The Men Civil Society Used to Make

Father’s Day just passed, and it has me thinking about the men who shaped me—the ones who truly mattered well beyond my own father. No society has ever asked fathers to raise its children alone. For most of American history, a wider circle of men shared the work. Coaches, scoutmasters, teachers, neighbors, and volunteers all took an interest in children who were not their own. They did not appear by accident. They were produced by institutions, and our institutions are producing fewer of them than they once did. This is a quieter crisis than the ones that fill our politics, but it may prove more consequential. I think first of an assistant scoutmaster from my childhood. He was not a relative; he volunteered for the role and his own children gave him every reason to be elsewhere. Yet he spent weekends camping with boys who were not his sons, teaching us to solve problems, take responsibility, and shoulder a common load. At one point, he even sat down and helped me with my math. I have long since forgotten the equations, but I have never forgotten that a grown man decided a struggling teenager was worth his time. I think, too, of the men who guided my science projects in Houston; those who answered endless questions and treated a young person’s curiosity as something worth taking seriously. None of them were obligated to. All of them did it anyway. What these men offered was not expertise. It was presence. But presence is now a scarce resource. For most of American life, communities generated such relationships almost automatically. Churches, scouting, youth sports, fraternal lodges, and neighborhood associations brought children into steady contact with adults who were neither their parents nor paid professionals. Tocqueville saw this as the genius of American democracy: a web of voluntary associations doing work that elsewhere fell to the state or the clan. Burke called them “the little platoons.” Robert Putnam, measuring their decline, called what they produced “social capital.” By every measure tracked by Putnam’s successors, that web has thinned. Membership in civic organizations has fallen. Volunteering has declined. Fewer Americans belong to the groups that once placed an ordinary adult in front of someone else’s child week after week. The concrete version is simpler: fewer children grow up surrounded by adults who know them, expect things of them, and invest in them. This is a loss that does not show up in economic statistics, which is part of why it is so easily ignored. It generates no quarterly report and rarely becomes the subject of legislation. And it is precisely the kind of loss that government is poorly equipped to repair. You can fund a program. You can credential a professional. But you cannot legislate a scoutmaster who gives up his Saturdays, because the thing that makes him valuable is that he chooses to. Mentorship of this kind is an act of both freedom and duty. It is voluntary, sustained by obligation, and impossible to mandate from above. That is why the conservative instinct is the right one. The institutions that form character are not interchangeable with the state and cannot be rebuilt by it. They are restored the way they were built: by particular people joining particular groups and showing up for particular children. The renewal of civil society is not a policy project. It is a personal one. My scoutmaster did not change my life in a single intervention, and the men in Houston did not redirect my future in one conversation. Their influence accumulated through small acts none would have called remarkable. That is how character is usually transmitted: not in grand gestures, but in the patient, unglamorous decision to be present. Most of the people who shape us are not famous. They are ordinary men and women who choose service over convenience. The teacher who stayed after class. The coach who refused to lower his standards. The scoutmaster who spent his weekends outdoors. Their names rarely appear in any tribute. They belong in our account of how a free people forms its citizens. We need more engaged fathers, not fewer. But the deeper point is larger and more fragile. A healthy society depends on adults willing to invest in children who are not their own and on the institutions that bring them together. Strong institutions produce strong relationships, and strong relationships produce capable adults. Weaken the institutions and the relationships do not migrate elsewhere; they fail to form at all. Many of us are who we are because someone else’s father took the time to help raise someone else’s child. The real question is whether we are still building the institutions that make such men and whether we will notice, in time, if we stop. The post The Men Civil Society Used to Make appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI .