Testament of Hope, posthumous,
1969