What Social Entrepreneurs Can Learn from Wyatt Earp

by Nathaniel Whittemore

category: Dissent

Published May 05, 2009 @ 12:38PM PT

The image of the romantic Western hero is not unlike the image of the social entrepreneur. They are both deeply moral visionaries who march to the beat of a different drum and are not afraid to make their own rules. People who make the world around them, rather than taking it as is.

But for whatever truth both of these images contain, their more cinematic qualities can also mislead. In a brilliant column in the New York Times today, conservative commentator David Brooks writes about how the Republican Party has misunderstood "rugged individualism" and lost a sense of community and "civic order" that he asserts most Americans cherish.

Brooks points out that John Ford, in his estimation the greatest of all Western directors, did not tell stories of John Wayne-style individuals but of communities. And he wonders about the position that has left the Republican Party. It's worth quoting at length (emphasis mine):

Today, if Republicans had learned the right lessons from the Westerns, or at least John Ford Westerns, they would not be the party of untrammeled freedom and maximum individual choice...

They would begin every day by reminding themselves of the concrete ways people build orderly neighborhoods, and how those neighborhoods bind a nation. They would ask: What threatens Americans’ efforts to build orderly places to raise their kids? The answers would produce an agenda: the disruption caused by a boom and bust economy; the fragility of the American family; the explosion of public and private debt; the wild swings in energy costs; the fraying of the health care system; the segmentation of society and the way the ladders of social mobility seem to be dissolving.

But the Republican Party has mis-learned that history. The party sometimes seems cut off from the concrete relationships of neighborhood life. Republicans are so much the party of individualism and freedom these days that they are no longer the party of community and order. This puts them out of touch with the young, who are exceptionally community-oriented. It gives them nothing to say to the lower middle class, who fear that capitalism has gone haywire. It gives them little to say to the upper middle class, who are interested in the environment and other common concerns.

The Republicans talk more about the market than about society, more about income than quality of life. They celebrate capitalism, which is a means, and are inarticulate about the good life, which is the end. They take things like tax cuts, which are tactics that are good in some circumstances, and elevate them to holy principle, to be pursued in all circumstances.

I think it's a dead on analysis. The Republican Party has, it seems to me, lost itself. It's allowed a philosophy that at its best affirmed the capacity of people to lead and make their own decisions to calcify into a million different Gospel Truths which seem to be concerned only with regulating people's social lives and deregulating everything else. There is almost nothing of the live-and-let-live libertarianism that still pervades places like Maine (where I grew up, and which has voted increasingly Democrat for years) left in the national platform.

When I read Brooks column, I couldn't help but think of my own nervousness about the language we place around social entrepreneurship. To be sure, our nascent field is nothing like the decaying, moribund leftovers of the GOP. But sometimes in our excitement about innovation and our need to classify, we get locked up and trapped up in our glorification of the individual.

When we focus only on the stories of individual social entrepreneurs, we risk creating a wall of exclusion. Rather than inspiring others to aspire to be change leaders, we instead make them wonder if they have the characteristics which would allow them to be such a person. Moreover, we make it easier to underestimate the importance of teams and the brilliant chaotic messiness of community organizing that spurs movements. And of course, we put an absurd and unreasonable burden on the shoulders of those we celebrate.

This is not a community vs. markets question. The irony is that the story of markets, too, is a story of relationships, not of individuals. Markets only work when people with complementary needs can find one another.

I do not believe that the social entrepreneurship field only cares about individuals, or that it doesn't understand that change comes from helping communities organize and bring their assets to bear around common goals.

But I think it's hard to tell that story and to tell it well. I think there's a reason John Wayne is easier to latch onto than John Ford. Both movements and markets are messy, and they do not follow simple plot lines. It's our job let the mythology ride into the sunset and to tell the right story.