American civil society

Of course, none of this really ever got going in the US.

Huh? The current trend of religious alternative social institutions in the US is _recent_. Secular clubs and organizations used to be far more important only a few decades ago than they are today.

Thank you, carlos. To add on, the slow death of fraternal orgs and the like has been cited as evidence of the atrophy of American civil society (as opposed to consumer culture).

OTOH, Henry’s point about the absence of these as explicitly political/ideological orgs holds, I think. A few thoughts on this:

Many of these American groups were once political, but never as a raison d’etre – the Ancient Order of Hibernians might turn out to vote for increased police pensions (to use a handy ethnic stereotype of the NE US) or to encourage the US to support Eire, but that was incidental to its ethnic origin. There were places like Hull House 100 years ago that served muckraking with their soup, but most progressives of that era looked to the gov’t as the solution, and never intended to be in the full-time social services/social activism game, if they could get gov’t to take responsibility.

But I think the critical factor is the overwhelming xenophobia and fundamental political conservatism of the US. Even highly respectable progressives like Jane Addams were liable to be tarred as anarchists or communists, and so they had to be relatively circumspect in their activism – or risk running for office from jail, like Debs. The Red Scares of the 20s & 50s really cemented Americans’ mistrust of politically-driven social services, as a Peoples’ Palace would clearly be nothing but a front for the International Communist Menace.

In contrast, it’s clear that whatever social services are offered by Falwell, et al, are given in the spirit of true Christian Charity, no strings attached.

Henry

I am very confused. In democracies there are obviously a whole host of non-state voluntary organisations – churches, trade unions, friendly societies, charities, clubs etc – in existence. You seem to imply, however, that these institutions can be classified under ‘right/ ‘left’ labels, and furthermore that in America, at least, a lot more of them are of the right wing variety.

The idea that civil society institutions can be classified in this fashion seems non-sensical to me. What if a religious group supports creationism, but also favours redistribution of income from its wealthier to poorer members? Is it then both right and left at the same time?

If the ‘left’ is to have any meaning, beyond some woolly feeling of universal brotherhood (which the right can also claim), it must surely be a preference for direct state provision over private ordering. If you accept this point, the notion of left-wing non-state institutions seems to me to be an oxymoron. I cannot fathom, therefore, what your PhD supervisor was moaning about.

I don’t, by the way, mean to imply that non-state voluntary associations are by default ‘right wing’. On the contrary, some (e.g. trade unions) can most definitely promote collectivist goals. I just think the idea of voluntarianism as a right/left issue misconceived.

The Casa del Popolo in Fiesole’s pizza is not all that.

But the view from the terrace is unbeatable.

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…)

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.

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?!’)

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.

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.

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.