Mutual Service and the Language of Domination

This book attempts to celebrate both community and difference. I want to discuss our serving and defending one another without pretending that these communitarian practices bring unity to the global village or any other habitat. Bringing unity seems always to require silencing the so-called parts that do not fit the holistic vision, and I want no part of that. But avoiding community ignores the problem of lives of quiet desperation" shut-in singles, suicidal teenagers, homeless people" lives which are perhaps more desperate now than they were in Thoreau's time. I wish to attempt a Wolin-like stance toward the world—"taking care of people and things instead of using them up"—without relying on unity for a foundation.

Thoreau, who uses community to name such mutual service and defense, fears its collectivistic consequences, and often prefers to be left alone. Bataille, who wants no part of unifying arguments, sees taking care of people as a form of dominating them and seeks that different kind of solitude—an "apotheosis of alcohol and flesh"—that celebrates a using up of people and things. My task is to show how overcoming the urge to say that human beings, or subsets of them, are all the same leads arguments neither back to the atomistic prejudice of nineteenth century individualism nor ahead to the solitary ecstasy of avant-garde eruptions.

Communitarian arguments pose a major threat to radical individualism, but many of these arguments illustrate how right Bataille, and perhaps Foucault, are to berate mutual service as a form of domination, or humiliation. The celebration of difference demands a rejection of what Connolly calls "attunement." Thus, contemporary political theory in the West seems to offer choices that range from a flat refusal to serve and defend other people to caring for people in ways that dominate and humiliate them.

Thoreau refuses to serve others; Bataille exposes the domination of those who do not so refuse. Most people seem to embody both extremes: refusing and caring. We are caught in a bind between having to be individuals and having, as individuals, to care for the collectivity, or union. In other words, the state, which protects individuals as individual rights-bearers, requires them occasionally to make personal sacrifices for the collectivity. Government consequently fluctuates between refusing to provide services and providing services in ways that dominate and humiliate the recipients.

To illustrate this unhappy situation, I quote from an editorial in a Christian magazine. The one-page article appears to be a straightforward comparison of a "cash merit system to reward citizens" for acts of social conscience—in this case, agreeing to live in a racially segregated, "woodsy Chicago suburb," Oak Park—and Habitat for Humanity, an organization whose volunteers build and sometimes live alongside houses for the marginally poor, in this case in segregated urban areas "where no one wants to live."

Serving the Poor

Habitat for Humanity grants no-interest loans to its new homeowners, who devote one thousand hours of labor to their houses and the houses of others (accumulating "sweat equity"). "People [who volunteer for Habitat for Humanity] don't receive cash bonuses; rather volunteers like Jimmy Carter work long hours without pay." In this particular project "committed Christian couples mostly from middle-class backgrounds move into the neighborhood [on Chicago's west side] offering role models for the poor and bringing a social stability to the area." This language seems to cast urban dwelling as a form of missionary work, if not as a mission for the National Guard.

The article is designed to underscore the difference between two news reports of a Carter visit to Chicago on behalf of Habitat for Humanity in 1986. One reports Carter swinging a hammer in the slums; the other reports him attending a "dress-up affair" in Oak Park, the suburb known for its cash merit system of integration. The following excerpt describes the two events in earthly and heavenly terms.

Oak Park hopes to "fix" its society with a carefully controlled plan to change the envirnoments, and ulimately, the value systems of various minority groups. To accomplish that goal they rely on a powerful motivation: human greed. Their plan is creative and rational—an ecample of the kingdom of this world at its best.

Habitat for Humanity, in contrast, is working to produce a far more radical change among a smaller group of people. They desire to change not only the human environment, but the human heart. They believe it is not enough for people with resources to invite in well-screened representatives of minority groups.

Rather, people of resources must go, voluntarily, to the places of need, and give their time, and their sweat, and their families, and their love. Even greed is not a strong enough motivator to accomplish that sacrifice. It requires instead the Christian commitment of people willing to take a risk with no prospect of reward in this life—in other words, the kingdom that is not of this world.

This "ironic juxtaposition" contains words that darken the illuminating distinction between the two kingdoms. One can sense Pauline traces of Rousseau or Augustine, for whom the two "kingdoms" commingle within us all, at least for the time being.

The surface distinction in these illuminating paragraphs draws a line between liberal reciprocity in a contracted universe (if you move in, then we will pay you fifteen hundred dollars) and the communion of saints in an expansive universe. These are the so-called two worlds of Jimmy Carter, a tension between greed and love. But notice that the greedy, rational side is described as "creative," a "plan to change the environment" toward racial integration. This is the power of greed on its best behavior, courting communitarian ends. And notice that the loving, committed side is a "risk" taken "voluntarily" with no prospect of "reward." This is the sacrifice of love couched in the...