The 'bad' Samaritan and the murder of community by the state

"In Robert Nisbet’s excellent book The Quest for Community: Nisbet predicted that, in a society without strong private associations, the State would take their place—assuming the role of the church, the schoolroom, and the family, asserting a “primacy of claim” upon our children. “It is hard to overlook the fact,” he wrote, “that the State and politics have become suffused by qualities formerly inherent only in the family or the church.” In this world, the term “nanny state” takes on a very literal meaning."

We see this all around us as the state picks up roles formerly handled by neighbors or voluntary associations.  Here are a few examples from this outstanding article by Gracy Olmstead who wrote the above paragraph as well:

 Woman arrested for letting 8yo play in park with cellphone while she worked nearby,

Man faces six months in jail because his son ditched Sunday School.

Mom charged with felony for  letting 7y.o. walk to park.

In each of these cases the 'Samaritan' in question percieved the child as threatened and instead of doing something constructive like finding their mother or in the case of the Sunday School desperado taking the child home because they knew his father, they called the police who promptly criminalized behavior that was utterly normal a generation ago when violent crime and other risks to life and limb were much more prevalent. Indeed, I used to walk four blocks to Kindergarten every day even in midwinter when it was dark.  Mom walked me the first day, introduced me to my teacher and after that I was on my own.  She would probably do prison time if the authorities caught wind of that today.

But the issue I want to focus on here is the loss of community:  neighbors calling the police rather than watching out for each other - assuming the quality of a stool pigeon or snitch rather than a neighbor.  Lets assume that each of these parents were acting recklessly - I don't think so but let's say for argument's sake they were.  Is the best neighborhood response getting them arrested? Prosecuted? Wouldn't a decent human being instead try to help the kid and talk to the parent?  You know, what we used to call being a good neighbor?

It seems to me that Robert Nisbet was wrong;  it's not only societies with weak civil cultures whose governments turn vindictively parental, it's societies with overly strong and invasive law.  When something is criminalized it is a signal to people that the only way to solve the problem is by calling in the criminal justice system.  As our omni(in)competent state has expanded it has displaced other gentler, more personal methods for solving problems.  With the best of intentions and in the pursuit of the right outcomes, the legalizers have inadvertently damaged many of the natural community processes that routinely delivered the outcomes they were seeking.  So in pursuit of the perfect, the statists are seriously damaging the good.

Look at it from a slightly different angle:  the statist destruction of civil society is a little like the debate over infant formula.  Everyone agrees that mother's milk is better than infant formula -  nutritionally, economically and relationally.  Infant formula was originally invented to provide nutrition to babies who for whatever reason couldn't get access to their mother's milk.  It was to fill a gap - solve a known problem.  But as time went on, the formula companies realized that they could make a lot more money if it was pitched as a 'convenient' replacement for mom's milk.  The result for a time until the alarm was sounded was lots of moms wasting lots of money giving their children substandard nutrition.  And in poor countries this occasionally turned deadly.  Likewise, the state's interventions into our families and relationships and communities were originally designed to deal with major issues that we couldn't deal with informally:  murder and mayhem, fraud, etc.  Today the state manages and criminalizes deviations from its prescriptions for our food, parenting, recreational substances, energy consumption, housing construction, garden choices, health insurance and a thousand and one other categories, with each intervention replacing more healthful, natural, free civil society with artificial, cruel, expensive state coercion.  And like overuse of infant formula, it kills.  Particularly in poor communities.

One of the reasons this happens  is because people, particularly in very strong, homogeneous communities don't realize the destructive displacement that they sponsor. They look at less well endowed communities with more diversity and less cohesion and they conclude that 'those people' need to be managed better by what they consider to be 'their' government. They don't realize that the mechanisms that govern that community may be different for a reason and that replacing them with state intervention won't likely make them better but just more bureaucratized and coercive.  It's funny, the left says it believes in diversity but demands that the state rule ever more detailed elements of people's lives in exactly the same way everywhere while the church lady right says it believes in community and local initiative but then demands that the state coercively ban behaviors that it doesn't like from the top down.

And all this well meaning but utterly self righteous coercion both right and left is killing our communities.  And turning us all into snitchful bad Samaritans.