So our challenge is to restore American community for the twenty-first century through both collective and individual initiative. I recognize the impossibility of proclaiming any panacea for our nation’s problems of civic disengagement. On the other hand, because of my experience in spearheading in recent years a concerted nationwide conversation modeled on the intensive interchange among scholars and practitioners in the Progressive Era, I am optimistic that, working together, Americans today can once again be as civically creative as our Progressive forebears. These deliberations, the “Saguaro Seminar: Civic Engagement in America,” brought together thinkers and doers from many diverse American communities to shape questions and seek answers.1 The ensuing discussions have informed my suggestions in this chapter in many ways. The group’s objectives have been, first, to make Americans more aware of the collective significance of the myriad minute decisions that we make daily to invest—or disinvest—in social capital and, second, to spark the civic imaginations of our fellow citizens to discover and invent new ways of connecting socially that fit our changed lives.
Figuring out in detail how to renew our stock of social capital is a task for a nation and a decade, not a single scholar, a single book, or even a single group. My intention in this chapter is modest—to identify key facets of the challenge ahead, by sketching briefly six spheres that deserve special attention from aspiring social capitalists: youth and schools; the workplace; urban and metropolitan design; religion; arts and culture; and politics and government. For each, by offering some suggestions of my own, I seek to provoke the reader’s own imagination in the hope that together we can produce something even more creative and powerful.
PHILOSOPHERS FROM ARISTOTLE and Rousseau to William James and John Dewey have begun discussions of civics with the education of youth. They have pondered the essential virtues and skills and knowledge and habits of democratic citizens and how to instill them. That starting point is especially appropriate for reformers today, for the single most important cause of our current plight is a pervasive and continuing generational decline in almost all forms of civic engagement. Today’s youth did not initiate the erosion of Americans’ social capital—their parents did—and it is the obligation of Americans of all ages to help rekindle civic engagement among the generation that will come of age in the early years of the twenty-first century.
So I set before America’s parents, educators, and, above all, America’s young adults the following challenge: Let us find ways to ensure that by 2010 the level of civic engagement among Americans then coming of age in all parts of our society will match that of their grandparents when they were that same age, and that at the same time bridging social capital will be substantially greater than it was in their grandparents’ era. One specific test of our success will be whether we can restore electoral turnout to that of the 1960s, but our goal must be to increase participation and deliberation in other, more substantive and fine-grained ways, too—from team sports to choirs and from organized altruism to grassroots social movements.
The means to achieve these goals in the early twenty-first century, and the new forms of connectedness that will mark our success, will almost surely be different from those of the mid–twentieth century. For this reason, success will require the sensibility and skills of Gen X and their successors, even more than of baby boomers and their elders. Nevertheless, some “old-fashioned” ideas are relevant. Take civics education, for example. We know that knowledge about public affairs and practice in everyday civic skills are prerequisites for effective participation. We know, too, that the “civics report card” issued by the U.S. Department of Education for American elementary and high school students at the end of the twentieth century was disappointing.2 So improved civics education in school should be part of our strategy—not just “how a bill becomes a law,” but “How can I participate effectively in the public life of my community?” Imagine, for example, the civic lessons that could be imparted by a teacher in South Central Los Angeles, working with students to effect public change that her students think is important, like getting lights for a neighborhood basketball court.
We know other strategies that will work, too. A mounting body of evidence confirms that community service programs really do strengthen the civic muscles of participants, especially if the service is meaningful, regular, and woven into the fabric of the school curriculum. Episodic service has little effect, and it is hard to imagine that baby-sitting and janitorial work—the two most frequent types of “community service” nationwide, according to one 1997 study—have much favorable effect. On the other hand, well-designed service learning programs (the emerging evidence suggests) improve civic knowledge, enhance citizen efficacy, increase social responsibility and self-esteem, teach skills of cooperation and leadership, and may even (one study suggests) reduce racism.3 Interestingly, voluntary programs seem to work as well as mandatory ones. Volunteering in one’s youth is, as we noted in chapter 7, among the strongest predictors of adult volunteering. Intergenerational mentoring, too, can serve civic ends, as in Boston’s Citizen Schools program, which enables adult volunteers to work with youth on tangible after-school projects, like storywriting or Web site building.
Participation in extracurricular activities (both school linked and independent) is another proven means to increase civic and social involvement in later life. In fact, participation in high school music groups, athletic teams, service clubs, and the like is among the strongest precursors of adult participation, even when we compare demographically matched groups.4 From a civic point of view, extracurricular activities are anything but “frills,” yet funding for them was decimated during the 1980s and 1990s. Reversing that perverse development would be a good start toward our goal of youthful reengagement by 2010. Finally, we know that smaller schools encourage more active involvement in extracurricular activity than big schools—more students in smaller schools have an opportunity to play trombone or left tackle or King Lear. Smaller schools, like smaller towns, generate higher expectations for mutual reciprocity and collective action. So deconcentrating megaschools or creating smaller “schools within schools” will almost surely produce civic dividends.
Our efforts to increase social participation among youth must not be limited to schooling. Though it is not yet easy to see what the Internet-age equivalent of 4-H or settlement houses might be, we ought to bestow an annual Jane Addams Award on the Gen X’er or Gen Y’er who comes up with the best idea. What we need is not civic broccoli—good for you but unappealing—but an updated version of Scouting’s ingenious combination of values and fun. I challenge those who came of age in the civically dispiriting last decade of the twentieth century to invent powerful and enticing ways of increasing civic engagement among their younger brothers and sisters who will come of age in the first decade of the twenty-first century.
THE CHANGING CHARACTER of work and the closely related movement of women into the paid workforce were among the most far-reaching upheavals in American society during the twentieth century. This transformation of the workplace was comparable in magnitude to the metamorphosis of America a century earlier from a nation of farms to one of factories and offices. Yet as the twenty-first century opens, American institutions, both public and private, and norms and practices within the workplace have only begun to adapt to this change. As we saw in chapter 11, this workplace revolution is implicated in the nearly simultaneous decline of social connectedness and civic involvement. So I challenge America’s employers, labor leaders, public officials, and employees themselves: Let us find ways to ensure that by 2010 America’s workplace will be substantially more family-friendly and community-congenial, so that American workers will be enabled to replenish our stocks of social capital both within and outside the workplace.
Fortunately there is some evidence that community- and family-oriented workplace practices benefit the employer as well as the employee. At least in periods of full employment, moreover, such practices become a key
ingredient in recruiting and retaining a high-quality, loyal workforce. Happily, the proportion of American workers who reported some flexibility in their work schedules increased from 16 percent in 1990 to 30 percent in 1997.5 However, many of the benefits of employment practices that encourage social capital formation—stronger families, more effective schools, safer neighborhoods, more vibrant public life—”leak” outside the firm itself, whereas all the costs stay put. This fact gives firms an incentive to underinvest in civic engagement by their employees. Conversely, workplace practices that inhibit community involvement and family connectedness produce a classic case of what economists term “negative externalities,” imposing an unrequited cost on society.
In the case of environmental pollution, it is now widely accepted that tax and other financial incentives are an appropriate public response to negative externalities, reinforcing moral suasion as a means of encouraging environmentally friendly behavior. Similarly, we need to rethink how to reward firms that act responsibly toward their employees’ family and community commitments and how to encourage other employers to follow their example. Many firms offer released time to employees who volunteer for community service, a valuable practice that should be extended. But volunteering is only one form of civic engagement. Public policies like the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 and legal requirements that employers facilitate jury service illustrate that the public interest in civic and social connectedness can justify public regulation of employment contracts. However, caring for sick loved ones is not the only family responsibility, and jury service is not the citizen’s only duty, and our labor law should recognize that.
Our findings in chapter 11 point unambiguously to the civic as well as the personal dividends associated with part-time employment. For many people, we discovered, part-time work is the best of both worlds—enhancing one’s exposure to broader social networks while leaving enough time to pursue those opportunities outside the workplace. We found that part-time workers are typically more involved in community activities than either full-time employees or people who are not employed at all. Not everyone wants a part-time job, of course, but many do, and America’s public, nonprofit, and private institutions have only begun to address the challenge of restructuring work to meet that demand. The new politics of time must be high on the public agenda in the new century.
Civic engagement and social connectedness can be found inside the workplace, not only outside it. Thus our workplace agenda should also include new means of social-capital formation on the job. This is especially true with regard to bridging social capital, since the increasing diversity in the workplace is a valuable and not yet fully exploited asset for social capitalists. As we saw in chapter 5, some encouraging initiatives along these lines—teamwork, architectural restructuring, and the like—are already under way. On the other hand, other changes that we discussed there—especially the proliferation of “contingent” work—heighten the challenge of creating work-based social capital. Employers, labor unions, labor relations experts, and employees themselves need to be more creative in meeting the social connectivity needs of temps, part-timers, and independent contractors.6 Finally, we need to challenge the notion that civic life has no part in the workplace. Why not employer-provided space and time for civic discussion groups and service clubs? Why not better protection for privacy of employees’ communications?
AS THE TWENTIETH CENTURY ENDED, Americans gradually began to recognize that the sprawling pattern of metropolitan settlement that we had built for ourselves in the preceding five decades imposes heavy personal and economic costs—pollution, congestion, and lost time. In chapter 12 we discovered that metropolitan sprawl has also damaged the social fabric of our communities. So I challenge America’s urban and regional planners, developers, community organizers, and home buyers: Let us act to ensure that by 2010 Americans will spend less time traveling and more time connecting with our neighbors than we do today, that we will live in more integrated and pedestrian-friendly areas, and that the design of our communities and the availability of public space will encourage more casual socializing with friends and neighbors.7 One deceptively simple objective might be this: that more of us know more of our neighbors by first name than we do today.
Urban designers, marching under the banner of “the new urbanism,” have produced many creative suggestions along precisely these lines over the past decade or two.8 Admittedly, far more time and energy have been invested so far in articulating and even implementing these ideas than in measuring their impact on community involvement. It is surely plausible that design innovations like mixed-use zoning, pedestrian-friendly street grids, and more space for public use should enhance social capital, though it is less obvious that the cosmetic details of Victorian or colonial design and the echoes of nineteenth-century public architecture typically found in new urbanist communities like Disney’s Celebration, Florida, will necessarily have that effect. (The brand-new town in Easton, Ohio, includes a town center built to resemble a converted train station, although there was never any train station there.) In any event it is time to begin assessing rigorously the actual consequences of these promising initiatives.9
The new urbanism is an ongoing experiment to see whether our thirst for great community life outweighs our hunger for private backyards, discount megamalls, and easy parking. In the end Americans will get largely the kind of physical space we demand; if we don’t really want more community, we won’t get it. On the other hand, in the past segregated suburban sprawl was also powerfully shaped (often unintentionally) by public policies like highway construction, mortgage interest deduction, redlining, and concentrated public housing. As the costs of sprawl (economic and environmental as well as social) become clearer, public policies to discourage it will become more attractive, as they already have in places from Atlanta to Portland. Finally, innovative community thinkers and organizers like Harry Boyte, Ernesto Cortes, and John McKnight have devoted much effort to finding and exploiting unexpected assets in disadvantaged communities. Community Development Corporations, created in the 1970s to foster physical reconstruction of blighted neighborhoods, are now turning their attention to investing in social capital, too, and groups like the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) have had some success in that area.10 I challenge all of us to add to that good work the objective of creating networks that bridge the racial, social, and geographic cleavages that fracture our metropolitan areas.
FAITH-BASED COMMUNITIES REMAIN such a crucial reservoir of social capital in America that it is hard to see how we could redress the erosion of the last several decades without a major religious contribution. Particularly in the public realm, Americans cherish the First Amendment strictures that have enabled us to combine unparalleled religiosity and denominational pluralism with a minimum of religious warfare. On the other hand, it is undeniable that religion has played a major role in every period of civic revival in American history. So I challenge America’s clergy, lay leaders, theologians, and ordinary worshipers: Let us spur a new, pluralistic, socially responsible “great awakening,” so that by 2010 Americans will be more deeply engaged than we are today in one or another spiritual community of meaning, while at the same time becoming more tolerant of the faiths and practices of other Americans.
In our national history, religion has contributed to social-capital creation, above all, in three dramatic and fervent “awakenings.” During the Great Awakening from 1730 to 1760, revivals “explode[d] like a string of firecrackers” into “massive and continuous revival meetings … kept in motion by traveling preachers.” The Second Great Awakening from 1800 to 1830 was an equally frothy period of engagement, in which “circuit riders” carried the new gospel from one churchless frontier settlement to another. Circuit riders formed groups of ten to twelve converts to reinforce each other’s spiritual seeking until regular churches could be established. Historians debate the motivation and even the religiosity of these evangelists, but the movement inspir
ed many to turn toward the poor, reject slavery, and found missionary and temperance societies. One notable invention was the Sunday school movement, integrating revivalism with a desire to teach literacy to those excluded from common schools, including women (black and white), factory children, and frontiersmen.11
In the previous chapter we observed a third major period of religious engagement with social issues at the end of the nineteenth century, embodied in activities like the Social Gospel movement and the Salvation Army—the so-called church of the poor that focused on the “submerged tenth” of American life, buffeted by the strains of urbanization and industrialization. The Salvation Army, “saving the world one soul at a time,” was an interesting hybrid of doctrinal fundamentalism, liturgical heterodoxy (with marching bands and “hallelujah lassies”), and progressive beliefs about helping the poor, raising the religious status of women, and ministering to white and black alike.12
Are there the ingredients in America at the beginning of the twenty-first century for another Great Awakening? Megachurches, to take a single example, use contemporary marketing and entertainment techniques to craft an accessible religious experience for their typically suburban, middle-class market. (Though initially focused on the white population, megachurches are increasingly attracting people of color.) While their church services, by dint of size if nothing else, often seem impersonal and theologically bland, megachurch leaders are savvy social capitalists, organizing small group activities that build personal networks and mix religion and socializing (even bowling teams!). Meanwhile, in a different portion of the religious spectrum, as we saw in chapters 4 and 9, evangelical and fundamentalist churches (along with their counterparts among Jews and other religious traditions) constitute one of the most notable exceptions to the general decline in social capital that I have traced in this book.
BOWLING ALONE Page 50