Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, November 29, 1994 TAG: 9412070063
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
A short walk from the Botetourt County Courthouse, the diner at lunch hour is a forum for discussing every little thing, but especially politics and current events. The talk brings together opinionaters from various walks of life: judges and plumbers, lawyers and carpenters, secretaries and doctors. The discussion is wide-ranging; the disagreement, friendly.
"No one is put down for their opinion, no matter how outrageous it seems to the others," says lawyer Harold Eads, a regular at Connie's. "It's democracy in action," says Commonwealth's Attorney Rob Hagan.
Alas, democracy outside of Connie's isn't getting as much action these days. Americans, it is widely lamented, are more angry than involved. Our sense of common purpose is withering.
Any number of causes can be cited. But one that hasn't drawn enough attention is the decline of community fixtures, like small-town diners, where citizens traditionally have engaged face to face in free speech.
Statistics suggest that, sometime during the 1970s, institutions where Americans gather and discuss common interests and topics of the day began to shrink. Organizations such as Lions Club, League of Women Voters, the Elks, and bowling leagues have seen declines in membership.
Most of these aren't political institutions. But as places where people interact and find opportunities to rise above narrow self-centeredness, they've helped underpin republican democracy.
Sure, the American Association of Retired Persons is flourishing. It has more than 33 million members today, up from 1.6 million in 1970. But to join the AARP, one need only sign a check. Lobbyists do the work of democracy for the members. It's politics by proxy.
Too, some satisfy their thirst for political dialogue by listening to talk radio. But even daily communion with Rush Limbaugh is a one-way contact, a poor substitute for citizen interaction. The medium, moreover, seems to lower the civility of debate, proving better at inflaming passive resentments than at bringing people together to discuss solutions to common problems.
In his 1993 book, "Making Democracy Work," Harvard political scientist Robert Putnum studied Italy's 20 states, trying to determine why some were more successful than others. No factor that Putnum identified from 100 years ago - including affluence and education - proved as good a predictor of current health, happiness and prosperity as did the proportion of people engaged in civic and social activities: choral societies, fraternal organizations, etc.
In some circles nowadays it is fashionable to insult voters' intelligence. Poll results are cited to show, for instance, that 40 percent of Americans were unaware before the past election that Democrats controlled the House of Representatives. But if Putnum is right, the republic's future is threatened more by declining civic engagement than by any lack of information or knowledge.
What's happened since 1970? Television, for one thing, has gobbled up leisure - numbing people into passivity, isolating them in their (now mostly suburban) homes, leaving precious little time for civic involvement.
But economic change may be the more decisive factor. Uncertainty makes us fearful and grumpy. Women, once mainstays of community and voluntary activities, have joined the paid labor force. More generally, as management guru Peter Drucker writes in Atlantic Monthly, work is becoming increasingly detached from community.
The "knowledge society" spawns a new class of workers who apply specialized knowledge to their labors, who are linked to a global communications network and are less bound to traditional home bases - family, parish, union hall, even nation.
For consumers rather than citizens, expertise has become the substitute for democracy, social services the substitute for society. This substitution violates human nature (we are sociable animals) so we become angry.
This theory - call it the Connie's hypothesis - is, of course, only speculative diagnosis. It outlines only one cause among many for our (excuse the word) malaise. And it suggests no solution. (Forget about returning to The Way We Were. Assuming it ever existed and we wanted to go back, we couldn't.)
Striving to explain the national mood is crucial, though, if only for this reason: Lacking understanding or focus for our anger, we become more vulnerable to demagoguery and to the search for scapegoats.
We need to talk more about this.
by CNB