-Make a principled stand against expanding or creating programs which go around such local relationships by creating a direct relationship between the state and the individual.

-Try to reduce dependance on such vehicles by, as much as possible, forgoing available services of that sort in favor of relationship-based help.

Thus, if a family or community comes together to support their own elderly as much as possible rather than relying on a medicare-paid nursing home, they are doing their own small part to return to a more human society. When people get together to help another family through an illness, unemployment, or disability, they restore a more community-based society.

Obviously, though, although these kind of things are good for us, they don’t get us any closer to reducing the state-individual relationship on a wider level. It seems to me that it would take a very long time (or some sort of catastrophic break-down after which people rebuild) to change that sort of thing, if only because people have not been factoring it into their life choices for so long. As Eddie says, few of us find the prospect of having our in-laws (or often even parents) live with us. (I fear I’ll eventually have a few family members living with us long term, but I’m not looking forward to it.) In novels from 100+ years ago, one often reads people remarking that, “You don’t just marry the woman/man; you marry the family.” People haven’t been thinking that way for a long time, and indeed, many of us pretty clearly thought, “Hey, I’m only marrying her — we’ll just have to see the family once or twice a year.”

Social justice and human rights begin at home, with morality.

If Cavanaugh is right about the nature of the modern state, then it would seem the thing to do would be to oppose the state and seek to limit its power however possible. The last thing you would want to do would be to give it more control over more areas of life.

I would add this: if a social contractarian approach can mimic the common good, it does so best when it uses its natural scale advantage to enact a form of social insurance.

That seems to be a fairly plausible partial explanation to me. Unfortunately, I don’t think we will ever be able to isolate that factor out of the many dramatic changes that have taken place in the U.S. since 1935. It could be argued that Social Security is a symptom more than a cause of American individualism. Although, the prospect of living with my in-laws makes me sometimes feel that it’s not completely a loss that we do not live in closer proximity; a chance for redemptive suffering lost, I suppose.

It is not possible that one of the reason mediating institutions have broken down is precisely because their functions have been taken over by the State?

While repeating the above “who said anything about abolishing social security”, I can’t help asking: What exactly is “simply wrong” about expecting individuals, families and communities to plan for the retirement of those within those groups?

First off, one of the reasons that we’re having this conversation these days is because somewhere along the line we dropped the idea that families were expected to take care of their own. One of the biggest differences at work between the Indian and US-born members of our team is that all of the Indians I know live in 3-4 generation homes. It’s pretty much expected in most more traditional societies that when the parents reach an age where they no longer work, they’ll circulate among their children’s families if they don’t have the money (or inclination) to live on their own off their savings.

Rightly or wrongly, our society has nearly completely dropped that in favor of a much more individualistic societal organization — and so we have the idea that if you don’t have massive savings (it seems like I often hear that people my age will need a 401k valued at around 1mil by retirement) you’ll be either relying on the government or destitute.

So if we’re going to get outside the current paradigm and avoid all nationalistic, gnostic, calvinist and individualist tendencies, we’d expect people to have enough children to support them in their old age and then expect extended families and communities to communally support all those who were unable to have children — or whose children were unable to support them.

Who’s talking about eliminating Social Security?