October 8, 1998 | Read Time: 4 minutes
Since President Clinton has made national service for young Americans a hallmark of his Administration through such programs as AmeriCorps and the 1997 summit on volunteerism, the controversy over his conduct in office — and his possible removal — could conceivably dampen enthusiasm for it. However, non-profit leaders concerned with maintaining a high degree of civic spirit in the rising generation can take heart from a recent study done for the youth-service group Public Allies.
Fully two-thirds of the 728 Americans between the ages of 18 and 30 who were questioned for the survey said they tried to put their personal ideals into practice through volunteering and other forms of community engagement.
It seems, however, that they are going about it in their own way. Rather than align themselves with government or with well-established national religious or non-profit institutions, today’s young adults prefer new and different ways of promoting community improvement. Young people today, the survey notes, have begun to establish their own civic universe built around small, “bottom up” groups that thrive on personal relationships, such as schools and peer groups. Rather than look up to popular, charismatic, or persuasive leaders, today’s youth say they admire those who can get along well with other people, have high personal integrity, and are comfortable with diverse points of view.
According to the survey, less than one-fifth of young Americans think that they can effectively foster change by furthering a “political or social cause.” Such a vision contrasts sharply with that of the baby-boom generation, which, until the Vietnam War and Watergate era, looked to government and the programs of the Great Society as ways to serve the public good and solve social ills.
Now that such programs have fallen out of favor with the majority of Americans — and the nation’s political leadership is again enveloped in scandal — it is a good thing that civic spirit among young people is not tied as tightly to Washington as it once was. But there is a downside as well to this neo-Tocquevillean notion of voluntary civic action in America.
The Public Allies survey indicates that young Americans define their goals mostly in terms of better relationships. According to the report that accompanied the study, “diversity, reaching out and connecting to other people, and making a difference in the lives of others all are extremely important values to this generation.”
Laudable as those aims may be, however, they lack moral content. Good relationships can serve bad ends, as well as virtuous ones. Ultimately, what holds civic groups together — and makes them effective — is a shared sense of purpose, of goals, and of vision for themselves, for their communities, and, ultimately, for their country.
And that, the study suggests, may be lacking — or at least not clearly developed and articulated.
One study, of course, is hardly conclusive, but the heavy emphasis young people place on individual relationships raises the question of whether their activities are really more personal than civic-minded. One-third of those surveyed felt that the most important experience affecting their generation was “the increase in divorce and single-parent families.” It would not be surprising, then, if their volunteering had a lot more to do with finding what the historian Christopher Lasch once called “a haven in a heartless world” than with trying to change that world.
Too much concern for personal fulfillment is not a good basis for building effective and lasting civic groups. And it is all too easy to confuse activities that mostly serve one’s private needs with those that actually benefit the public.
Still, how young Americans’ ideas about civic engagement evolve and take practical form as the generation grows older will be worth watching. So, too, will the ways in which its civic activities fit into a society in which government, as well as long-established non-profit and religious groups, continue to play a large role.
By calling for more “community service” and mentor programs, some traditional political and non-profit leaders have begun to respond to the outlook reflected in the Public Allies survey. Others, however, continue to insist that today’s young people are too politically apathetic and bemoan their reluctance to take up one or another effort to change public policy. But unless those leaders can redefine the relationship between government and the nation’s civic life to give greater emphasis to fos tering non-governmental activity, they will have little chance of capturing the enthusiasm of the rising generation.
For now, this notion of a civil society that stands apart from government — while accomplishing many of the tasks that allow government to be limited and successful — is a promising one. Whether it can remain apart from government and still find solutions to many of the nation’s problems remains to be seen.
On balance, however, if we are now headed for another wrenching test of our confidence in the nation’s political leaders, we should be grateful that the rising generation of young Americans can envision a healthy civic life without Washington.
Leslie Lenkowsky is professor of philanthropic studies and public policy at the Indiana University Center on Philanthropy and a regular contributor to these pages. His e-mail address is llenkows@ iupui.edu.
