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What It Means to be 98 Percent Chimpanzee: Apes, People, and Their Genes (review)

to incarceration for nonviolent offenders, that extending First Amendment rights to children is a bad idea because parents have a right and a duty to shape the educational environment of their children, and that all “stakeholders” in a corporation, including the employees and the local community, should be given a role in its governance. Expanding and modifying Emile Durkheim’s theory of rituals, he explores holidays and rituals as seedbeds of virtue and sources of social integration. He assesses the relative strength of on-line communities for meeting basic human needs and considers the virtues of “voluntary simplicity” for freeing people from consumerism and developing a richer, more psychologically satisfying inner life. He surveys and applauds the rediscovery and developing effort to integrate social norms into the study of law and economics. Lastly, Etzioni highlights distinctive features of the communitarian approach vis-à-vis social conservatism, cultural relativism, identity politics, and the “civil society thesis.” (Those who have read New Golden Rule will already be familiar with much of the terrain mapped by these distinctions.) Each of the essays collected here is thoughtful and well written, even if at times not entirely satisfying. Etzioni, for instance, notes criticisms and counterarguments to his positions but often stops short of really engaging them, content to make a brief response and then move on. More important than the merits of the particular essays, though, is the larger question of what they add up to. Etzioni rhetorically locates communitarianism between liberalism and social conservatism, but a fair-minded reader of The Monochrome Society might be forgiven for suspecting that it is simply an idiosyncratic blend of the two. Etzioni argues that communitarians have a more limited moral agenda than social conservatives and he at least implies that they countenance less government intervention than liberals. Besides splitting the difference, what is the position here? Communitarians themselves do not agree on a moral agenda or the proper role of government, and the practical implications Etzioni draws from communitarian principles are not really unique to communitarians. Further, the discussion seldom moves beyond the abstract to show these principles at work in actual communities. It’s hard to see, in the end, whether communitarianism is a genuine alternative to conventional positions or just a critique — however useful — of them.