All together now: going it alone won't do.

The question was posed to me over twenty-five years ago but I remember it as if I'd heard it for the first time yesterday. I was at cocktails on a balcony in Miami with casual acquaintances--New Yorkers known to my traveling companion. They quizzed me as to what I was doing and I had talked of my work on the boards of several women's organizations. The hostess broke out in seeming exasperation, "But why do you do that? Why do you give your time to these, these--" she faltered for a descriptive word--"these groups?"

I was stunned. It had never occurred to me that there were people who did not think it normal to behave in the way de Tocqueville saw as quintessentially American--to form groups, to join groups, and to tackle problems cooperatively. But I tried to answer, "It's my tradition, I suppose. My mother, my grandmother, belonged to women's groups. My aunts joined unions, collectors' clubs, art clubs. It seems natural to me--to reach out to others of like interests and purpose."

She was having none of it. To her mind spending time in organizations and working on their agendas depleted one's creative energies and robbed one of the cultural benefits of leisure. The root of her point of view--essentially an elitist one--probably lay in her European background. The government existed to take care of common interests; there was no need for intervening groups between the individual and the state.

I thought her attitude very strange then. Today it would not seem so strange.

For better or worse and for different reasons we have become a nation of nonjoiners. We are all aware of the results of the recent sociological research that the tendency to isolation or extreme individualism has extended even to bowlers, many of whom now prefer to bowl alone rather than join a bowling league! Volunteer organizations have to rely largely on retirees. Every private club I know is struggling, without much success, to attract younger members. What has happened to the nation where, as de Tocqueville described it, organized groups were the norm and every community was crisscrossed with their networks? He held, as Seymour Martin Lipset writes, that "Americans are encouraged to press for their objectives through individual or organized group action, not to accept their lot or to hope for remedy from an established upper class...."

Again and again in our history those who suffered from inequality and isolation were lifted from it through groups. For women this goes back to the days of the Puritans in the Massachusetts Bay Colony when women immured in the home sought companionship and inspiration at the prayer meetings and discussions in Anne Hutchinson's parlor. It goes back to the quilting bees and potluck gatherings of pioneer women. And from the middle of the nineteenth century until the present, women became a force in society and eventually full members via group movements. Women were attracted to reform activities and, in doing so, discovered their own inferior status and began to work for equality.

In the introduction of her Women Together, Judith Papachriston writes: "There periods of intense activity stand out: the first began in 1848 and extended into the 1870s; the second, which saw women achieve the vote, stretched from about 1890 to 1920; and the last, the contemporary phase, began in the late 1960s. Each of these periods had its origins in a time of national reform. Before the Civil War, abolitionists agitated on behalf of black slaves; in the Progressive era, in the early decades of the twentieth century, social workers, muckrakers, and reformers spoke out for the victims of industrialization and slum life; and in the 1950s and 1960s, protesters called attention to minority and poverty groups denied civil rights and economic opportunity."

The function of groups in helping minorities achieve equality can be cited again and again. Fraternal insurance groups--really burial societies--gave poor immigrants a focus, some economic security, and a means of socialization. Funeral societies did the same among blacks in the South. The great achievements of the various forms of the labor movement are so obvious as hardly to need mentioning.

But as important as groups were in building equality, their effect on character was equally important. They were a means of integration into the larger community, and a way of merging individual interests with those of the larger society. They enlarged identities--our sense of who we were. For those of my generation and even the generation of my children (now adults with children of their own), to become part of groups was as natural as breathing. First came the neighborhood play groups--playing softball, organizing games of "chase" with great choosing of sides going on through the summer twilights. Then, like our parents who belonged to the Women's Club, the Newman Club, the Masons, or the Knights of Columbus, the Rotary and the PTAs, we joined organized entities like the Boy or Girl Scouts, the Junior Women's Club, the 4-H Club, and the Future Farmers. Later, volunteerism became a way of life; private clubs became a measure of achievement, as did professional organizations.

That substructure of community, the network of organizations, is now at risk. It still functions in small communities but is falling apart in the urban sprawl. What tore it apart? The answers are various. Organizations can age. Their original purpose may vanish and they can become obsolete unless they are revitalized by leadership with new vision. In the sixties there was a severe reaction against those groups and clubs viewed as elitist and exclusionary--from golf clubs and the DAR to college fraternities and sororities. In the seventies the new feminists attacked the concept of men's clubs or women's clubs, whether social or professional.

Perhaps the most pernicious cause of all is the turning in on self caused by technology--especially television and computer technology. We have all experienced the distracted mutter of the person who is watching television while talking to us on the phone. We know people who find it hard to welcome real persons as visitors because they are so caught up in the characters of a favorite sitcom. With the burgeoning of the personal computers and the Internet a new addiction has developed. On the day I write this, the morning paper carried a letter in an advice column for adolescents from a teen-ager with a pressing problem: "For the longest time I have been addicted to using the computer. I use it on average ten hours a day five times a week." The letter is signed--"Needs help." Advice columns for adults have, for the last year or so, carried letters from distraught men and women whose spouses have fallen in love with people on the Internet. These people do not have time for, or interest in, the people closest to them, let alone the community-at-large.

Our nation is falling apart. It is time we give serious thought to gluing it together.

Correction * In Abigail McCarthy's previous column [June 1] Iqbal Masih's name was misspelled. Commonweal apologizes for the error: not watching our gs and qs.