Everyone from President Clinton to Bill Bradley to Bill Bennett has weighed in our need to restore our sense of “community.” But as the literary deconstructionists like to remind us, people tend to proclaim something loudly when that something is most in danger of disappearing. Evidence is mounting that our national reservoir of good will toward each other is running out like water from a leaky bucket. The public talk, while welcome, is not enough. The next step should be for President Clinton to create a bipartisan national commission to assess the state of our civic health, make recommendations and get us thinking less about family values and more about civic ones.
The increasingly familiar work of Harvard historian Robert Putnam has put a clear light on the depopulation of the arenas where Americans talk their way toward common ground — the network of institutions between government and the family ranging from Bowling Leagues to churches, colleges and civic groups known as “civil society.” PTA membership is down from 12 million in 1964 to 7 million today; volunteering for civic groups like the Red Cross is down one-third or more; membership in the Jaycees has dropped 44 percent since 1979. According to Putnam, while bowling alone for fitness is up, bowling leagues is off by 40 percent.
Small wonder, then, that the overall level of social trust — measured by people who say “most people can be trusted” — dropped from about 58 percent in 1960 to 37 percent in 1995.
Our trust deficit must be closed if the appeals to common ground are to mean anything. And that means attending to our ailing civil society.
A National Commission on American Civil Society could bring together perhaps two dozen respected experts to give us a status report on the health of civil society and make recommendations. The commission would dig beneath the concerns raised by the president and the other voices crying for community from left and right. And its hearings across the country would help us learn to talk about our civic life.
Words may not create the world, but they do shape our understanding of it. As the language of finance has become accessible — cyclical industries, tax-free municipals — it has helped more people think about investing in mutual funds and managing their retirement planning. Key concepts of psychology — repression, trauma, sibling rivalry — have changed the way we think about ourselves and our families. The language of the environment – the food chain, global warming and groundwater — gives us a way to assess our impact on the earth.
But when it comes to civic life, we are like visitors to a strange city without a map. The phrases “civil society,” “social capital” and “civic virtue” sound as strange to most of us today as price/earnings ratio, ego and biodiversity must have sounded 50 years ago.
As we remap our common ground we also need:
- More discussion of our founding principles and how to recast them for an increasingly diverse nation. Every organization, from the National Association of Homebuilders to the American Bar Association, to churches, mosques and synagogues, should take ten percent of its time to reexamine the Constitution and Declaration and recapture what it means to be an American.
- More emphasis on volunteerism and teamwork in our educational institutions, especially colleges and universities. They must reclaim their place as laboratories for citizenship, not just professional schools where students are eased into high-paying jobs. Students must graduate knowing what these key aspects actually feel like and how satisfying they are.
It matters whether we are a group of individuals who are mistrustful, lawsuit-prone and rights-conscious, or a community of citizens willing to work together for the common good. The call to common ground will remain just a call unless it is heard by people with a sense of shared civic values. And those values will be reinforced not in the glow of the TV screens illuminating America’s living rooms, but in our public spaces.