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12. Little Platoons
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[ 228 ] 12Little Platoons Strongly bound communities, fulfilling complex public functions, are not creations of the state. They form because they must. Human beings have needs as individuals (never mind the “moral sense” or lack of it) that cannot be met except by cooperation with other human beings. To this degree, the often-lamented conflict between “individualism ” and “community” is misleading. The pursuit of individual happiness cannot be an atomistic process; it will naturally and always occur in the context of communities. The state’s role in enabling the pursuit of happiness depends ultimately on nurturing not individuals, but the associations they form. The text for this discussion is one of Burke’s best-known passages: “To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections . It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country, and to mankind.”1 I will be using the image of the “little platoon” to represent the essential relationship of social organization to the pursuit of happiness and, by extension, the relationship of the state’s social policy to the pursuit of happiness. We each belong to a few “little platoons.” The great joys and sorrows, satisfactions and preoccupations, of our daily life are defined in terms of them. This observation, I will assert, applies to everyone, wherever his little platoons fall within the larger social framework. Using a central government to enable people to pursue happiness becomes in this perspective a process of making sure that the little platoons work. The enabling conditions have to be met—in a properly constructed society, people must have access to material resources , safety, self-respect, and intrinsic rewards. But the little platoons of work, family, and community are the nexus within which these conditions are worked out and through which the satisfactions little pl atoons [ 229 ] that happiness represents are obtained. That being the case, “good” social policy can be defined only after we have answered the questions: How do little platoons form? How are they sustained? What makes them nourishing? Affiliation as the Mechanism for Forming Little Platoons When in part 2 I began to explore enabling conditions for the pursuit of happiness via Abraham Maslow’s needs hierarchy, I observed that the third of the needs, for intimacy and belongingness, was also a resource; in effect, it is the master resource whereby human beings in society go about seeing that the other needs are met. The label I will give to this mechanism is “affiliation.” Here, too, Burke has distilled the essence of what I mean: “Men are not tied to one another by papers and seals. They are led to associate by resemblances, by conformities , by sympathies.”2 The last two chapters presented an elaborated illustration of af- filiation. Parents, teachers, and (in their turn) the children were engaged in a tacit, complex process. Each parent had certain individual interests. So did each prospective teacher. The result was not just the meeting of those particular interests, but something more. The little platoon called “community” had been enriched, with positive results that were more than the sum of the educational and professional outcomes . This was no accident, but a characteristic result when small groups of people have individual problems that can best be solved by gaining the voluntary cooperation of others—or in other words, when small groups engage in voluntary affiliations through the force of individual circumstance. We are now in a position to talk about affiliation more systematically. affiliations as small steps An affiliation behavior may be one whereby one person forms new relationships with others (by marrying or moving to a particular town or neighborhood). It may consist of an effort to alter an existing environment (circulating a petition, or forming a neighborhood block [54.224.90.25] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 13:21 GMT) [ 230 ] toward the best of all possible worlds watch). Sometimes it means leaving relationships that are unsatisfactory (getting a divorce or quitting a club). But the word “affiliation” probably tends to evoke too many of these formal types of affiliation and not enough of the small acts of affiliation that make up the larger ones. The places you shop, the friends you choose to see a lot of, the relationships you have with coworkers, the ways you spend your...