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Keeping Volunteering Voluntary
Raymond Nance
America is a country of volunteers. In 2002-2003, 64 million Americans (28.8 percent of
those 16 and older) donated 52 hours a year, the equivalent of more than one full work week, to
building shelters, coaching Little League, caring for the elderly, teaching literacy, and countless
other community-minded pursuits (Bureau). That's the good news. The bad news is that two out
of every three Americans do not volunteer.
Given the many experts who claim that volunteering builds character, teaches citizenship,
and addresses unfulfilled national needs (Gorham 7), it is little wonder that from time to time
politicians propose making more of a good thing by suggesting that we all volunteer: that is,
make volunteering nonvoluntary by instituting a mandatory national service requirement, either
military or nonmilitary (that choice is left to the individual). Is mandatory national service a good
idea? Should we, for instance, require every high school or college student to give two years of
service to the country? No. Volunteering is a treasured centerpiece of civic life in America and
deserves public support, but we should resist letting its successes become an argument for
mandatory national service.
In November 2001 Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Evan Bayh (D-IN) introduced Bill
S1274, the “Call to Service Act,” which would dramatically increase the opportunities to serve in
government-sponsored volunteer programs. “Public service is a virtue,” write the senators in a
New York Times op-ed piece not quite two months after the horrors of September 11, 2001. They
believe that this “is the right moment to issue a new call to service and give a new generation a
way to claim the rewards and responsibilities of active citizenship.” Senators McCain and Bayh
stop short of calling for mandatory national service. Still, one can hear an echo of the word
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compulsory in their claim that “national service should one day be a rite of passage for young
Americans.”
Proposals for compulsory national service are nothing new. In 1906, the philosopher
William James argued in "The Moral Equivalent of War" that the military virtues of discipline,
hard work, loyalty, and belief in causes greater than oneself should not be taught only in
wartime. A civil society benefits enormously from these values, said James, and we should teach
them to our youth. But we should not need to be constantly at war to do so. James proposed a
"moral equivalent of war" that would teach military virtues in peacetime. He would send college
students off to a hard, nonmilitary service in order to learn the values of citizenship and to "get
the childishness knocked out of them" (18).
James's essay became the philosophical foundation of America's volunteer movement.
Inspiring as that vision was and continues to be, it is no longer practical (if it ever was) to send
all college students off to "coal and iron mines, to freight trains, [and] to fishing fleets in
December" so they might "come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas"
(18). In 1906, there were many fewer young people, both in the general population and in
colleges (Landrum, Eberly, and Sherridan 22). At the time, the logistics of compulsory national
service may have seemed manageable to James. Today, however, such a proposal, while
attractive in theory, could scarcely be managed. Think of the complications of sending every
college freshman off to a year of national service. Organizations such as AmeriCorps and VISTA
have a hard enough time finding meaningful work for mere thousands of volunteers who
earnestly wish to volunteer. Expanding that effort to include millions of students (many of whom
would resent their service) would require a huge federal bureaucracy that could not guarantee
meaningful opportunities for participants. And providing transportation, housing, and oversight
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(these are kids, remember) would entail enormous expense. Nonetheless, James strikes an
important chord with his vision of learning the virtues and disciplines of citizenship through a
nonmilitary regimen in peacetime. His phrase "moral equivalent of war" has entered our national
vocabulary (Landrum, Eberly, and Sherridan 22), and for a hundred years writers interested in
volunteerism in America have been quoting him.
The question of what sort of service, or obligation, citizens owe a country is as old as
civilization. In one of his famous dialogues, Plato records a conversation between Socrates,
whom Athens had imprisoned and condemned to death for corrupting the city’s youth with his
teachings, and a friend who urged that he escape and save himself. Socrates argues that if he has
accepted and enjoyed the privileges of citizenship, then he must also accept the judgment of the
State. According to Socrates, citizens obligate themselves to the State when they accept its
benefits. But how is that obligation to be paid? Some twenty-four hundred years after Socrates
accepted what he considered his duty by drinking a cup of hemlock, Americans pay their
obligations to the government differently (thank goodness!): through taxes, jury duty, and
obedience to laws passed by elected officials.
Can the government compel us to do more? Can it compel us, for instance, to military or
nonmilitary service? The U.S. Constitution grants Congress the right to raise armies (Article 1,
Section 8, Clause 14). The way Congress chooses to do this, however, reflects the needs of a
particular era. During World War II and the Vietnam War, the government implemented a
military draft. Today, for reasons of professionalism and morale, the Department of Defense
prefers an all-volunteer army to an army of conscripts. A recent Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff was reported to have said that the “country doesn’t need a draft because the all-volunteer
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force works—in fact, the United States has the most effective military in the world precisely
because it is all-volunteer” (qtd. in Rehm).
The State has a constitutional right to draft young people into military service in times of
military need, whether it chooses to exercise that right through an all-volunteer or a conscripted
army. There exists no parallel constitutional power that grants Congress the right to draft citizens
into nonmilitary service. Still, the State could pass laws to that effect. Would this be a good idea?
The answer must be no for both logical and moral reasons.
Military need is not logically equivalent to nonmilitary need, mostly because we fulfill
nonmilitary needs through the normal operations of government. When the State identifies work
to be done for the common good, it taxes citizens and directs its employees to perform that work.
The State might also hire contractors to complete the work. This is the way we build highways
and libraries. If the State performs these basic functions poorly, it fails in its responsibilities. The
remedy to this failure should not be the drafting of America’s youth into national service for one
or two years. The State could not reasonably call for national service as a means of improving
the moral character of youth when its real need is to find cheap labor to fill the holes created by
its failure to clean streets or teach third graders how to read. If the State lacks the competence to
do its work, then citizens should overhaul the system by electing new, more effective
representatives. If the State lacks the money to do its work, then the legislature should raise
taxes. But the State should not build a case for mandatory service upon its inability to complete
the jobs it is in business to do.
Nor could the State compel young people to national, nonmilitary service on moral
grounds. We know that volunteerism promotes selflessness, a concern for community, and an
appreciation of country (McCain and Bayh; Gergen; James; Patterson). As a nation we should be
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promoting these positive qualities as vigorously as possible. Still, the essential quality of
volunteerism is that it is time given freely. “True service,” writes Bruce Chapman, “has a
spiritual basis [rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition]…Fulfillment of an obligation to
government, in contrast, has a contractual basis” (134). Service to others is rooted not in
obligation but in generosity. And it is a spirit of generosity that underlies all the good that
volunteering achieves. Convert the essential generous impulse to an obligation, and the moral
foundation of service disappears. The State could no more expect those forced into service to
have learned good citizenship or patriotism than we could expect a child whose parents order
him to “make friends with Johnny” to have learned anything useful about friendship or to feel a
special kinship with Johnny. Affection, good citizenship, and patriotism don’t work that way.
Without any incentive other than the good it would do their communities and their own
hearts, 64 million Americans—more than one quarter of the country—volunteer. Could more
people volunteer, specifically more young people? Yes, especially in light of the finding that
young people in their early twenties volunteer the least, relative to all other age groups (Bureau).
Should more people volunteer? Yes again, both because there are always those who need help
but cannot afford to pay, and because giving back to our country—beyond paying taxes, sitting
on juries, and obeying laws—transforms people and communities in the best of ways. Former
presidential advisor and journalist David Gergen describes this growth:
Voluntary service when young often changes people for life. They learn to give their fair share.
Some 60 percent of alumni from Teach for America, a marvelous program, now work full time
in education, and many others remain deeply involved in social change…Alumni of City Year,
another terrific program, vote at twice the rates of their peers. Or think of the Peace Corps
alumni. Six now serve in the House of Representatives, one [Christopher Dodd] in the Senate.
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Unquestionably, national programs for volunteers can benefit both the individuals serving
and the communities served. And so we should support any efforts on the national level,
including the McCain/Bayh “Call to Service Act,” to increase rates of volunteering—provided
we can be sure that volunteering will remain voluntary.
We can also act at the local level. Following innovators such as volunteermatch.org,
which matches would-be volunteers with organizations seeking volunteers, activists in high
schools and colleges could create local matching services. A Web site “Volunteer Kit” could be
created and downloaded (for free) by any institution wanting to promote the efforts of
volunteers. The kit would include a Web site engine to enable those needing help and those
seeking to help to register and find one another. National leadership on volunteerism is welcome
and necessary. But so too is local leadership. Many small-scale agencies and community centers
in need of volunteers never appear on the national radar, either as recipients of such government
programs as AmeriCorps or as beneficiaries of such national nonprofits as volunteermatch.org. A
well-coordinated local effort could fill a significant gap.
“[T]oo often,” writes novelist Richard North Patterson, “we offer young people a vision
of community which extends to the nearest shopping mall.” Nationally sponsored—and local—
programs for service can make us better than that, and we should promote volunteerism
wherever and whenever we can. But we must guard against using the success of these programs
as a pretext for establishing mandatory national or community service.
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Works Cited
Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Volunteering in the United States, 2003.” 18 Dec. 2003. 12
Aug. 2004 <http://www.bls.gov/news.release/volun.nr0.htm>.
Chapman, Bruce. “Politics and National Service: A Virus Attacks the Volunteer Sector.”
National Service: Pro & Con. Ed. Williamson M. Evers. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution P,
1990. 133-44.
“Constitution of the United States of America.” The New York Public Library Desk
Reference. New York: Webster’s New World, 1989.
Gergen, David. “A Time to Heed the Call.” U.S. News & World Report 24 Dec. 2001:
60.
Gorham, Eric B. “National Service, Political Socialization, and Citizenship.” National
Service, Citizenship, and Political Education. Albany: SUNY P, 1992. 5-30.
James, William. “The Moral Equivalent of War.” International Conciliation 27
(Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1910): 8-20.
Landrum, Roger, Donald J. Eberly, and Michael W. Sherraden. “Calls for National
Service.” National Service: Social, Economic and Military Impacts. Ed. Michael
W. Sherraden and Donald J. Eberly. New York: Pergamon, 1982. 21-38.
McCain John and Evan Bayh. “A New Start for National Service.” New York Times 6
Nov. 2001: Op-ed.
Patterson, Richard North. “Keeping Alive the Spirit of National Service.” Boston Globe 1
Aug. 1999: Op-ed.
Plato, “Crito.” Classic Literature Online Library. Trans. Benjamin Jowett. 17 Sept. 2004
<http://www.greece.com/library/plato/crito_04.html>.
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Rhem, Kathleen T. “Rumsfeld: No Need for Draft.” American Forces Information
Service 7 Jan. 2003. 14 Aug. 2004
<http://www.dod.gov/news/Jan2003/n01072003_200301074.html>.