Comments on: American civil society

By: Robbo

Robbo — Thu, 15 Jul 2004 04:28:28 +0000

Also, as asg said… the “xenophobia” assertion is a little out of line. I’d argue that the USA (and North America in general) has, over time, been much less xenophobic than many other cultures around the world. And it’s probably even less so now than 50 or 100 years ago. Yes, there are certainly exceptions (laws limiting immigrents at different times, certain groups like the KKK…). But I think the trend, if anything, has been toward more of an openness to the rest of the world over the past half century. And so that isn’t what explains why I’d agree that civil altruism seems to be dying out in the USA…

By: Robbo

Robbo — Thu, 15 Jul 2004 04:21:07 +0000

Carlos: Well, I do think Americans have become less community-oriented in the past 60 years. Some of that is the suburbanization of America; unlike rural viallges and urban ghettos, peoples’ lives are less intimately connected with those they live nearby. Some of it is what burritoboy alluded to—we’ve become much more of a society based upon individual merits, less on family credits; and along the same lines, that long-term connectedness to a community is less common (you take a job with several companies over a career—or even if with one company, you get moved a lot). And some of it is the entertainment. Local dances, plays, small-time sporting events, etc that used to be the focus of a community are less of a draw than they used to be (especially vs. 100 years ago). The Baby Boom comment was just it seems that many of those factors have seemed to accellerate since WWII.

By: praktike

praktike — Wed, 14 Jul 2004 14:45:53 +0000

Actually, Henry, now that I think about it, I think you could make the case that immigrant mutual aid societies in the US were actually modelled on similar organizations in their home countries. These groups functioned in many cases like insurance agencies and credit unions on a national level in addition to providing local charitable services.

By: Doug

Doug — Wed, 14 Jul 2004 11:25:33 +0000

Henry, I’m with praktike and burritoboy here, though it might help to know more if you have a particular period and/or region in mind. The ongoing commitments of mainline Protestants are probably underestimated because the denominations and their leaders are not as stridently partisan as their evangelical counterparts can be. (One of many interesting parts of the early chapters of Clinton’s autobiography is his recollection of liberal Baptist leaders.) The roles of black churches and social organizations are probably another source of rich information that’s hard to classify left-right, especially as you go back to the 1950s and earlier. Jewish groups, immigrant groups and more are probably good places to look for the social services you’re thinking about. One difference that is probably salient as you do a rough Europe-US comparison is the lack of an established church. As I understand it, much of the European left had an explicit anti-clerical bent, and promoting the left had a lot to do with overcoming the entrenched power of an established church. (Or the union of church and state, as in some of the German Prince-Bishoprics.) Established churches defined the right and to be left was to be anti-clerical. Without established churches (at least in the post-colonial period), the left-right relationship to churches is much more diffuse in the US. I also suspect profound regional differences, where the ethnic origin of immigrant settlement plays an important role. South Dakota and south Louisiana probably have different structures; four hundred years of settlement on the eastern seaboard probably yields a different character from just over a century in the Great Plains or mountain West. I hope you’ll write more, because with more specificity this could be a very interesting discussion.

By: asg

asg — Wed, 14 Jul 2004 03:24:15 +0000

Others have mentioned the crowding out of spontaneous social institutions by government. I just thought that the phrase “the overwhelming xenophobia… of the U.S.” was noteworthy, as in it’s one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever read, even on the internet, and that’s saying a lot.

By: burritoboy

burritoboy — Wed, 14 Jul 2004 00:44:43 +0000

Pratike is on the right path, but I don’t think it was quite public education or suburbs that brought about the decline of these institutions. The Shriners / Lions / Elks etc. were very popular throughout the 1950s and sometimes especially popular in suburbia. Electricity, automobiles, telephones and public education had all been in wide use for 40-60 (or more) years by the 1950s, and these organizations remained very strong. The men’s business & social clubs, especially, were hard-hit as business became both more global and technocratic. Large firms began to move their “up-and-comers” around a great deal, so there was little point in having a network of small-time business contacts outside the company. You would only be in, say, your Peoria or Green Bay posting for a handful of years anyway. Further, those “up-and-comers” by the mid-50s, were being identified as such by their education rather than their lineage (i.e. they were getting hired because they had a BA or MBA and not because their dad was a big wheel somewhere or knew someone somewhere). The young executives increasingly began to view Shriner-land as hopelessly backward, overly rooted, and wedded to personal dealmaking. And these young executives owed their own success to business being viewed conversely as global (or, at least, all across the US), un-rooted (everybody wanted that posting in Paris or London or New York or California and to get out of Toledo or Rochester as fast as possible) and devoted to business as impersonal, technocratic analysis. Or as Neil Fligstein would say, the conception of control shifted from a sales conception to a finance conception.

By: praktike

praktike — Tue, 13 Jul 2004 21:23:42 +0000

Henry, this is very wrong history. There was in fact a long-lasting set of social institutions outside of government, comprised of mainline Protestant Churches, ethnic Catholic parishes, and immigrant mutual aid societies. But several things happened. One is that many of the functions of these organizations were absorbed by government. Another is cultural assimilation and suburbanization facilitated by public education, television, the automobile, alternating current, and the telephone. A final reason is the declining influence of mainline Protestantism, the reasons for which are less obvious to me.

By: Mrs Tilton

Mrs Tilton — Tue, 13 Jul 2004 21:23:12 +0000

The Casa del Popolo in Fiesole’s pizza is not all that. But then it couldn’t be, really; a Casa del Popolo needs to be rather small to fit in a pizza. (‘What is this – a Casa del Popolo for ants?!’)

By: Carlos

Carlos — Tue, 13 Jul 2004 20:22:09 +0000

Robbo, I’m not sure if American society has gotten more individualistic since the Baby Boom. I do think that there was a break from earlier US social traditions at about that time, but I would worry about ascribing it to a demographic blip.

By: h. e. baber

h. e. baber — Tue, 13 Jul 2004 20:19:44 +0000

I do remember attempts to get up such projects during my youth when a number of my friends worked as “community organizers.” A few were viable, like “The People’s Free Medical Clinic” where doctors volunteered and local people whose only alternative option was the hospital emergency room really did come. But most were sooooo middle-class couintercultural, so focused on the preoccupations of their organizers and wrapped up with their stylized, romantic version of “working class culture” that I suspect most people simply felt excluded. Some of my friends started a chapter of the IWW (International Workers of the World, the “Wobblies”). They discussed Marcuse and sang what they said were “old Union songs. None had ever been gainfully employed.

By: Robbo

Robbo — Tue, 13 Jul 2004 19:43:12 +0000

On your point about religious groups being the primary source of grassroots social organizations, I agree with jroth and carlos that this is largely because American society has become so individualistic in the post-baby boom era that few people (outside of some religious organizations) are altruistic enough to make them work. If you do look at the remnants of a lot of these secular organizations in the USA, most of them are composed of the 70 and over crowd… As far as it being far and away evangelicals, I’m not so sure. “Evangelical” groups do comprise a large component of them; but how much so is probably at least, in part, a reflection of the regional culture. I used to live in Cincinnati, OH, and Catholic charities FAR outnumbered those of any other ilk (probably had something to do with the fact the town was heavily populated by Catholics, such that almost 50% (yes, half!) of the students in the city went to a Catholic shool.) And, as jroth said, my impression is that for the most part, the social services offered by religious organizations (homeless shelters, food pantries, used clothing depots, etc) tend to be truly a service offered to all with no strings attached (e.g. I’ve never heard of the Salvation Army ask for a pledge of faith to use their stores… and their roots, at least, are as evangelical as any organization). I guess that begs the question: if the left produced such a grassroots network of social services, would it have the capacity to be altruistic enough to provide those services with ‘no strings attached.’ Or would the left want to use it as a tool to further their agenda? (e.g. the Marxist entities you referred to…)

By: Robbo

Robbo — Tue, 13 Jul 2004 19:42:27 +0000

By: Robbo

Robbo — Tue, 13 Jul 2004 19:41:40 +0000

By: Otto

Otto — Tue, 13 Jul 2004 19:01:34 +0000

The Casa del Popolo in Fiesole’s pizza is not all that. But the view from the terrace is unbeatable.

By: Carlos

Carlos — Tue, 13 Jul 2004 18:08:20 +0000

HF, by the end of the tradition, yes, that’s pretty much right. But in their heyday—which lasted surprisingly late in some areas of the US —you had fraternal organizations do things like place troubled children with member families who would otherwise end up in orphanages or juvenile detention. Scholarships for smart high school students, when going to college was a big deal. Regular banquets, when going to restaurants was a big deal. Some provided loans to their members, paid medical bills, funeral expenses. And so on. Systematic? The intent wasn’t to duplicate, but to ameliorate. They tended to be not more political than their membership. Some clubs even deliberately fuzzed party, class, and ethnic lines. And some didn’t, of course.