In the Roman Catholic Mass there is a frequent exchange between priest and people: One morning it went like this: "The Lord be with you," to which the congregation replied, "and with you also." And so it went until an ecclesiastical/technological gremlin did something to the pulpit microphone. Frustrated, the priest said, "There's something wrong with the mike," to which the well-trained congregation dutifully replied, "and with you also."[1]
There is not only something wrong with him and but also with the world. Noting this, I have found deep meaning in the Hebrew word "tikkun" - repair of the world - for surely the world, wonderful as it is, is always in need of mending. On this Sunday between the Jewish High Holy Days of Awe - Rosh Hashanah - the Jewish New Year - and Yom Kippur - the Day of Atonement, it seems appropriate to take stock of how we are doing in repairing the world.
After all, it is said that on this day God keeps three record books - a thin one in which are inscribed the names of all the truly evil people in the world - a second even thinner one in which are inscribed the names of all the truly good people in the world - and a very thick one in which all the people who are mixtures of good and evil can be found. It is here we will doubtless find our names - if we are so brave as to look. Our own religious prophet Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "everything of God has a crack in it."[2] I submit one of the central missions of the Unitarian Universalist movement is trying to fix those cracks, repair the world and create the Beloved Community of Love and Justice. How are we doing as a nation - and as a congregation?
Many, including presidential candidate Al Gore, took pleasure last week in citing the latest figures from the U.S. Bureau of the Census - which showed that the number of people without health insurance has fallen for the first time in years and the percentage of people in poverty has fallen for the second straight year. Not surprisingly, the Vice-President attributed this to the economic policies of the Clinton-Gore administration, and we are supposed to be grateful and vote for him to continue this marvelous record.
What remains unsaid, unless George W. Bush will say it (which I doubt), or Ralph Nader (he probably has) was that these figures are a scandal in the wealthiest nation in the history of the world and in the midst of the longest period of uninterrupted economic growth in the nation's history. It's not enough to say, "we can do better." Something larger is at stake here. We are too timid to pledge ourselves to eliminate poverty in the midst of plenty - to provide quality health care for all our citizens - to end the shame of soup kitchens and homeless shelters in our towns and cities. We merely promise we will try to do better.
What is happening to the American dream of a just society? Apparently it is being hoisted on the petard of the two major party candidates who have lost any sense of moral vision in an inept pandering for votes.
What remains unspoken in Campaign 2000 is what has been written by Harvard's Robert Putnam, who was here last week to speak to the Rochester Area Foundation on his controversial book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. He worries about a breakdown of connectedness in our communities and a lack of civic engagement. It is a most disturbing book and I commend it to your attention.
His basic thesis is this: "For the first two-thirds of the 20th century a powerful tide bore Americans into ever deeper engagement in the life of their communities, but a few decades ago - silently, without warning - that tide reversed and we were overtaken by a treacherous rip current. Without at first noticing, we have been pulled apart from one another and from our communities over the last third of the century."[3]
He illustrates that thesis: "The average college student today knows little more about public affairs than did the average high school graduate in the 1940's."[4] Our voting is down a quarter over this period and interest in public affairs is down about one-fifth. More than a third of America's civic infrastructure - the voluntary associations that participate in the social, economic and political life of the community, have simply evaporated between the mid 1970's and the mid 1990's.
By comparison, financial capital - the wherewithal for mass marketing - has steadily replaced social capital - grassroots citizen networks - as the coin of the realm. And what is most striking is that these declines are greatest among the better educated. He concludes: "Americans have been dropping out in droves."[5]
His metaphor for this is bowling: while bowling is increasingly popular among Americans, our participation with other people in bowling leagues has dramatically declined. Ninety-one million people bowl, over 25% more than voted in the 1998 congressional elections.
In the 1990's Americans donated a smaller share of our personal income to charity than at any time since the 1940's - down 29%. In 1960 we gave away $1 for every $2 we spent on recreation. By 1997, we gave less than 50 cents for $2 spent on recreation.
This erosion of community is experienced as a lack of reciprocity - or as it has been colorfully put by Yogi Berra: "If you don't go to somebody's funeral, they won't come to yours."[6] Social capital is civic virtue embedded in community - a sense of mutuality - a feeling of personal responsibility for the common good - an eagerness to work with others toward it.
In the mid-19th century the French sociologist Alexis de Tocqueville, in his seminal work Democracy in America, worried about American community. He described the individualism he observed in the United States as "a calm and considered feeling which disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of his fellows and withdraw into the circle of family and friends; with this little society formed to his taste, he gladly leaves the greater society to look after itself."[7]
In this century, Putnam, believing that the individual must be firmly embedded in community, notes that Paul Revere's famous ride was successful only because of networks of civic engagement in the Middlesex villages.
Putnam claims we are participating in an erosion of our social capital. Religion has become privatized as membership and attendance decline - especially among the baby boomers born after the Second World War and their Generation X children. While many of them are on a spiritual quest, that quest is more often than not solitary, not communal.
One exception to this decline in faith-based civic engagement is the evangelicals. As one observer put it, "It is the evangelicals who are most walking their talk."[8]
In the secular world, union membership is down. Voluntary associations for civic betterment wither on the vine for lack of volunteers. Our basic sense of trust in our fellow citizens has eroded and we retreat into our cocoons watching TV with or without members of our family.
Why should this be? What are the causes of our decreasing participation in the life of our communities? Putnam estimates that pressures of time and money caused by our economic competitiveness cause about 10% of our withdrawal. Our mobility and suburban sprawl, he calculates, also causes about 10% of our disengagement.
Most important in our loss of civic participation is the difference in the generations. While what Putnam calls the "long civic generation" - born between 1910 and 1940 - have remained active in the community, each generation since - the boomers and their children - have become less and less involved. Putnam says that fully half of our civic withdrawal is explained by this. We notice that phenomenon here at church, where most of our community outreach activists are from this long-civic generation.
Why this dramatic difference? For one thing, the long civic generation is the last generation to grow up before the television explosion. The Baby boomers and the Gen Xers were brought up on TV. Americans average 4 hours of television watching per day, very nearly the highest in the world. TV is the 800-pound gorilla of leisure time. It feeds our passivity and apathy - and couch potatoes are not good at repairing the world. Putnam estimates our TV addiction accounts for 25% of our decreasing participation in community affairs.
Perhaps more important, this older, more active generation, has gone through the Depression and World War II - social cataclysms which unified the population in sacrifice for a common goal, created a kind of equality and provided an experience in civic engagement. One sociologist of the long civic generation, in a somewhat cynical mode, said, "We are the last suckers."[9] Why wouldn't he say that when his generation - which Tom Brokaw calls "the greatest generation," - made incredible sacrifices for the nation and the world - only to watch their children and grandchildren engaged in a frenzy of self-aggrandizement?
A UCLA survey of college freshmen gives credence to Putnam's thesis. In the 1960's and 1970's, students rated keeping up with politics and being active in environmental clean-up as somewhat more important than being well off financially. By 1998 those ratings were reversed and financial self-interest was twice as important as politics and environment. Strangely, but perhaps not surprisingly, personal malaise, depression and suicide are more common in this group of students than in their elders. By 1999 younger people were unhappier than older people.[10]
Happily volunteerism among this youthful group in the last 10 years is up, partly because schools often require it. However, even this is not totally salutary. While students are turning out to build homes, tutor children and feed the poor in record numbers, their voting participation rate is the lowest it has been since 18-year-olds got the vote.
With the exception of the anti-sweatshop movement, discussion of politics on campus, interest in social activism and desire to "be a community leader" have sunk. In other words, these youthful volunteers are willing to bandage the wounds of a brutally competitive society, but are not eager to challenge the principalities and powers that create such wounds in the first place.
Tufts College is countering this trend by creating its University College of Citizenship and Public Service, which by 2002 will offer courses in the intricacies of involvement in the political process.
While the volunteering of students in community service is good, it is not enough. One political science professor said, "A lot of people thought that the way to get citizenship was to just throw students out into service without challenging them to think in a civic way, to think about the public issues that underlie the very need for the service they're doing. A lot of service programs have worked hard to get students the opportunity to do service, but they haven't challenged them to think."[11]
How are we doing at First Unitarian? We are known far and wide for our social activism. Do we deserve that reputation? The patterns of the nation as a whole are disturbingly like those we experience. Our task forces are staffed mostly by older people - it is the graying of social action. While I work happily among this dedicated group of people and am amazed by their incredible devotion, many of our discussions revolve around how to get younger people involved.
Putnam predicts that the trend seems likely to continue, and when this long civic generation passes from the scene, there will be few left to do the "hum drum work of democracy" leaving the field to a few power brokers who will call the tune.
We need to determine if the "bowling alone" phenomenon is affecting our congregation. If so, how should we address it? We have already taken the first steps in our church school by introducing the In Our Hands curriculum which exposes our children to issues of social justice. Each class is given an opportunity to do community projects appropriate to their age group.
Two years ago this congregation funded and built a new playground in an inner-city neighborhood. It was an inter-generational project which galvanized our community.
Dare we rest on our laurels? Tonight at our congregational meeting on social responsibility we will have an opportunity to consider what we can do for an encore.
Then, on Sunday afternoon, November 19, I will be lead a program on "Bowling Together: Recharging Our Batteries to Change the World" - a celebration of what our activists have done and a seminar for would-be activists who want to help in repairing the world.
In these next two months, then, we will begin to see if we are victims of the bowling alone phenomenon; if our reputation as Rochester's "alert conscience and hospitable roof" is justified; if we can recapture the zeal of the long civic generation.
George Bernard Shaw once suggested that every citizen of a civilized society ought to be brought before the bar of justice periodically to justify their existence. If they could not do so, they should summarily be put to death. While this is a bit of Shavian hyperbole, it merits the serious reflection of spiritually alive people - Unitarian Universalists in particular.
I leave you with a poetic witness to the moral commitment of one member of the long civic generation, a name not know to you, but known to the poet. "Sign: For Margaret Lehan, Unitarian Universalist Activist":
"Margaret may have her doubts
about the existence of an after-life
or of disembodied spirits.
But we have no doubts about Margaret.
We've seen her thin little wrists
hold steady a broad "U.S. out of El Salvador" placard
in wind and cold in front of the federal building.
And whether, as she believes,
her ability to support that sign
is simply a combination of skinny arms
and a stout determination for justice,
Or whether, as some of us feel
inclined to think,
she is braced regularly
by a legion of angels
who are more inspired with helping
an elderly lady uphold a hearty principle
in a hard wind
than they are with dancing on the head of a pin,
either way,
we know a miracle when we see one."
Miracles like this are not simply to be observed. We are the miracle makers We are the menders and the furbishers. . We are the ones who will repair the world. There is no one but us.
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