Regenerating Society in an Age of Disintegration

We live in an age of social disintegration. Our families, communities, and neighborhoods are fragile, suffering from America's social breakdown—the fraying of the relationships that used to bind us to each other. As many thinkers on the left, as well as the right, have forecast, growing atomization has resulted in a slew of social ills—including unstable family structures, school shootings, skyrocketing rates of depression and anxiety, and deaths of despair—from alcoholism, drug abuse, and suicide. These problems exist on a scale without parallel elsewhere in the developed world.  

While economic growth and innovation are key elements of a successful country, the American fixation on choice, convenience, and comfort yields an insufficient vision for a generative society. Our preoccupation with maximizing material gains and choice has unwittingly fueled conditions that habituate us to choose loneliness and isolation in how we use our time, develop our careers, engage (or not) with our family and neighbors, and use technology. The resulting atomization has degenerated the social institutions that underpin our social health and culture, with wide ranging implications for our economy and democracy.  

Yet, instead of tackling the sources of our social breakdown, our government bodies, philanthropists, and social entrepreneurs target its products in separated siloes. This approach often weakens the very relationships individuals need to flourish in their communities. Individuals and groups typically look outward for assistance, hoping to qualify for public programs, rather than inward to build social relationships with family and neighbors. And individuals who get ahead quickly learn that it's best to move on to a better locale rather than build up their own. The others are left behind.  

The resulting neighborhood effects explain why many of our society’s problems seem intractable. Without strong neighborhoods, school systems cannot improve educational results, housing authorities cannot increase affordable housing, healthcare agencies cannot improve health outcomes, and police cannot ensure streets are safe. Well-off neighborhoods are not immune when they are plagued by disconnection and isolation, as indicators of rising drug deaths, depression, loneliness, and mistrust attest.

To restore social dynamism in American life, we might reconsider life on a human scale. What might strengthen our social fabric block by block? We are more likely to feel a sense of obligation to others and seek to steward a place and its resources when our lives are deeply intertwined. Generativity is more likely to occur when each of us—whether rich or poor, prominent or ordinary—hold a stake in smaller social units where we matter to the unit’s success. In a country as vast as the United States, only strong neighborhoods with robust social institutions can spur dynamic local engagement, place by place. So how can we catalyze generative places?

The Heartwood of Place-based Institutions

Experts and pundits have noted how Americans are increasingly detached from social institutions—including marriage, associational life, work, and faith—but they tend to look at the dynamics in siloes rather than as part of an overarching pattern within society itself. Place-based institutions are like heartwood—the strong, durable center of a tree trunk that solidifies over time. As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, “In democratic countries the science of association is the mother science; the progress of all the others depends on the progress of that one.” The dramatic changes in the physical landscape and nature of the organizations that dominate society have infected and weakened this heartwood, with enormous implications for how we interact.  

Social institutions and volunteer organizations once provided abundant opportunities for each person to participate, contribute, take ownership, and find meaning in their daily lives across America’s vast landscape. By contrast, today, “national public life is now dominated by professionally managed advocacy groups”—often far removed from where people live—rather than associations of citizens operating side by side. Service organizations, which not only bring people together but often do work in their communities, have long struggled to maintain memberships. And the mighty national cross-class voluntary federations that once dominated American life—organizations such as the Knights of Columbus, Veterans of Foreign Wars, and Ancient and Accepted Free Masons—have withered.

Even “‘voluntary groups’ are, more often than not,” writes sociologist and political scientist Theda Skocpol, “non-profit institutions through which paid employees deliver services and coordinate occasional voluntary projects.” Where we once regularly volunteered to work with fellow citizens to build up our neighborhoods and towns, today, much volunteer work involves working for others and executing one-off efforts in the direction of professional managers and organizations. Meanwhile, giving is way down. In 2018 (the latest year for which comprehensive data is available), just 49.6% of U.S. households made a charitable contribution: a drop of almost 17 percentage points from 2000, according to Lilly Family School of Philanthropy.  

Americans may still be spiritual, but they are leaving organized religion in droves. Churches are closing at an alarming rate—with perhaps as many as 100,000 predicted to close over the next decade. Membership in formal houses of worship has declined steadily in recent decades, with the growth of unaffiliated individuals rising significantly, especially after 1990. Pew Research Center reports that close to one-third of all American adults now say they have “no religion” at all.

It is much harder to start or sustain place-based local institutions in this climate—the ground where they must lay roots and grow is much less fertile. Many Americans live in institutional deserts, with most aspects of daily life—from working to learning to playing to shopping—being done either alone or in a transactional fashion. This isolates people from one another in a way that was not true in the past. We are seeing an unprecedented weakening of what author Marc Dunkelman, writing in National Affairs, calls “middle-ring relationships” and a dissolution of “the bonds that long defined American villages, neighborhoods, and suburbs.” Many youths never experience the socialization of institutional attachment and embodied service that previous generations took for granted. Without the strong heartwood of place-based institutionalized attachments, young people do not grow up embracing values and norms once seen as essential to human and societal flourishing.  

Stronger Branches: Leadership & Stewardship

Instead of government policies or national campaigns to address various societal woes, Americans need to galvanize social and economic regeneration place by place. And social generativity depends on the robustness and density of institutions—formal and informal—in any particular locale. Whether social, economic, religious, or civic, institutions bolster social networks, shared loyalties, widely accepted norms, and deep reservoirs of social capital.  

These local generative institutions don’t seek to scale but to steward. For example, neighborhood churches can have a bigger impact on the social fabric than megachurches; micro entrepreneurship may be more socially generative than large corporations; and hyperlocal nonprofits and charities may do more to build social cohesion than the large service-oriented entities and philanthropies. The momentum created will work sideways and upwards—it will branch out—to bring benefits for more residents, adjacent neighborhoods, smaller and larger cities, regions, and finally, the whole country.  

In practice, repeated embodied interactions build dense social networks, cohesion, and trust—lubricating cooperation in the daily regimen of life. These interactions prompt people to solve common problems, address conflict over resources, and reach for higher aspirations. As Tim Carney writes in Alienated America, “The only way to maintain ‘real and sincere closeness’ with a person is to entangle ourselves with that person through the bonds of an institution—to live in community and to work toward common ends with that person.” This expands the capacity and norms for self-governance: the foundation of the American experiment.

The American frontier is an example of this fruitful cooperation. As historian Daniel Boorstin writes in The Americans: The National Experience, these migrants “commonly moved and settled in clusters, drawn together by the perils of the unknown land.” People banded together to defend themselves, raise houses, clear land, plant crops, trade, share information, build schools, gain companionship, and pray. There were the inevitable conflicts over religion, politics, slavery, trade, and alcohol, and sometimes there was violence. But people had to work together to survive, so they developed networks, voluntary associations, and social institutions. As such, Lacy Ford suggests the frontier is better understood as the product of “pious ‘joiners,’” rather than of the “unfettered individualists” typically portrayed. As Robert Nisbet concludes in Twilight of Authority, “rich in social inventions, all of which were necessary to progress and protection.”

Stewardship is dynamic, but it is not quick. It entails leaning into a particular place and taking responsibility for leading and uplifting local institutions and neighbors. This requires intimate knowledge of the local landscape—everyone from local officials to religious leaders to businesspeople to senior community members—and a willingness to sacrifice one’s time and sometimes resources for the greater (local) good. The “durable shared loyalties” noted above have only proved to be durable over a period of time.

Stewardship is a mindset that used to predominate among Americans, especially elites, but it has yielded to more self-interested consumption and cosmopolitanism. This leaves fewer community leaders—“stewards”—ready to step in when someone has a problem, fewer mentors for couples and children who need them, and fewer institutions that can organize residents to tackle common challenges. The stewardship gap is most apparent in distressed neighborhoods because conditions drive out the most talented people, yielding a perpetuating downward trajectory. Stewards act as investors, philanthropists, advisers, mentors, matchmakers, and participants in the countless efforts, big and small, that improve a place.  

Strong heartwood generated from an abundance of local institutions grows, thickens, and extends branches—local activity geared towards bettering the place—enabling generation and regeneration despite the dramatic changes in environments. Place-based religious groups, for example, are not only doing better than their secular counterparts; they also do better than faith-based organizations that lack a strong place component. The Amish, Mormons, and Orthodox Jews are all maintaining or growing their numbers while other religious groups are in decline. Utah, the state whose social structures are best preserved due to religion (LDS), consistently has the best social indicators in the country, outpacing other states on a slew of indicators: it has the most stable families and the lowest percentage of poor and extremely poor children in the country; despite low taxes, more upward mobility and lower income inequality than any other state in the country; and a strong economy, with the best employment situation in the country. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the state consistently ranks the highest on social capital indices in the country.

Bearing Fruit Place by Place

While we cannot restore the conditions that made townships central to our lives the way they were in the past, we can recreate many of the enabling conditions that nurture and produce fruit: a rich repertoire of social institutions. What would this look like, practically speaking?  

Civic leaders, policymakers, philanthropists, and social leaders should re-envision the physical and institutional landscape around clearly demarcated neighborhoods, with a renewed emphasis on in-person exchange and the development of the wealth of “organizational life.” This means ensuring that residents in each area have a sense of collective identity and mutual responsibility, if not a shared feeling of common community (a much higher bar). This may be easier in smaller cities, where urban institutions are more connected to different locales than in huge metropolises.  

This is practicable: Adjusting the tax system to favor local volunteerism and giving and local zoning to enable mixed-use development would contribute to this dynamic. Community schools are excellent incubators of social relationships, as are “third places”—the churches, coffee shops, gyms, hair salons, bars, bookstores, parks, and community centers that host regular, informal gatherings of residents.

If we understand that the local neighborhood is the primary arena where social institutions arise and flourish, we see how decentralization—also known as subsidiarity—is critical. Decentralizing government such that it served and was responsible for specific neighborhoods would make public authorities much more embedded in specific places while giving residents more say in how funds are spent. Public servants would know social contexts better and have the incentives to improve them—especially if they were committed to a particular geography for an extended period and evaluated on its performance rather than the number of permits issued, or housing units built.  

More institutional innovation would help as well—as Robert Nisbet repeatedly emphasizes. There is a glaring need for better place-based governance forms; business districts have them, but neighborhoods do not. Such innovation is the only kind likely to address the relational problems at the heart of today’s most pressing social ills. Theda Skocpol writes, “The process of civic revitalization must proceed by trial and error—and the more experimenters, the better.” As noted above, this requires real stewardship—and from a critical mass of people place by place.  

Houses of worship are essential to social flourishing, and many could become more place-based to do so. Too often, churches and other religious organizations act as if they are serving consumers, curating gatherings that appeal to therapeutic impulses and marketing personalities and sermons. Some churches make few demands of their congregants regarding community service, donations, and in-person formation the other six days of the week. Individuals see churches as “functional assists” for a particular need or given phase of life—just like other institutions in America today. This greatly reduces their capacity to halt social decay—and to contribute to regeneration. Whereas religious and other social institutions used to cultivate the pre-political social fabric on which so much depends, today, some are just as likely to see their missions in political terms. This does not only deny members of society what is essential to their wellbeing; it also distorts the public square.  

Lastly, national political and civic leaders should stop evaluating economic gains based on national metrics that do not capture how some American neighborhoods, cities, and regions are struggling. The federal government has adopted more place-based policies over the last two administrations, with the goal of increasing the incentives for investment and catalyzing broader action aimed at boosting the economic dynamics of specific places. But more experimentation is needed, and a broader variety of policies will be more likely to reach America’s diverse regions (rural and metropolitan) and neighborhoods that struggle the most. Mechanisms such as neighborhood improvement districts, social impact bonds, and population health management could be adapted to support such efforts to strengthen neighborhoods.

In addition, we could do more to incubate micro entrepreneurship, especially in poorer neighborhoods and regions. Too often, civic leaders look to large companies and investors for salvation when many people locally are eager to start their own businesses or redevelop their neighborhoods. We need the right regulations, commercial space, financial institutions, training, mentorship, and civic leadership to unleash this potential. Success would not only help people better lift themselves; it would also work to restore the social fabric as such activity knitted people together.

Contrary to what revisionist histories might have you believe, our success as a nation is not rooted in centuries of individual economic transactions based on each person’s self-interest. Instead, it is the product of cooperation, collective action, and dense social bonds embedded within robust place-based social structures. Alexis de Tocqueville noted in Democracy in America how essential association life was to the country’s democratic spirit because “sentiments and ideas renew themselves, the heart is enlarged, and the human mind is developed only by the reciprocal action of men upon one another.” In an age of disintegration, we need to focus first and foremost on stewarding vibrant communities across generations.  

Seth D. Kaplan, a lecturer at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, is the author of Fragile Neighborhoods: Repairing American Society, One Zip Code at a Time.