The Decay of Civil Society

Signs like St. Ansgar’s greet you as you enter most small towns in Iowa. They feature the logo of civic institutions in the community alongside a slogan that no one has ever, nor will ever use. These signs are a good proxy for the vitality of a community’s civic institutions. A short heuristic to measure community engagment is:

(# of Organizations on Sign)/ (Population)=Community Vitality Index

(Sorry to Vox this)

The willingness of the American citizen to bear responsibility for his community’s well-being has long differentiated American society. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in Democracy in America,

“The health of a democratic society may be measured by the quality of functions performed by private citizens.”

The quality and quantity of civic functions performed by the average American citizen has declined since de Tocqueville, especially in the last 3 decades. Consequently the health of our democratic society is declining. If I were to attempt to prove my statement with numbers, I would be practicing numerology without a license, so I will argue it with logic instead.

I will lay out structural causes for the decline in civic engagement in America. I will seek to avoid reductionism, although when dealing with complex systems it is impossible to operate without some generalizations.

How We Got Here

Rapid technological advancement has changed where Americans live. We went from an agrarian society to an industrial society to a knowledge society within 200 years; this happened after several thousand years of the agricultural status quo. Historically, zoned or planned cities didn’t exist. Now, they are the norm, and cities and their suburbs house a larger percentage of the world’s population than at any point in history. The automobile has been a large factor in this migration, as it’s no longer necessary to live within a few mile of one’s work.

Mathematician and polymath Benoit Mandelbrot formalized the idea of the Lindy Effect, which states that for many technologies and ideas, the longer the concept has been in existence, the longer it is likely to remain in existence. Top down organization of complex systems rarely works as the data that goes into the system only captures a small percentage of user concerns and benefits. For this reason, we can use the Lindy Effect to bet that in 1,000 years the fork is more likely to be used than a new eating device (All credit to Nassim Taleb for this illustration).

While planned cities and suburbs are en vogue now, it is likely that the model has hidden downside which will only be revealed after years of people living and working in them every day. Using the Lindy Effect, I feel confident in predicting that zoned suburbs will be a much smaller portion of human habitation in 1,000 years than they are now.

One downside of our new suburban life that is visible now, is that as business, community life, and schools become separated geographically, civic engagement goes down exponentially. Responsibility shifts from productive citizens to bureaucrats. This is a decline that happens due to humans’ competing tendencies towards selfishness and empathy.

Selfishness dictates that, as where we live, work, and play are separated, we no longer feel a responsibility to maintain or improve each geographic area or community of people. What happens in one sphere doesn’t affect us as much in any other sphere, so we are less incentivized to be proactive. The benefits and risks are distributed below the threshold for action. These spheres of civic life (church, business, school, entertainment) are now barely intertwined, like a venn diagram, whereas previously, interactions resembled a couple threads of yarn all tangled together in one ball.

As humans, we are not purely selfish creatures. Empathy plays an important role in our decision-making process. As Adam Smith put it so well in The Theory of Moral Sentiments,

That this is the source of our fellow-feeling for the misery of others, that it is by changing places in fancy with the sufferer, that we come either to conceive or to be affected by what he feels, may be demonstrated by many obvious observations, if it should not be thought sufficiently evident of itself. When we see a stroke aimed and just ready to fall upon the leg or arm of another person, we naturally shrink and draw back our own leg or our own arm; and when it does fall, we feel it in some measure, and are hurt by it as well as the sufferer.

By removing ourselves from what happens after 5 o’clock in our employer’s neighborhood, or what happens in the business community during the day in the suburb we live in, our empathy is reduced. It is impossible to empathize with someone who we don’t know or understand.

As our selfish and empathic interest in our neighbors is removed by structural changes, so too is our desire to act. The benefit of a Lions Club or church supper is not apparent when you’ve never met a person like the one you’re serving-it’s easier to write a check to a starving child in Africa that you’ve seen on TV than it is to drive someone who lives near your business to an appointment. Charity becomes all about an instant payoff. Writing a check to the child in Africa has less transaction cost than getting to know your elderly, poor neighbor, and you have less empathy with your neighbor because you can’t possibly understand their circumstances. A crying child? Everyone understands that.

Along with structural changes, the reduction in the importance of Christian faith has led to a sharp decline in civic engagement. Mark 12:30–31 says:

“30 And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. This is the first commandment. 31 And the second, like it, is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other commandment greater than these.”

We are called as Christians to be in the world but not of the world. I don’t want to suggest that we can create heaven on earth, but I do posit that as redeemed Christians are present in a community, it will have temporal benefits as well as eternal. Loving your neighbor as yourself is very hard, but the practical benefits of it are enormous. As society has marginalized faith, the only rational thing for many to do is eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die. Empathy may make us happier, but we have removed ourselves geographically from people to empathize with, and spiritually from the need to empathize at all.