We, the People
 It
is only now beginning to be talked about, but there is a profound
re-formation of American society going on today at the
civic level, and it owes a great deal to the advent and spread
of relatively inexpensive computer technology. The personal computer, as well as all the
other recent technological innovations, have empowered
Americans as never before in human history. And one of
the byproducts of this empowerment -- unremarked until now
-- is the slowly growing but widespread recognition that
those among us who have always wanted to be our masters
-- and who have often succeeded via sweeping claims of
public need -- have in actuality had at heart little more
than their own desire for the exaltation of high office
and the exultation of that power. We cannot but see that,
despite the confiscation from us, for generations now, of
an immense share of the wealth we have created, and
despite an infinitude of silly and obtrusive laws and regulations,
government has not solved the public problems for which
it took our earnings and our freedom. Instead it is overwhelmingly
clear that government itself has worsened those problems. This recognition grows out of our everyday
experience: implicitly we compare the standards and norms
of performance inherent in the technology we use everyday
in the business marketplace with the standards and norms
we observe operating in government's sphere. Having been
disciplined into clear intelligence by free and competitive
innovation in the economy, we look at government and have
to laugh. Or we get angry. And even though such anger
tends to produce hand-wringing in the establishment media
(with its vested interest in the established power
alignments), that anger is turning out to be quite
positive. Why? Because the anger is turning out to be the
fuel for a local activism that is re-building American
civil society. Richard Harwood, director of a Maryland public
issues research firm, identified this trend in a 1991
survey. "It was one of the first reports that people
were angry about politics," said Mr. Harwood, who
founded the Harwood Group. "But if you asked the
same people who said they hated politics, 'Do you care about
your community?' they were the same ones who were involved"
at the local level. It was not a paradox. When it is recognized
that the government can't solve community problems, the
only remaining option, for those who care, is to
themselves organize and attack the problems. And that is
happening, not only here in Nevada, but all over the country. |
"This
is the equivalent of a nonviolent revolution," says Franklin
Thomas, president of the Ford Foundation in New York, "and
it's not very well known. It's people in communities and neighborhoods
organizing to cause positive things to happen, feeling
the sense of responsibility and not becoming totally
subject to the policy whims of any level of
government." With the discrediting of 'big government,'
what is rising again in America is the idea of the
"civil society," an idea perhaps unfamiliar to
many people today but a concept that was once central to
American life. Civil society, or the "civic sector,"
was the sum of all the community's private and voluntary
non-profit institutions: churches, schools, clubs, and
all kinds of service groups. In the first century of
America, the civil society was an equal player with the
private and public sectors, often mediating between the
other two. And then, social historians recount, it was
increasingly pushed off stage. Entering the American scene were European
collectivist and other ideologies which sniffed at the
many voluntary private programs as unenlightened and unscientific.
Increasingly, over the coming decades, American elites
embraced the essentials of those ideologies, until,
ultimately, partisans of the new orientation gained
control of American government, and its coercive and taxing
powers. The re-direction of national resources and
priorities that ensued hollowed out the civic life of
American society. Now, though, precisely out of our experience
of the flaws and dangers of government as an instrument
of social reform, civil society is rising again. This movement is unlike other recent social
movements, in that it simply has to do with ordinary citizens
digging in to deal with today's most pressing issues -- schools,
family, crime and safety -- and relying on the tools at hand.
One of the most important of those tools, with which community
and civil society is being re-built is the Internet, and we'll
return to that subject in future editorials. But for now we'd just like to draw attention
to an important precedent this civic revival has -- another
era when the dark side of government had recently been seen
all too clearly by Americans, and across the United
States of that time citizens were re-discovering that the
key to addressing community social problems was within
themselves. The spirit that pulsed through that time came
forth in memorable words, words that founded a nation.
"We, the People." |
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