Truth squad: the coercive agenda behind the 'civil society' movement.

• Author: Gillespie, Nick

The looming dual finales to the century and the millennium have so far inspired surprisingly little millenarian rhetoric, the end-is-nearism that has traditionally punctuated such moments with all sorts of strange predictions and behaviors. In times past, the close of a century, even more so of a millennium, typically generated fevered treatises on the certainty of a coming catastrophe and inspired large numbers of people to prepare maniacally for the destruction of the world, the second coming of Christ, or some combination of both.

In our times, by contrast, such anxieties have given rise to a spate of generally evenhanded "Year 2000 Problem" magazine articles, action films such as Deep Impact and Armageddon, and gradually increasing air time for the early '80s Prince song "1999." Distressing perhaps, but hardly cataclysmic. For most of us January 1, 2000 - or, for purists, January 1, 2001 - seems to portend only another long weekend.

In this context, A Call to Civil Society: Why Democracy Needs Moral Truths, a 30-page "report" recently issued by the "the Council on Civil Society," represents a return to tradition. The council is a politically diverse group of two dozen "nationally distinguished scholars and leaders" that includes Institute for American Values President David Blankenhorn, Sen. Dan Coats (R-Ind.), Princeton's John J. DiIulio, the University of Chicago's Jean Bethke Elshtain, National Parenting Association President Sylvia Ann Hewlett, Sen. Joseph Leiberman (D-Conn.), Harvard's Cornel West, and UCLA's James Q. Wilson - a veritable slugger's row of high-profile and influential public figures.

Their "call" for a renewal of familiar cultural institutions is spoken in the apocalyptic rhetoric long associated with century's end. The booklet also offers revelation (the other meaning of apocalyptic), showing how even the most seemingly innocuous arguments for "civic participation" often seek to limit and regulate alternative social arrangements in the name of a vague common good.

Though the authors grant in passing that "there is much good news" in America today, to them the immediate future looks darker than midnight: "Let us be honest," they intone. "In what direction are we tending?... [O]ur democracy is growing weaker because we are using up, but not replenishing, the civic and moral resources that make our democracy possible." As our country becomes an "increasingly fragmented and polarized society," they argue, "our social...