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Change, Community and Subsidiarity

Philip Camara, co-convenor of Subsidiarity Movement InternationalMarch 13, 2010Some analysts wonder if it is possible to use the principle of subsidiarity in acountry like the Philippines amidst the claim that communities do not anymore

exist, most especially in the urban areas. The thinking further goes to honorautonomy, particularly of communities, they and it have first to exist.

Clearly, they believe that modernism and a modern state have no space for thetraditional aspects and values of a community.

While our day to day experience in Metro Manila will bear out some truth in theabove view, the question arises: does Subsidiarity require traditional communities to thrive? I do not believe so.David Round, A New Zealander columnist in his March 7, 2010 blog has this to sayabout traditional community life:

like the life of anyone in a small simple close-knit community, one which is,by our standards, without privacy, intellectual curiosity or freedom. Inevitably, in any village where people live next to each other and spend all their wakinghours together, everyone knows everyone elses business, and private life is impossible. Private thought, different from everyone elses, is impossible. Freedom, as we understand it, is impossible, for social cohesion requires adherence totraditional ways and loyalty to traditional leaders. Any deviation from the norm is actually threatening to the community. Consequently freedom of thought andintellectual curiosity cannot exist either. Life there is, by our standards, both extremely constricting and extremely boring.

Everything comes at a price. Strong communities are excellent things. But the pr

ice of community is the loss of the individual. This is in the very nature of things. Those who sing the praises of simple happy community life often display aconsiderable degree of condescension and even hypocrisy. They would be horrifiedat the suggestion that they might live that way themselves. It is an ideal theyhave no intention of trying; it is something for other, lesser folk. If for a second they entertain the possibility of living that way, it would have to be asone of the leaders, vested with traditional and unquestioned authority, not as one of the common herd.

Many times we see this view displayed as a defense of the shift since the 16th century from community to individualism and the formation of the nation-state. Inbetween the nation-state and the individual are intermediary organizations noti

onally segregated by spheres of politics, economics, and culture. In the modernworld, there is no quarter given to community. Most societal power is shared between those spheres and only the crumbs are given to the households. Yet, all life springs from the households, in the form of production, consumption, taxes, ideas, cultural works, and new human beings. It is generally, in the households that the individuals are recharged to perform. Without the household, the individual could not sanely exist for long.

Given the primordial role of the individual acting within institutions the community of households are nothing more than shared space, a shared common area andshared infrastructure maintained by different institutions that have operating manuals and need hardly any community interaction to keep moving well.

What is the vision of those who espouse Subsidiarity as an organizing principlewhere power over function is devolved to the lowest feasible conscious unit ? In other words, some tasks are best carried out by individuals, some by household

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, others by groups of households sharing the same territory, and still others bytheir government representatives and/or agencies, some state, some national.

SMI believes the following:- Way too much power over functions have been removed from households and network of households sharing space and facilities to the detriment of a just, more prosperous and equitable society;

- Practicing the organizing principle of Subsidiarity does not presuppose the existence of traditional communities. In fact, none of the characteristicsof what Mr. Round describes in a traditional community are a prerequisite for subsidiarity to be practiced. As long as there are households (and there will behouseholds until Kingdom comes) and as long as households share a common territory (and there will be shared territory until we succeed in discombulating ourselves) then practicing Subsidiarity is not only possible but desirable;

- Beyond the community of households sharing an accessible common territory with its attendant infrastructure lies a whole range of supra organizationsthat too can be integrated with this basic subsidiarity-practicing unit: village

government, school boards, health bodies, peace and order councils, disaster management councils, etc. At least in the Philippines, it is very obvious that allof those front line organizations are extremely anemic because real power andbudgets are under powerful politicians and their allies who control national, centralized agencies.

- Our typical middle class residential experience is that of sharing space with neighbors in enclosed subdivisions or same-income condominium buildings.Here, there is privacy, and really very little community interaction except maybe for the monthly request for dues payment and reading the report of the officers. But the fact is common space and management is shared. Therefore, the opportunities for practicing Subsidiarity are already present and some of which are realized through the residential associations. But typically, the associations jus

t end there. They have no more upward hierarchy but yet you could imagine the very interesting possibilities if there were federations of homeowner associationswithin Barangays, the first tangent of community government interaction. Why arent there? Only because we do not honor the principle of subsidiarity.

- In fact, the likely cause of having no federations of residential associations is precisely the fear by the powerful that power will immediately haveto be shared with these bodies. If Barangay residential association federationswere further federated by cities, so will the power of Mayors have to be shareddue to the increased accountability mechanisms.

- Without subsidiarity the natural order of things under our system of superiority (where the few control the many as well as the budgets) is what wesee today: corruption at the top, helplessness and hopelessness at the bottom.

- With subsidiarity the life blood returns to the household and the network of households giving life and strength to simple but doable things like solid waste management, peace and order, utility service management, etc. But more important than any of that is the reclaiming of space, of identity, of initiative, of a community building that Fr. Horacio de la Costa dreamed of connecting tocommon goals (national) and recapturing the bureaucracy.

SMIs vision of shared power under the organizing principle of Subsidiarity willhopefully elicit the support of the gate-keepers and status-quo power wielderswho somehow still think that the Philippines can still be fixed by better instit

utional operating manuals, maybe a better basic law of the land, good governancepractitioners, etc. etc. but never to question the colonial-era organizing principle of superiority itself.

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As Bob Dylan sang in the 60s :

How many years can a mountain existBefore it is washed to the sea?Yes, n how many years can some people existBefore theyre allowed to be free (from poverty)?

Yes n how many times can a man turn his headPretending he just doesnt see?The answer, my friend, is blowin in the wind,The answer is blowin in the wind.

Recent statistics of increasing OFWs, poverty rates, infant mortality, NPA / Muslim insurgencies (>50,000), malnutrition, preventable deaths, joblessness tell the story of our state, organized for the benefit of the powerful, failing itspeople.

Indeed, its been 489 years since the installation of our colonial, top-down, pinatulo, trickle down, resource-and-people-exploiting governance system. When w

ill it end? The answer is blowin in the wind.