The decline of the traditional civic culture in America has, no doubt, lots of causes, many of them mentioned elsewhere in this thread. Having been raised for much of my childhood in very small towns, I notice the effects of this constantly, living as I now do in a suburb of Atlanta. I notice it also as a member of the board of our neighborhood association (a voluntary one, FWIW) in the difficulty we often have getting homeowners in our neighborhood involved in activities and in issues that affect us.
Science writer Matt Ridley makes a pretty good case, in his book The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation, for the idea that self-interest is indeed the cornerstone of all human behavior, but that people are in fact reasonably good at recognizing the need to cooperate – so long as their motivation to do so isn’t pre-empted by the expectation that someone else (such as the government) will do it instead, and so long as their interest (in the sense of their “ownership”) in the mechanisms for doing so is preserved. Among the evidence he musters to support this contention are numerous experiments and observed phenomenon that demonstrate the counter-intuitive fact that the likelihood of an individual assisting another individual in obvious need of help declines as the number of people who see the need increases, assuming the potential helpers are aware of each others presence. The reason thirty-nine people saw Kitty Genovese being attacked and did nothing is, according to the evidence Ridley presents, that there were thirty-nine of them and not one or two. He also cites numerous instances from a variety of cultures of successful collective ownership and management of resources (fisheries, grazing lands, water rights, etc.) that functioned for centuries, only to collapse once their functions were assumed by government and the individuals lost any proprietary interest. He effectively debunks the notion that these “tribal” arrangements succeeded because of some innate environmental sensibility on the part of the peoples involved, and establishes that they succeeded because of the ownership interest of the individuals involved and failed once that was removed.
While I’m not sure I’m willing to go quite so far as Ridley down the libertarian road, the argument he presents does go a long way toward explaining many of the things we see happening in our culture: those who can afford to do so create new communities for themselves in which they do have a proprietary interest, with services and amenities for which they’re willing to pay because they have an ownership interest in them. They send their kids to private schools where their financial stake gives them a somewhat greater say in how the school is run. They expend their resources and efforts on people and institutions they “own” (their children, their home and their gated neighborhood, the schools where they send their kids, etc.) Meanwhile, those who own no property, who are likely to be fairly new to the community and who are likely to leave it in the near future, make up a greater percentage of those whose kids are in the public school system, a greater percentage of those who depend on the government to provide and maintain services and infrastructure. They have no ongoing stake, however, in the continued viability of these services and facilities, and thus don’t consider it in their interest to do anything to preserve or enhance them, expecting that the government will somehow do so instead.
Having said all that, I still think gated communities represent an apparently successful attempt on the part of developers to sell people something that they can’t really deliver. They play on the fears people have for the safety of themselves and their families, while doing little or nothing to actually increase their security. Having moved behind the gates, they believe they have something that can only really be achieved by living in a community where people are genuinely connected to each other and are willing to invest in each other’s welfare, while in fact they’re only isolating themselves from each other even more. Perhaps it’s human nature, but people seem much more willing to try to buy security and community and pleasant surroundings than to actually make the effort to create them where they are. Hence the flight of so many Atlantans to the far reaches of the outlying suburbs, only to have to pull up stakes and move again as the problems they’d rather run from than tackle inexorably follow them outward.
