New Movement Plots More Civil Way of Living

Since the late 1980s, Amitai Etzioni, a George Washington University sociology professor and founder of the fledgling “communitarian” movement, was a kind of cult figure to intellectually minded political centrists and scholars interested in the growing lack of civility in American life.

As political debate grew ever more barbed and the demand for individual rights ever more shrill, Etzioni often seemed a lone voice in calling for a national renewal of civility.

Now, Etzioni has to shout over a crowd.

In recent months, the notion that American society is in need of renewal has become as popular as the Macarena. National commissions, their letterheads weighted down with the gravitas of distinguished former lawmakers, have begun sprouting at a rate of almost one a week. Fueled by a surge of interest, and money, from the nation’s philanthropic foundations, there is a sudden spate of conferences convened, studies commissioned, books penned.

Some of the foundations are even seeking to rebuild a lost sense of community the old-fashioned way: by funding projects designed to help shattered--and even just frayed--neighborhoods get back on their feet.

On Monday, the latest entry in this burgeoning industry will unveil itself: the Boston-based Institute for Civil Society, part foundation and part think tank. Its endowment of $35 million, from an anonymous donor, is one of the 10 biggest philanthropic contributions made this year.

And that is just one measure of the funding that civil-society projects now command: The Pew Charitable Trusts have set aside $14 million for work on issues of renewing democratic life in the United States in the coming year, and other major foundations are clamoring to get in on the action.

The sudden vogue appears to tap into a deepening perception among Americans that something has gone wrong with their communities--something to which politicians and institutions just now seem to be awakening.

“They always are the last to join the parade,” Etzioni said. “For those of us who work in the vineyards, it’s not so sudden.”

The Institute for Civil Society has announced that its flagship project is to be headed by retiring Rep. Patricia Schroeder (D-Colo.). An unrepentant liberal who served 24 years in the House, Schroeder is to scour the nation for projects that will help foster corporate and entrepreneurial responsibility for disadvantaged communities and individual responsibility on the part of members of those communities.

Indeed, Schroeder is only one of several former lawmakers who have found refuge in the new civil-society sector from one of the nation’s most uncivil institutions--the U.S. Congress. Retiring Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) recently joined virtues maven and former Education Secretary William J. Bennett in launching the National Commission on Civic Renewal. One of Nunn’s Senate colleagues, New Jersey Democrat Bill Bradley, who is also retiring, last week joined a cast of academic heavyweights in launching a National Commission on Society, Culture and Community, sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the institution these lawmakers are leaving is itself seen as needing a serious renewal of civility: The Pew Foundation said it will spend $700,000 to sponsor a bipartisan retreat in March for House lawmakers to contemplate how to improve the tenor of debate in the lower chamber.

In Washington, the venerable Brookings Institution is looking to catch the civic-renewal wave. E.J. Dionne, a Washington Post political columnist and Brookings senior fellow, said the think tank aims to bring together academics and activists from across the political spectrum to explore questions that divide right and left and lie at the heart of all civil-society debates: What, if anything, has government done to erode the neighborhood and community institutions that bind Americans together and what can government do to help foster and restore them?

“It is clearly in some ways a fad,” Dionne said. “But most fads are rooted in real things, and this surge is rooted in a combination of real insight and people’s gut feelings about what’s happening out there in society.”

While the high-level interest is new, its intellectual and academic foundation has been years in the making. In academic circles and among pollsters attentive to the nation’s social pulse, evidence of a breakdown in community has been growing steadily.

In his 1995 article, “Bowling Alone,” Harvard University sociologist Robert Putnam chronicled the demise of Americans’ membership in civic and fraternal organizations ranging from the Rotary Club to the bowling league. The stewards of the General Social Survey, an exhaustive annual census of American attitudes conducted by the University of Chicago, found about the same time that our trust in each other has plummeted steadily over recent decades.

Meanwhile, election turnout has slipped to historic lows as more voters--perhaps repelled by the tenor of political debate or apathetic about their prospects for changing things--have stayed away from the polls.

While signs of a fraying social fabric mounted at home, many of the nation’s biggest foundations were pouring funds into efforts to export America’s vaunted democracy to nations newly emerging from the Soviet yoke. The more they did so, said Paul Light of the Pew Charitable Trusts, the more they realized that the product they sought to export appeared to be in poor repair.

“There’s a tendency among the people you’re trying to help [overseas] to ask: ‘How’s your election process going?’ ” said Light, director of Pew’s Public Policy Program. “As you’re working on strengthening democracy in Central Europe, it may sensitize you to the fact it’s not working so well in the United States.”

Indeed, thinking about civil society may prove an appealing retirement job for many who had toiled primarily on Cold War issues during their careers.

Nunn, who served as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, is better known to the military’s top brass than to community activists and observers of social phenomena. But on Nov. 13, when the National Commission on Civic Renewal was launched, Nunn strode into the civil-society arena with the same owlish aplomb he had for years exercised in discussions of nuclear deterrence.

“A broad consensus has emerged among both experts and ordinary citizens that the quality of our public and civic life has declined alarmingly in recent decades,” said Nunn. At the same time, he acknowledged that “on challenges of great magnitude . . . there is often a long and damaging lag time between recognition of the challenge and a firm national determination of correcting the problem.” The University of Pennsylvania’s 48-member commission aims to do largely the same thing, gathering thinkers and doers together over the next three to five years. Complete with now de rigueur Internet discussions, the effort aims to explore whether social and political discourse in the country has indeed become uncivil and, if so, how it can be improved.

Penn President Judith Rodin, a psychologist, cautioned that while civility is not an end in itself, the lack of it squelches a diversity of voices and ultimately is inconsistent with the functioning of a working democracy.

“We’re not necessarily arguing [that] we all ought to be nice to one another,” Rodin said. “But we must help people listen to one another, take the time to really hear and engage with each other and take on the hard task of citizenship. We are grappling with some of the same issues our nation’s founding fathers did.”

But for some of the emerging legion of civil-society renewers, the time for study commissions is long past. Foundation money, they argue, is better spent on those who will roll up their sleeves and rebuild shattered communities from the ground up.

There is, said Pam Solo, president of the Boston-based Institute for Civil Society, no mystery as to what has happened to American culture, nor much mystery in how it can be improved. “Part of restoring civil society is addressing the central problem of violence, which begins with the dehumanization of the person. We need to reassert the primacy of the person--and the primacy of each person’s responsibility to the common good.”

In Roxbury, a blighted 62-block neighborhood of Boston, where the Institute for Civil Society has chosen to make an initial stand, that means supporting programs that will help youths resist violence and teach them everything from how to find a job and manage their money to how to work with outside entrepreneurs to bring jobs and business into their community.

For such old-fashioned community activists, the surge of interest in civil society is welcome but it comes with a risk.

“I’m concerned that just as quickly as it’s grabbed onto, this civil-society renewal could become a slogan and a trivialization,” Solo said. “The experts are sometimes part of the problem. They forestall any responses and then they create an industry out of it.”