Social disintegration and disorganization have developed over several generations; can be resolved only by appropriate institutions, decisions, and political will consistently applied over several generations. Most children born in 1995 will be alive in 2065 and their lives will reflect not only the social, scientific and cultural achievements of the 20th century, but also its social pathologies, maladaptive decisions and dysfunctional institutions.

The United States emerged from World War II as the world leader; its altruism and generosity inspired and contributed to the reconstruction of Japan and a reconquered Europe. America’s institutions demonstrated an extraordinary capacity for benevolent social planning in demobilization, in restoring and expanding the country’s economic and scientific productivity, and in its level of popular well-being—educating, housing and constructively employing some 16 million veterans without serious economic or social disturbance. America’s global cultural hegemony was increasingly exercised at the popular level by the media of mass communication, especially films, whose "demonstration effect" made American ways and well-being the envy of the world, an object of imitation. The effect was widened and deepened by the electronic media while U.S. Government-sponsored cultural policies emphasized academic exchanges, American Libraries abroad and inexpensive translated editions of political classics reflecting the American way. Even the Cold War would provide an object lesson and mode of comparing political and social ideologies and institutions, ways of life and expression that could only reflect favorably on America. Yet something went wrong.

Arnold Toynbee recognized that civilizations arise when creative governing minorities consistently make effective adjustive and adaptive decisions for the community, thus confirming their "legitimacy" and evoking popular assent to their leadership. Civilizations (and, indeed, communities at every level) begin to fail when their rulers or ruling class increasingly make inappropriate and maladaptive uses of social resources (including human talent, productive capacities, wealth and influence), or maladaptively program human interactions through ill-considered laws. The decision-makers become a "dominant minority," losing their "legitimacy" and increasingly relying on compulsion as society’s projects produce undesired, undesirable, and often unforeseen (albeit usually foreseeable) negative consequences. In America recent references to government "enforcers" as "jack-booted thugs" suggest that for a significant number of Americans the process of "delegitimation" is well advanced. Quebec’s referendum on separation from Canada suggests the process is well advanced there as well.

This century has been a laboratory proving Toynbee’s insight at both the national and international levels. World War I marked the breakdown of the Enlightenment’s secular liberal world order; domestically the moral anarchy of Germany’s Weimar Republic failed and called forth a monster, Nazism. In the U.S.S.R. following World War Il and decades of moral, political and economic malaise, 70 years of the omnicompetent state and socialist planning had proved maladaptive and utterly dysfunctional by 1989. In America the fun and money-frenzied 1920s, gangsterism and a maladaptive economy produced, by reaction, an ever-increasing concentration of power in a bureaucratic welfare state. This taxed heavily, minutely regulated ever more aspects of life, and massively redistributed the social product to gain popular political assent. The phenomenon was characteristic of both representative democracies and the revolu-tionary populist regimes of right and left in the 1930s and 40s. In America these trends continued after World War II, bringing on the Great Society characterized by extraordinary levels of poverty and welfare dependency, along with an ever-increasing level of federal regulation.

At the global level American institutions, political, economic and cultural, clearly had prevailed by the last decade of the 20th century; "democracy," the market economy, the English language and advanced American academic degrees, American popular culture, stars and personality types have uncontested place. After the draw in Korea, the debacle in Vietnam, and the disgrace in Lebanon and Somalia, the United States employed its logistic capabilities, advanced weapons technologies, intelligence, communications and control systems with startling military violence and effectiveness in the Kuwait/Iraq affair. But this was for very limited objectives and over a brief period of time; it was unable to effect a change of regime in Iraq.

Domestically, the United States’ smooth transition from the depression of the 1930s and the global violence and disruption of World War II had created an unprecedented general level of health, nutrition and well-being. It provided a university education to so many returning veterans that older cultural discriminants of class lost much of their significance.

By the 1960s, however, America had become sensitized to emerging domestic issues that required immediate, creative and effective responses:

a) a growing federal budget and financial burden on the citizens driven by the "cold war" and military expenditures,

b) a loss of scientific and technological élan reflected by sputnik and a series of Soviet firsts in space,

c) the invention and successful testing of "the pill" which, coupled with the control of syphilis and gonorrhea by antibiotics, and the coming of age of a cohort of permissively raised American "baby boomers", produced a sexual revolution,

d) a rising consciousness of, and sensitivity to, institutionalized social injustice: racial, ethnic and sexual discrimination, poverty, repressive public authorities, unequal opportunity, etc., and

e) increased awareness of issues of environmental quality, public safety, health and occupational hazards.

American public legislative responses reflected the nation’s affluence and the conviction that virtually all problems can be solved by technological and institutional "fixes", fueled by public funds and a national public administration.

When money and monetary values are mere constructs of law and political will, when the allocation of goods (including jobs, education, lucrative contracts, licenses, zoning changes, construction permits, etc.) is a function of partisan politics, friendship and simply the power to punish or retaliate, the bulk of mankind (prudently) responds passively. People become the objects of history, not its subjects—an alienated mass ripe for servile status.

Many of the core social issues of contemporary American society revolve around the sexual revolution and its effect on the family—the procreation, nurture and education of children. When coupling is casual and/or temporary there is little mutual love and confidence, little sense of parental responsibility. Fatherless boys are prone to violent criminality and in America take pride in seducing and abandoning young women, whose offspring are then fatherless. Widespread promiscuity and the legitimization of homosexuality tend to foster social diseases and induce (often voluntary) sterility. The capacity to delay or avoid childbearing joined by psychological pressure for personal affirmation brought about by the feminist movement and the need for two incomes in new families (inflation-induced housing costs have risen over 20 years at twice the rate of inflation) has resulted in fewer children in traditional family units; immigration, legal and illegal, makes up the slack in the work force, with corresponding effects on the nation’s common language, culture and shared values. Employed mothers of young children in traditional families increasingly question the justice and legitimacy of a system that provides subsidized housing, food stamps, free medical care and cash subsidies for additional children to the unmarried and welfare dependent, while they are constrained to delay or limit their own families for economic and prudential reasons related to older but seemingly obsolete notions of personal and family responsibility.

Increasingly barbaric, even savage criminal behavior (frequently linked to the absence of male authority and discipline in "single parent families") is masked in the public arena by redefining behavioral standards, "defining deviance downward;" often by legalizing what had been criminal, e.g. "soft" drug use; or even making what had been criminal a constitutionally guaranteed "right" (in some cases to be pushed by the U.S. foreign policy establishment as a universal "human right"). Abortion is the most obvious example, though voluntary euthanasia is clearly on the agenda. As the Dutch experience shows, this rapidly degenerates into widespread medical manslaughter on the German pattern of the late 1930s, even without formal governmental encouragement.

As the quality of elementary and secondary public education declines in America and measured academic achievement at every level consistently falls below that of most other modern or modernizing nations, American public opinion is placated by changing test items and emphases and readjusting norms downward. As a consequence of the failures of primary and secondary education, much American higher education is now "remedial." The United States increasingly "imports" scientists and engineers, especially at the most advanced levels, and holds them in thrall through manipulation of their residency status. At these levels the tenor of American life is, after all, very high. In many universities American students in the sciences and engineering can barely understand their teachers, so diverse is the range of accents and the often idiosyncratic grammar and syntax of their foreign born and educated professors.

The recently passed "Schools to Work Careers Bill" envisages central planning for the formation and allocation of "human capital", combining the educational and career development decisions for most Americans in a national governmental mechanism that extends the range and power of population controls, already strongly conditioned by the (technically private) Educational Testing Service. Technologies necessary to serve humanly desirable goals often have an equal potential to make possible and effective previously impossible levels of human control. The pursuit of desirable goals when determined by an inadequate or limited concept of man, or by ideological "correctness", or purely pragmatic and instrumental goal-seeking can convert technology from servant to master of men, and may make the servile state an operative reality.

Increasing social disorganization, widespread fear and the delegitimation of public authority, crime and the induced poverty of welfare dependency, incompetence in the workplace and the "dumbing down" of the bulk of the population, illegitimacy, marital breakdown, the loss of community, economic egotism coupled with public policies placing the burden of social experimentation and innovation on an ever smaller portion of the population living by traditional values, productive and morally supportive of proven institutions—all are leading to the social compulsion of a significant part of the work force, which Hilaire Belloc terms "the servile state."

Since the beginning of this century, and before, there has been an ideological current favorable to limitless freedom, self-affirma-tion and self-realization without regard to other persons in the family or the larger society. The language of rights to the neglect or downplaying of obligation facilitates and justifies action careless of consequences. What is pleasurable or immediately gratifying is good: negative consequences may be dealt with separately and later. Edward Banfield has pointed out that a very short time horizon characterizes those prone to urban rioting and the behaviors associated with the culture of violence.

Often technology or an institutionalized social safety net can be called upon to avoid or mitigate the negative consequences of imprudence or malice: the unwanted child is aborted; the drunken husband or shrewish wife is divorced: the social disease is cured by antibiotics; the effects of drug abuse are mitigated by welfare institutions. methadone treatment and supplemental income programs. The pimp and drug dealer shot "in the course of business" are provided unlimited access to the best medical technology in the trauma units of major municipal and university hospitals.

Nature, in the sense of intrinsically defined relations between human acts, individual and social, and their inherently likely outcomes may be consistently and persistently sidestepped. When sexual acts are conceptually and practically distinct from reproduc-tion, the result is sex as recreation. Where there were two sexes, the last decade of the 20th century sees at least five genders: male, female, homosexual, bisexual and transsexual. The concept of "family" no longer implies children, but has become an amorphous, often temporary, sharing of life and affective expression, a notion increasingly receiving juridical recognition to the detriment of the traditional family. Martial’s and Juvenal’s writings suggest that the opportunistic violence and criminality of the slums and the moral disorders and cynicism of America’s urban elites were not unknown to imperial Rome. As demographic decline, personal demoralization, external pressure and unacceptable bureaucratic exactions brought on the economic and social collapse of the late Empire, more and more persons accepted the social discipline and relative security of serfdom. Out of that matrix rose the Christian civilization of Europe.

No contemporary community has satisfactorily institutionalized a stable, open-ended, adequate and liberal response to the social challenges suggested above. Certainly the revival and survival of civil society requires solidarity at every level of community: family, neighborhood, city, region, nation, continent or cultural area, the whole human family as a global community. Are there individual human rights? Certainly, and they should be institutionalized, guaranteed and enforced as civil rights. But as Pope John Paul II emphasized in his address to the U.N. in October 1995, we must identify and enunciate the rights of communities and especially of nations united by a common language, culture, history, traditions and usually a core, contiguous geographic space—a homeland.

These many peoples differ in modal personality, range of talents and interests, values emphases, level of development—and must be cherished in their individuality and differences. They must be permitted to develop autonomously, yet in concert with an increasingly self-aware ecumenical culture and global community consciousness.

It is my thesis that a pluralistic world order is emerging and that, despite its present geo-political, economic and cultural dominance of the global scene, the United States is but one of a broad range of evolving social and cultural complexes. The future of civil society at the global level lies not in the predominance or domination of any single system, but in the emergence of institutionalized patterns of peaceful and equitable interaction that will render physical and moral violence between and among the many communities as components of the global system relatively limited, rare and less than globally catastrophic in their outcomes. World wars fought with weapons of mass destruction—atomic, biological and chemical—are too destructive to contemplate and their avoidance requires institutionalized safeguards whose operation is system-self-correcting, automatic and based upon the rationally pursued interests of the bulk of mankind. Malice, nihilism and wilful destructiveness—though perhaps concomitants of human freedom—must be limited in scope and effect. In his thought experiments On Escalation, Herman Kahn could conceive of threats based on a capacity to destroy the galaxy. Clearly the action capabilities of men and groups, including perhaps mankind as a whole, must be constrained in the interests and common welfare of ever larger communities.

But let us return to the United States and the American commonwealth as a civil society, one among many in the world, whose internal dynamics appear to me to be taking it into a trajectory whose natural conclusion will be the servile state.

This is the challenge. Can our decision-makers effectively respond to the forces of moral nihilism and social chaos, allocating resources and creating institutions to promote civic order, personal discipline and creativity in freedom, in brief the common good, of this national community as part of the human community? We make an act of faith that social justice is possible, that the good of persons and smaller communities is not only consistent with, but encompassed within, the global common welfare.

1. Circulated drafts of the American Bishops’ "Letter on the Economy" (1986) accepted inflation as a legitimate device to support a "preferential option for the poor;" Pope John Paul Il in "Centesimus Annus" (1991) finally committed the Catholic Church to monetary stability.

2. The United States now has well over a million persons in its jails. Political objections to this emerging American "archipelago" of detention facilities are based largely on the costs of penitentiary space (about $60,000 per inmate), but someone will soon realize that abandoned military bases and federal wilderness areas provide cheap space.

3. Liberty Classics edition, 1977, p. 50.

The paper ends with an act of faith that the problematic it describes is able to be solved, but the problematic is harsh indeed. Proceeding along the axis of loss of self-control especially before government determination of one’s life the author amasses a formidable array of historical data and trends to illustrate the extent of the crisis. It moves from fiscal policy, to sexuality, to environment, to family, to violence in a set of illustration which it takes not as points of debate, but as symbols of a trend which cumulatively are overwhelming.

In one sense the paper illustrates social life understood as consisting only of the government whose actions are characterized by its coercive power. In that case all public social acts are coercive, and subject the individual to a position of enforced servitude.

This is reinforced if one assumes a radical libertarian indi-vidualism or the anarchism inherent in conservatism. Seen in this light, any social action is unjustly imposed upon one’s individual freedom and possessions. Taken in conjunction with the coercive character of government action all related social provisions and actions are an unwarranted invasion of one’s life and property; taxes become expropriations; efforts to bring the poor or the new immigrant into the mainstream of society and all of its benefits, such as employment and appropriate education are a prejudicial expropriation of those not in need of such services, though in fact these are enjoying the benefits of public good to the full.

Hence, the main body of the paper, while questioning directly the wisdom of public social policies and the strength of private morality, would seem at another level to illustrate the basic inadequacy of a radical individualism. In its terms the problem cited is truly insoluble; there can be only despair, not hope.

When then in its conclusion the paper speaks of hope and notes that individual rights are not enough, that the welfare of peoples and nations must be protected and promoted, it opens a new horizon. This is the reality that one is born in a community not as an oppressive force from without, but as an expression of the openness and tran-scendence which characterizes the human person from within. It points to the other, to service in and for the community, and to the importance of its enabling a decent level of life for all willing to work for it.

This suggests that, essentially and from within, life is social, and hence that—in contrast to both anarchism and conservatism—social provisions should be seen not as unwarranted impositions or servile oppression, but as appropriate expressions of what I deeply am as a human.

How can this be exercised? It was suggested that this begins in the family as built upon a mutual gift of love in marriage and procreation and upon the constant concern involved in raising a new generation. This is extended in the face-to-face interaction with the people of one’s neighborhood. It constitutes a platform of friendship for one’s daily life and constitutes an island of solidarity. Indeed the neighborhood is geographical, but similar personal interaction takes place in terms of one work, one’s church, one’s school etc., all of which constitute solidarities of people and hence communities. These solidarities are not subdivisions of the state with its coercive power, but expressions of the people.

Indeed, the companion principle of subsidiarity is meant to protect these solidarities and the creative interpersonal freedom they express from being invaded by the coercive power of the sate. Hence subsidiarity means that what can be determined adequately and carried out at a lower level should not be a matter for determination from above.

This pattern of participation by all, if solidarity and subsidiarity, is the essence of civil society.

There is, however, a mutuality between civil society and the state. The state reflects a compact regarding the civil life of a people which protects the freedoms they possess; it provides counts for adjudication in case of conflict and provides the powers of coercion required to assure public safety and essential cooperation in public works. Thus, the state secures the realm of private action and, by promoting civil society from without, promotes the common weal as the free accomplishment of a people.

Conversely, civil society provides the culture and ethos of a society. A culture is not a given, but is a creation of a people. It is built of their choices and the social inventions they construct and pioneer. From this, in the light of religion and history, evolves their sense of the dignity of the person and of appropriate concern for others, both singly and as a community. It is this sense that guides the state in the drafting and implementation of its laws.

Toynbee’s prescription for a progressive civilization is that governing minorities make effective, adjustive and adaptive decisions for the community, thus confirming their "legitimacy" and evoking popular assent to their leadership. One cannot hope for this if a government be set over against individuals with no civil society in between or a fortiori if this government be seen in principle as an imposition on absolutized individuals. In this sense, civil society provides the rich human resources required not only for itself, but for government in the political order as well.