We are all cultural conservatives now. In his State of the Union address this year, Bill Clinton borrowed a notion from the Promise Keepers, the evangelical men’s group, that a father’s checkbook will never be a substitute for a father’s love. He endorsed school uniforms and attacked the decadent media. He could scarcely draw breath without praising churches, synagogues, and community organizations. He paid far more attention to cultural issues than Robert Dole did in his response, and outflanked Dole on the right. We now have a consensus in this country, at least in the realm of presidential politics. Bureaucratic means to address social problems have failed; local and religious institutions can instill conservative social values. The political class is uniting behind positions that conservatives have supported for a long time. So perhaps this is a time for rejoicing.
Wait.
A lot of people, Clinton apparently included, praise civil society the way they praise motherhood; it’s just a vague piety. But there is now a voluminous and often brilliant literature on civil society, and it is not always vague and saccharine. It is ambitious, it is radical, and when people start taking it seriously, many are going to find a lot to oppose.
Civil society theory begins with the notion that America, though based on liberty, is being undone by excessive liberty Unchecked individualism saps institutions, like the family, that build character. Unfettered choice weakens the bonds that keep us together. “Americans are worried above all about the unraveling of the orderly, coherent, authoritative moral community that they were once able to build around themselves within their own strong, local civil institutions,” write Michael Joyce and William Schambra of the Bradley Foundation.
Read again the key words in that sentence. Order. Coherent. Authoritative.$ N There you have the ethos of much of this literature. The adherents of “civil society” want individual choice to be exercised inside a thick web of local bonds. They want to restore the authority of local figures, like principals and priests, and to enforce community standards of decency. Maybe it has something to do with the baby boomers turning 50 that we have this renewed emphasis on order and coherence. But you don’t have to be a devotee of Ayn Rand to be taken aback by it a little. We can all agree that standards of decency should be applied to other people’s behavior, but i do I want to be subject to the social pressure of my neighbors if they decide I’m not behaving according to their standards? Do I want local busybodies with piddling township posts exercising their petty powers by looking into my affairs?
Notice how civil-society theory differs from the conservative ideolgy of the 1980s. In the Reagan years, the virtues of the entrepreneur were celebrated — audacity, high ambition, self-suffciency. And since it was the climax of the Cold War, conservatives celebrated the virtues of the combatant: courage, steadfastness, might, and pride. Describing the qualities Margaret Thatcher tried to instill with her policies, Shirley Robin Letwin called these the ” vigorous virtues.” It was a worldview in which competition was thought to bring out the best in people.
The virtues celebrated by the civil society theorists are quieter, but also t ougher. Self-restraint comes first. “What we have to do is to face the fact tha t we cannot giv e in to all of our desires,” Bob Dole said in his response to the State of the Union. More broadly, the civil society types emphasize family commitment and civic duty. They are not hostile to rugged individualism, but their emphasis is different. Civil society theorists tend to emphasize community more than the heroic individual, organic structures more than dynamic change, local serenity more than national greatness, authority more than freedom, stability more than change. Don Eberly, president of the Civil Society Proiect, recently listed the “six pillars of character.” They are, according to him, trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, fairness, caring, and citizenship. Those are all fine qualities, but they are not courage, audacity, creativity, strength, genius, and high ambition.
The civil-society theorists also have a distinct view of how character is formed. Much of their writing analyzes the “social ecology,” the interlocking system of attachments that provides the environment for our lives. These habitats form character, they say. “No habits of mind and heart can be cultivated unless the institutions of society support and “teach” these capacities,” argues William M. Sullivan. Good individuals depend on good families, good families depend on good neighborhoods. “To improve the conditions for childrearing in America today,” writes sociologist David Popehoe, “nothing may be more important than trying to protect and cultivate those natural, tribal-or village-like communities that still remain.” Sullivan and Popenoe are writing in a superb anthology edited by Mary Ann Glendon and David Blankenhorn called Seedbeds of Virtue (seedbeds being one of the many environmental metaphors used by the civil-society folk).
We’ve long heard about environmental causes for ad behavior, but usually that talk comes from the left. Liberals are fatuously obsessed with root causes (another environmental metaphor). But under the influence of civil- society thinking, root-cause-ism is now taking root on the right. “The root cause of crime is spiritual, a hardening of the heart that makes a man or woman indifferent to the rights of others,” writes Adam Meyerson in a letter to readers in the redesigned Policy Review, “The most effective institutions in criminal justice will therefore be those that in criminal justice will therefore be those that create moral communities and transform individual attitudes and behaviors.”
Such root-cause-ism can either be applauded as an ambitious effort to see problems in eir true light, or After all, the successful anti-crime efforts in places like New York don’t address root causes — character. They concern themselves with symptoms — crime.
Now contrast this with the conservatism of the 1980s, based as it was on a heroic vision of character development. Man is the one animal who rises above his environment, and character is a kind of metal one constantly forges for oneself. We are supported by others, but character is forged when people struggle through diffculty. It is forged in business competition, in military duress, in the demands of family, in the normal challenges of life. It is only when given maximum freedom to strive and struggle that one can develop the willpower that is the basis of character. The heroic school believes character is the self-conscious product of adult effort; the civil-society theorists focus more on childhood as the age when good character is absorbed.
Civil-society theorists tend to value stability over what Joseph Schumpeter called the “creative destruction” of capitalism. They believe the things that are destroyed — close communities — are more important thvn the things that are created — new companies, new wealth, new opportunities.
David Popenoe is the strongest advocate of the need for stable living conditions. In his essay in Seedbeds of Virtue he lists the optimum conditions for childrearing, the first being: “Children need and want social stability and stable social structure. They want to feel psychologically and socially secure in a place where they can “belong.'” Popenoe summarizes recent sociological research and offers a recipe for building a healthy community. First, foster residential stability. Second, enforce community moral standards. Third, provide many public facilities. Fourth, favor the development of smaller cities and towns. Fifth, support local political and social autonomy. Sixth, promote functional balance (don’t have one place for shopping and one for living, but instead integrate these functions). Seventh, protect homogeneous neighborhoods.
In his outstanding book The Lost City, Alan Ehrenhalt describes communiti es that had many othese qualities — neighborhoods oChicago in the 1950s. He be lieves we should try to replicate those conditions, but he is hardheaded about how controversial the recreation of such communities would be. He titles his fi rst chapter “The Limited Life” and emphasi zes that those lamented communities were based on limited opportunities. People stayed close to home, women had limited opportunities to work, people had limited access to the elite WASP world, people had very little privacy (of course there was community, since people were rarely alone). These communities, Ehrenhalt shows, were based on virtues like obedience to authority: “Community means not subjecting every action in life to the burden of choice, but rather accepting the familiar and reaping the psychological benefits of having one less calculation to make during the course of the day.” He argues that most Americans would gladly give up a measure of choice and change for security and stability.
That is a highly questionable notion. My family once lived in a tight, fabled community, the Lower East Side of Manhattan. They par-took in some institutions that fostered community and stability; my great-grandfather was a butcher, and he got together with the other chicken butchers to set prices and thus stabilize the market. But as soon as he made some money he moved away from that community. He moved uptown.
The long history of America shows that people use their liberty to move away from tight communities in search of greater opportunity and autonomy. Moving across the ocean, moving uptown, and moving west are central to the American experience. The tight communities of the 1950s helped produce the reaction of the 1960s and the feminism of the 1970s — people seeking greater freedom and opportunity. It’s likely that this particular dash toward opportunity and upward mobility is now considered a mistake by most people — certainly there is a backlash against feminism — but I doubt large numbers of people have given up on the idea of expanding opportunity. There’s little evidence that people are hungering to be more deferential or to have fewer choices.
perhaps the most radical element of civil-society theory has to do with its ambivalence towards the strong, twentieth-century nation-state. “A united United States is a historical construction that most visibly comes into being as a cause and consequence of American involvement in the Great War,” writes Jean Bethke Elshtain, in an echo of Robert Nisbet. “Prior to the nationalistic enthusiasm of that era, America was a loosely united federation with strong and regional identities.” Joyce and Schambra identify the creation of a ” national community” as a Progressive-era effort to weaken local communities and replace them with national rule by experts.
Is America’s national might really synonymous with Progressivism and war- mongering? You don’t have to be an American Gaullist to value national unity and to worry that America would be weakened if emphasis were to shift to local communities. Can local communities be healthy if the national culture emanating from Washington, New York, and Hollywood is not? Can America remain a great power in the world if its citizens are as parochial as the Swiss? One of the striking currents in Bill Clinton’s State of the Union speech was his conscious play on the idea of loyalty to nation, emphasizing national unity and the common concerns of all Americans. Such emphasis in a speech like that can only be poll-driven, which means national unity is still an idea Americans cherish.
Similarly, the civil-society theorists” flight from bigness also means that they have relatively little to say about the greatness of cities. But ambitious Americans still flock to cities, even many who write about local communities.
And so, all this talk about building local communities is not just do-gooder mush. It is, instead, a hardheaded agenda that requires some revolutionary change. Where you come down on it will probably depend on how you feel about populism.
The civil-society movement is a brand of populism. It looks to local communities to provide moral renewal, not to elites. It is inspired by the moral-renewal movements of the 19th century, which were often scorned by the educated elites of the time. But most important, the content of its morality is populist. It revolves around the day-to-day virtues involved in neighborliness, self-restraint, and childrearing. The most famous institution in the civil-society movement is the most populist, the bowling league, the decline of which is lamented by Robert D. Putnam. When Harvard professors worry about bowling leagues, populism is in full roar.
There is of course another morality, one which rarely speaks its name. Tocque ville, to whom the civil- society theorists look first for inspiration, was not a believer in the “limited life.” The gravest threat to America was not civic d isintegration, Tocqueville said, but rather the decline of ambition: “What frig htens me most is the danger that, amid all the constant trivial preoccupations of private life, ambition may lose both its force and its greatness, that human passions may grow gentler and at the same time baser, with the res ult that the progress of the body social may become daily quieter and less aspiring.”
But aspiration is taking a beating these days. Consider Clinton’s speech. Here was a man who doesn’t own a house praising neighborhoods. Here was a man who spent his life dreaming of the White House praising local institutions. Here was a man who has spent his adulthood networking with elites praising the superior virtues of regular folks. A man like Bill Clinton should be praising worldly, ambitious men like himself. He should be emulating George Washington, Winston Churchill, and John E Kennedy, drawing inspiration primarily from the great achievers of history, not from bowling leagues.
The civil-society theorists are producing the most provocative writing on social policy at the moment. They are raising diffcult, complicated questions and following their judgments bravely to their conclusions.
And in truth, they have anticipated most of the objections that can be leveled against them. But their emphasis on stability and small communities doesn’t suit an ambitious, dynamic power like America. This is not Europe; Americans can’t sit still. We can’t solve social problems by taming ourselves. We’re still a country too young to settle down.
By David Brooks
