Where Have All the Civitans Gone?

When I am asked to hit the road and keynote an event, most of the time, I don’t choose my destination or my audience. This means that, from time to time, I find myself in some very unexpected situations.

There was the time I arrived for an event only to find out it was actually an under-the-radar fundraiser for a political organization. Or the time I was asked to speak to more than 200 staff and faculty of a prestigious top 15 university as a lowly and ignorant 29-year-old (how did they even find my name?). There was also the time (and this one might really take the cake) when I was speaking at a summer camp, and they asked me to stay in a cabin full of middle school boys as the “camp counselor” for a couple of days — lucky me.

Last year, I had another one of those memorable moments. I showed up to speak to a local chapter of the “Civitans” (an organization I had never heard of) an hour outside of Charlotte, NC. I arrived just in time to hold the door open for a group of ladies in their 70s mustering toward the entrance with canes and walkers in tow. “Surely,” I told myself, “these were the senior members of the chapter, there early to get a good spot.” As it turns out, they were some of the younger people in attendance. By the time I took the stage, there couldn’t have been more than five people in an audience of about a hundred who didn’t have white-grey hair.

The Civitans, I learned that day, are a civic organization that has been around for the better part of a century. Each chapter invests its time and money into local causes. Some chapters volunteer regularly around town, while others host fundraisers for local charities. The lifeblood of each chapter, though, isn’t about a cause; it’s about a community. These people have dinner together every single week, with nearly a hundred people in attendance. They’ve been doing this for decades, and it shows. There was a social glue in that room that I was invited to experience for an afternoon. Everyone knew everyone else — both the good and the bad (neither of which they minded sharing with me). As a 30-something Millennial, the room felt… strange to me. I’m writing about the experience today, more than a year later, because I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

I was there to speak to them that day because they were having a problem — the same one I noticed as I held the door open for those ladies. They can’t find young people willing to join the Civitans. They don’t know how to attract them. They aren’t even sure where to find them. Because of the challenge, Civitan membership has been declining (or, perhaps more appropriately, aging) for more than two decades. If nothing changes, that North Carolina chapter, and hundreds like it around the country, will wither away.

I gave them some advice about younger generations, but upon reflection, I don’t think they are the problem. For younger generations, the relevance of a local civic service organization is not at issue—its necessity is.

The Civitans and other community organizations like them are growing irrelevant in their community because younger generations seem to have decided that civic clubs, in general, provide a service that they no longer require. Who needs a dinner with friends when I can order in? Who needs activities when I can watch Netflix? Who needs a fundraiser for a local cause when I can post my thoughts about issues on social media? Who needs a neighbor when I am connected to millions of others around the world who share my same hobbies and interests?

Growing disinterest in community organizations is by now old news. The landmark study on decreasing civic engagement released in 1995 was entitled “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community.” Author Robert Putnam “surveyed in detail Americans' changing behavior over the decades, showing how we had become increasingly disconnected from family, friends, neighbors, and social structures, whether it's with the PTA, church, clubs, political parties, or bowling leagues.” Sadly, with the growing ubiquitousness of smart portable technology and the internet that fuels it, since Putnam’s work was first published, we seem to have found even more reasons not to come together.

You and me to the nth degree

I recently finished David Brooks’ “The Second Mountain.” In it, Brooks recognizes in our culture the effect of a shift we made as a society almost two centuries ago. A shift from what are called “sociocentric” cultures to an “individualistic” culture. An American sociologist named Richard Shweder, who did most of his work in Orissa, India, found in his research that:

“The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its social and natural background, is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world’s cultures.”

One of the more popular books on this subject today is called “The WEIRDest People in the World.” WEIRD is an acronym (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) that refers to a set of characteristics that causes Westerners to judge the rest of the world using a lens most of us don’t even realize we possess.

The main difference between sociocentric and individualistic cultures lies in how we balance the needs of individuals and the society in which they live. “Most societies,” Shweder notes, “have chosen the sociocentric answer, placing the needs of groups and institutions first, and subordinating the needs of individuals. In contrast, the individualistic answer places individuals at the center and makes society a servant of the individual.” To most of us growing up in the Western world, the idea that we would choose to be voluntarily subservient to the needs of society — especially if the choice society is making is not in our own self-interest — seems strange, unfair, and perhaps even stupid. Why can’t I do me, and you do you?

It isn’t hard to see this exact scenario play out when looking at American reactions to any law that would restrict or confine a particular individual freedom for the sake of perceived community health or safety (For examples look to public backlash against stricter rules on smoking in the 1990s, stricter background checks in the wake of mass shootings in the 2010s, or of course mask requirements during the COVID-19 pandemic).

Jonathan Haidt, in his book “The Righteous Mind,” makes the case that “the individualistic answer largely vanquished the sociocentric approach in the twentieth century as individual rights expanded rapidly, consumer culture spread, and the Western world reacted with horror to the evils perpetrated by the ultrasociocentric fascist and communist empires.” As houses grew further apart and commutes got longer, a rugged sense of individualism became the modern way. Our sense of community shrank from my city, to my neighborhood, and then to just my extended family. Now the even the family is breaking up. We move elderly parents into nursing homes. Rising divorce rates have created a generation of single-parent households. And now? The number of people who are single and living alone is at an all-time high — an all-time high in the entire history of the world.

Some social scientists call it “the great disembedding.” Others, an “epidemic of loneliness.” However, I think David Brooks said it best:

”A half century of emancipation has made individualism, which was the heaven for our grandparents, into our hell."

An Epiphany for a Fleabag

So, where have all the potential Civitans gone? Wherever they are right now, it is increasingly likely that they are alone. If you ask one of these people if they like being more alone, especially the ability to make decisions without needing to consider others, they will likely say yes. Growing up in an individualistic Westernized culture teaches them that they shouldn’t need anyone else. The data, however, tell a different story. The most individualistic population of people the world has ever seen are also the loneliest, the most anxious, and the most depressed group of people in recorded history.

When these lies we tell ourselves about not needing other people start to creep up and grab hold; when our loneliness evolves into existential dread; what do we do? We scroll. We consume. We distract. And as we ignore the loneliness we feel, we might also start to lose ourselves all together.

This is the ironic destination of our journey down the road of individualism. What is normal everyday life for a person in a sociocentric culture (a community where they feel they truly belong) has become a revelation for a 21st-century device-addicted Westerner. We want to see we belong in the eyes of another person so badly that we will pay for a subscription to Better Help just to get it.

We can do better than a subscription, my friends.

If you haven’t watched this video essay on the most important 2 seconds of the show “Fleabag,” you must. Apart from being a beautiful piece of writing and editing, it also spills forth truth about what it feels like to feel truly alone — even when you are surrounded by people who are supposed to know and love you. As you watch, notice that the answer to her existential loneliness is not a better job or more money. Instead, the solution is a person who notices—someone who breaks away from thoughts of self and shows an interest in another.

To solve this problem, this is the kind of person we all have to become: a metaphorical (or perhaps even a literal) "Civitan." Someone who joins organizations and shows up. Someone who chooses the awkwardness of a social encounter instead of the safety of a device. Someone who puts their own selfish needs aside and makes a decision for the good of their community.

The people I met in the room that day know a truth many of us have forgotten. If you want to know you belong, you have to show you care.

More on that next week.

An Opportunity for Subscribers!

Hey Friends, on June 27th, I'll be hosting a free webinar to launch my new eBook, "The A.I. Dilemma: How Schools Can Build Digital Citizens in the Age of Intelligence."

The webinar is free and will be both interesting and a lot of fun! To sign up simply click here. Hope to see you there!

Andrew