Address by the Archbishop of Canterbury to the Society of local authority chief executives seminar on 'Community, Governance and Moral Responsibility'
Building Better Communites - The Challenge of Solidarity amidst Diversity
1. I am delighted to be with you today and to have this opportunity to address you. The Church in its manifold forms and local government have much in common. That may surprise you but it is true in at least two respects. First, we both cover every inch of this country. That gives us both a pretty well informed view of what is happening to different people in different places, and of their hopes and fears as we move towards the end of the 20th Century. Second, we are both concerned for the communities which we serve and wish to promote their best interests materially, culturally, spiritually and socially.
2. From a personal point of view I am pleased to be with you because as vicar, teacher, Diocesan Bishop of Bath and Wells and now as Archbishop of Canterbury, I have had many different contacts with Chief Executives, including some of those in this room. I have been deeply impressed by your commitment to making local government work for the benefit of the people and trying to achieve coherence where there could so easily be chaos. I assure you I know the feeling!
The Fragmentation of Community
3. Let me begin with that slippery but crucial word "community". It is quite easy to deride the woollier uses of this term. References to 'the community' may sometimes suggest a wholly artificial coherence or homogeneity which is out of touch with reality. Whatever community may be these days, it is certainly nothing like 19th Century communities in rural England. Today, a geographical 'community' may involve only a very loose sense of commonality between people of radically different class, income, and interests. In a much more mobile age, many will work outside the geographical area and may also pursue most of their leisure interests and even their religious interests, if they have any, in a variety of different places other than their own neighbourhood. Communities of interest may form around enthusiasms and hobbies which, in the age of the Internet, may extend across national boundaries, let alone extend beyond the local neighbourhood.
4. This is not to say that there is no such thing as community any more, but it is to suggest that community identities are becoming very complex and any one individual may identify with a wide variety of different kinds of geographical, institutional and interest-based communities at any one time. The pluralist theory of community is also oversimplified: namely, that even if geographical community is out, society can be redefined as a plurality of definable community groups such as the white community, the black community, the Asian community, the gay community and so forth. But insofar as the word is used to imply a substantial level of coherence or homogeneity and seeks to define the whole person as belonging to one group over and against the rest of the population, this pluralist theory of community is also deeply suspect. Most people's community identity these days is many-layered and complicated. Tastes have splintered, and the gap between different groups and sub-cultures can yawn widely.
5. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Close-knit and homogeneous communities have their limitations and frustrations as well as strengths, perhaps particularly communities which form in a defensive way over and against a threat from other people or mainstream society. For example, I myself much prefer churches which are outward-looking and see themselves as part of the society to which they belong rather than inward-looking communities, seeing themselves as separate and maintaining their own purity by keeping the outside world at arm's length. More generally, we can surely find great richness in the diversity of human beings and indeed of the natural, built and cultural environment in different parts of the country. There are many global forces tending towards a rather dull uniformity - after all, fast-food chains and by-passes and used plastic bags dumped on beaches look the same everywhere. So to preserve and nurture what is distinctive about a particular place or institution is surely one of the tasks of local government. Indeed, it is because of your work that, for example, more of England does not look like a characterless car park decorated with Bako houses. In these and other respects, distinctive character and diversity can be good.
6. But of course, diversity can also be associated with the fragmentation of community and bring dangers, too. And this brings me to the challenge in the title of my address 'Building better communities'. If 'community' has something to do with commonality, with sharing similar values, and being bound together despite our differences, how may we construct better communities?
7. The subject of your seminar gives us a vital clue. You use the key phrase 'moral responsibility'. For if our society in all its diversity is not in an important sense a moral community, we are in big trouble. I do not mean that everybody should be expected to agree on all kinds of contentious moral and ethical issues - how could I be an Archbishop in the Church of England if I believed such a thing? What I mean is that, however complex people's different community networks may have become, it is essential that there remains a robust level of commitment to the common good. You will know that 'to seek the common good' has been an injunction at the heart of the Book of Common Prayer down the centuries.
8. This is shared by other Churches too. On 21 October, the Roman Catholic Bishops of England and Wales published a document called The Common Good summarising the Social Teaching of successive Popes, and the Social Teaching is indeed a most impressive exposition of fundamental Christian beliefs as they translate themselves into the way in which we order our society and behave towards other human beings. In the Christian tradition, we can only fulfil ourselves as people by loving our neighbours as ourselves, by recognising the inter-dependence of individuals within the wider human society, and taking our responsibilities towards other people at least as seriously as our responsibilities towards ourselves.
9. By far the most important place where these basic human and civic values are taught is in the family where the strong and grown-up live out their responsibilities to the young and inexperienced and weak; where children learn that the human love on which the psychological security of the child can be based involves faithfulness, reliability, self-giving as well as self-fulfilment. The family is where love is bound up with the making of moral choices for the good of others and where inter-dependence is cherished. Discipline and love are not opposites, but allies in the common task of healthy human nurture in a context of inter-dependence.
10. For this reason, the cult of the 'individual' has to be challenged sharply. You will remember that during the '80's, some versions of morality tended to equate morality with individualism. Self-interest was put forward as the way to serve others. The Churches were not alone in distrusting this assumption but they were prominent in doing so. That is why the Church of England report Faith in the City incorporated a fundamental challenge to laissez-faire and individualistic philosophy. It insisted upon the recognition of inter-dependence, and on reaching out to the large numbers of people being marginalised and excluded from mainstream society in the deprived areas of our cities. And that is why the Roman Catholic Bishops' confident reassertion of the central concept of the common good is so thoroughly welcome.
11. One of the greatest challenges of the new Millennium is how we are all to find effective ways of expressing human solidarity in an age of increasing diversity, choice and individualism. For these can degenerate into fragmentation and the loss of social cohesion. One of the paradoxes of our age is surely that when communications are so sophisticated, the level of isolation and loneliness is possibly worse than ever. Let me offer an illustration. A few months ago I visited a Church Urban Fund project in Peckham in south-east London, called PECAN.
One of the things that this project does is simply knock on every single door in the neighbourhood, find out who lives there and invite them to join in local discussions about how particular kinds of training might enable them to re-enter the labour market or some form of local voluntary action. The PECAN volunteers found that these contacts were sometimes virtually the only social contact that some people on the estates had had for years, and participation in PECAN courses was for many a re-entry into society by people who had virtually disappeared as members of society altogether. No doubt these are extreme cases, but they reflect widespread tendencies towards social fragmentation and exclusion which need to be tackled vigorously in the name of human solidarity.
12. Here, then, is our central dilemma: when increasing diversity threatens to bring social fragmentation, how can we sustain and build up what we hold in common as human beings? What are the prospects? I shall start by considering some ominous, negative factors.
Dangers to the Common Good
13. First is the nightmare of social exclusion. The gap between the poorest and richer parts of our society has increased, even if there is a great deal of mobility between the two. Only those determined to ignore the evidence will deny that there are significant sections of our society living in circumstances which should not be tolerated. The concentrations of unemployment and deprivation of all kinds in particular districts and even wards are as extreme as, perhaps more extreme than, ever before. There are now something like 650,000 unemployed young people between 16 and 21 and substantial numbers of these have not only parents but also grandparents who have never had any regular employment. Many priests can point instantly to families where employment is a faint memory.
14. Another form of exclusion is that of being excluded from school communities - a trend which has sharply risen over the last 18 months or so. Let me assure you that I am not going to defend school bullies or the minority of disruptive children who wreck school communities through their wilful behaviour, bad language and bad manners. I hold to firm discipline allied to caring teaching. Nevertheless, children who are excluded from school for whatever reason are a problem for us all because we know how strong is the correlation between school exclusion and a subsequent career of delinquency and crime. Excluded and marginalised people, especially frustrated young males, have a way of biting back in spectacular fashion. Exclusion as a tactic, without a strongly resourced strategy for helping those youngsters back along the road of self-respect and reintegration in society, would surely prove disastrous. At the same time, much of the provision for young people through the Youth Service has been weakened over the years by cuts. If we fail to address with real urgency, and in a spirit of human solidarity, the vast problems being stored up in the form of angry, disappointed young people who feel that mainstream society has no time or place for them, we shall reap a bitter harvest.
15. A second major set of problems beset the family unit. At its best, and there are plenty of good examples around, it is the most important seedbed of human solidarity and inter-dependence. However, there are some statistics for us to worry about. I know that in some cases the family unit may become a prison for those subjected to abuse and tyranny within the family. But for the most part, it is hard to overstate the pain and hurt and psychological damage which is inflicted on people who are close to family break-up. Common sense and experience tell us that in general children need the love and guidance of both father and mother, that they are wounded by family conflict and divorce.
I know that the causes of family breakdown are many and complex. But I believe they include much greater sexual licence and a philosophical tendency to place self-fulfilment and pleasurable consumption above moral responsibility to others and faithfulness to one's family obligations. I recently visited the impressive St Basil's project in Birmingham. I was told that the problem of homelessness among young people is getting worse, and that the age of homeless young people is getting lower. Almost every young homeless person I talked to there had lost their home as a result of break-up, violence or other kinds of abuse in their family background. This illustrates the difference that effective and loving parenting can make. Parenting should surely be seen as a fundamentally important calling and duty requiring the most careful preparation, not least at school, and the strong support of the wider society.
16. Putting together the two trends I have mentioned so far - social exclusion and family breakdown - you will know, as the authorities at the forefront of the State's contribution to care in the community, that for many vulnerable people these days 'the community' can be a lonely, tawdry and inhospitable place. The strength of informal caring networks can be patchy and unreliable. And the need to support and supplement them raises sharp questions about society's moral capacity and willpower in an increasingly privatised world.
17. My third area of concern is actually linked to the others. It is the waning of belief in a code of shared moral values which can bind society together. I have often talked about the privatisation of morality, whereby what is good and right becomes seen as no more than a matter of individual opinion. This undermines codes and standards which rest on a commonly held understanding of the common good. It tends to replace a positive emphasis on mutual responsibility and accountability and love of neighbour with a negative and minimalist view that anything which does not directly and obviously harm another person is all right. If this tendency goes too far, people increasingly rely on the external compulsion of the forces of law and order rather than on an internalised moral code, so that society finds itself devoting more and more resources to the security forces and security measures and to the punishment of offenders, while the crime rate soars higher and higher. The sad truth is that if the internal moral code of ordinary citizens progressively collapses, even massive increases in the apparatus of security and punishment are to little avail. Ours is by no means the worst country in the world in this regard, and yet I think we all recognise enough of these trends in our own society to make us seriously anxious for the future. Privatised morality must be challenged and rolled back in the new Millennium.
18. Finally, and again linked to these other negative factors, I detect a considerable level of pessimism about society's capacity to do anything about these problems. There is considerable humility among the political parties, which is good, but bordering on fatalism and negativism, which is not so good, as to how Governments can do all that much to address many of these challenges. No doubt it is good that some of the cruder nostrums of direct government intervention or municipalisation have been exploded. We must, however, avoid the sort of abandonment that one sometimes sees in the United State of America where most middle-class people pull out of the city centres and head off for the suburbs, pulling up a psychological drawbridge behind them and leaving so-called 'doughnut' cities with middles which hardly belong any longer to the mainstream society and are left as sinks of deprivation, crime and drug abuse. I don't believe any of us want that kind of future. Long before frustration builds into despair, and anger subsides into resignation, we must act by drawing upon the wellsprings of goodwill that exist in this country to challenge timidity or fatalism.
19. I am also aware that the morale of local authorities has suffered as a result of what they see as a marked diminution of their powers in favour of central government and quangos. I know it has not been a happy time, overall, for many local authorities. In the experience of many local Churches, the key to addressing so many social problems through vigorous partnerships is strong civic leadership. And I worry about the future of strong, local civic leadership when the prestige and attractiveness of service in local government has been markedly reduced.
Faith, Hope and Love: the Remoralisation of Society
20. I have so far painted a pretty grim picture of some of our contemporary problems. But as someone whose whole system of belief is grounded in faith, hope and love, you will not expect me to leave it there. There are many good things to build on in developing our governance according to principles of moral responsibility. Some of the foundations are already in position and firmly established. Let me rehearse some of these and thereby suggest some of the building blocks with which to construct better communities. Many of these ideas will be very familiar to you but it is often the most obvious ideas to which we need to return.
21. First, both at national and local level, government can surely regain a realistic level of confidence about its role. I am not among those who continue to knock everything Governments do. They cannot solve all problems, but they can give an important lead in identifying need, in trying to take a strategic overview of social priorities, and in pulling together and enabling a wide range of agencies and resources to help society give expression to human solidarity and other moral aspirations. Why should we take a defeatist attitude when we can point to such extraordinary achievements as the National Health Service, the land use planning system, public libraries, sanitation and public health measures in our history? We know that many local crime prevention projects based on a partnership approach can work impressively - if only so many of them were not frantically scrabbling around the whole time trying to find the money to keep going. If a significant portion of the resources now bestowed upon punishment and security were to be invested in imaginative partnership schemes to reduce crime, I myself have no doubt that the results would be beneficial, although I know it is much easier said than done. We know that many schemes which take a comprehensive approach to the regeneration of deprived areas and council estates can work well and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, for instance, have done useful work in analysing and marshalling what we know about effective local strategies. Indiscriminate pessimism about these matters is unrealistic. And at least issues about the proper distribution of power between centre, regions and local authorities are firmly on the agenda of political debate.
22. Take another vital topic: housing. In an address I gave to the Chartered Institute of Housing last year, I pointed out that there is a substantial convergence of informed opinion as to how housing problems can be tackled effectively. These include the need for a healthier and decent quality private rented sector, kick-started by purposeful Government intervention; an onslaught on housing scarcity for people at the bottom of the heap; a mix of tenures and types of social housing, avoiding excessive concentrations of poverty; continuing downward pressure on tax breaks for most owner-occupiers, and a redeployment of those resources to more sensible priorities. There is strong support for action on the Housing Benefit poverty trap, and for full-blooded commitment to the regeneration of the deprived urban areas involving strong voluntary sector participation as well as public and private agencies. I am not trying to say that this can happen easily, but I am objecting strongly to any assumption that it cannot be done if we set our minds and wills to it. It will take fire in our bellies, and I believe that the Christian Churches should be among those continuing to supply some of that fire.
23. Secondly, I want to point out that the challenges of the environment are one of the strong long-term forces tending towards the remoralisation of society. This may seem a large claim, but long-term environmental challenges are a strong reminder of our inter-dependence as a human family. Just as the land use planning system enables all kinds of individual and commercial ambitions to be weighed against the common good in a broader sense, so the threat to our common future and those of our children and grandchildren, will surely drive us to pay increasing attention to the common good in wider spheres of life. Here again, governments at central and local level cannot possibly rise to the challenge of sustainability without the involvement of all kinds of other social actors, consumers, families and individuals. We all have a part to play and we cannot shuffle off the responsibility on to somebody else, but at the same time governments elected to represent the common good have a unique responsibility to help define the challenges and give a lead and pull action together across many different fronts. When I go into schools I am struck by the interest shown by children and young people in their environment. Surely those concerned with the Millennium celebrations could well tap this fruitful source of goodwill?
24. Nor should we give up on the remoralisation of society in a wider sense. There have surely been plenty of social and moral upheavals in our history, and there will be more in future, but it is wrong to see moral decline in a simplistic and linear way. The experience of the 19th Century showed how some of the moral bonds of society were made stronger, not least under the influence of religious revival. In our own time, my sense is that many people who have peered over the abyss of fragmented and privatised morality are drawing back and that the common good could be due for a comeback! I am, for instance, pleased that in a number of spheres of life, ethics and morals are being made explicit and written down in codes. It is possible to see the need for these as a sign of moral decay, but the impulse to write these codes is a sign of moral life and the act of doing so is a process of repossessing the underlying moral assumptions and ensuring that they cannot be ignored or swept aside in future. I believe that parliamentary life will emerge the stronger from the experience of the Nolan Committee and that out of the problems of low public esteem may come something better. Similarly, I believe that business enterprise will emerge the stronger and the more secure in public esteem as a result of the spread of statements of business ethics.
25. The complexity and fragility of much contemporary family life is too multi- dimensional a subject to try to address properly now. Here, too, I find aspects for cautious optimism as well as some anxiety. Despite enormous economic and social changes, roughly four out of five children currently live in a two-parent family. It remains humbling to see how many people will still give up so many of their own dreams and opportunities to care for a dependent relative, a contribution incomparably greater than anything that state agencies can possibly supply. There are enormous numbers of well off and fit elderly people with much to give. There are strong and widespread stirrings of the national conscience about the responsibilities of parenting, its vital role in transmitting the values of a civilised society and the need to support it. Yes, some of this stirring may seem rhetorical or unfocused but a widespread recognition of the need is the necessary first step and can lead on to significant cultural and practical changes if we stick at it. I sense a reaction against the more extreme philosophies implying that personal self-fulfilment is the supreme goal of life. The current emphasis on responsibilities linked to rights and the inter-dependence of all of us together is I think fundamentally healthy.
26. I am particularly concerned that the perils and injustice of social exclusion should be integrated as part of contemporary debate about morality and about the good society. Some moralists would prefer not to talk about it, but I can assure you that the Churches will not let the matter go. So far as we are concerned, the kind of issues addressed ten years ago by the Faith in the City Report, and more recently by the Roman Catholic Bishops of England and Wales and their Report The Common Good, are here to stay. I am at least cautiously confident that there are sufficient traditional and cultural forces supporting social cohesion and a sense of inter-dependence in this country that the American-style doughnut cities, horrific inner-city problems and crime will not be allowed to develop here; but this remains one of the foremost moral, political and economic challenges for all of us and we need to work hard to keep it at the forefront of public attention.
27. As a Christian leader, I have no doubt in describing all these issues taken together as a spiritual challenge, not simply technical or even simply moral. Moral precepts are essential but an inert rule book is not enough. They need energising by what I have referred to as fire in the belly. They depend on belief about what really matters in life, and what it is all for. They depend on the love of life, the love of neighbour and, I would add, the love of God that impels people to go the extra mile in wrestling with difficult challenges for the common good. Hence, far from religion being peripheral to our fundamental concerns and well-being, it is essential to them.
28. Paul Tillich, one of the greatest theologians of this century, once described true religion as 'ultimate concern'. In a famous sentence he defined religion as 'opening up the depths of man's spiritual life, which is usually covered up by the dust of our daily life and the noise of our secular work'. Later in the same book (The Theology of Culture) he argues that 'religion is the substance of culture'. He meant by that that the religious spirit, or religious dimension in culture is so important - however indefinable it is - that to lose it is to destroy community. May I urge you as leaders in your own communities to affirm religious groups, especially churches, in your own community building. They should be part of the partnership, with you, in seeking to address the manifold ills and opportunities of our day. Let us together seek to build better communities.
29. I conclude with the thought that, while it is a mistake to moralise without reference to practical realities, it is an even greater mistake to think that governance or any other dimension of human society can be severed from morality. Local government depends crucially on the sense of responsibility of ordinary citizens, and on their commitment to the common good, whatever their differences in age, class or culture. The Churches are your partners in seeking to promote the common good, in our respective spheres, and I trust that partnership will continue to thrive in the years ahead.