How much time do you spend sitting on your front porch on pleasant evenings, chatting amiably with the neighbors walking by? Do you regularly have picnics with friends, sometimes spontaneously when one calls on a lark and asks if you have time this afternoon? What about community meetings where residents plan projects to improve the neighborhood, organize campaigns to get out the vote on local measures, or discuss options for water conservation?
More likely, you are busy. What am I talking about, having a spontaneous picnic because your Sunday afternoon wasn't planned as of Sunday morning? Impossible. And as for chatting with neighbors, you probably only know a few by name. Local politics is even more obscure of a concept.
Robert Putnam has taken up a topic called "social capital." (The word was invented a while ago, but he revives it and fleshes it out significantly). Social capital is generated by human interactions and the groups we form. It is the connection you have to the people around you, the shared culture you create by doing things together and talking together. Crucially, it comes in two forms, "bridging" and "bonding." Bridging social capital is the good stuff-- creating positive connections between people that bring opportunities and advantages to both. Bonding social capital is more mixed-- its sense of connection comes from the exclusion of non-members. It represents the darker side of social capital: cliquishness, snubbing, and intolerance.
Putnam has studied the patterns of social capital in American society through the 20th century. His conclusions are foreshadowed in the book's title: "Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community." Social capital increased for much of the first six decades of this century (with a minor decline in some aspects of it through the Depression years). But beginning around 1960-1970, huge swaths of social capital began to decline, from card playing to membership in national service organizations, from trust in strangers to participation in national elections. In a scant 30 years, many of the gains of the first part of the century were lost, bringing us back to the levels of social capital seen around World War II. The issue whether there is hope for revival.
Are we, indeed, bowling alone? Perhaps not literally, but the evidence is irrefutable: communities are weaker now than they were during the years of steep rise (post WWII). Putnam brings in so much evidence, from so many diverse corners of society, that it is difficult to doubt the trend.
Putnam carefully points out that not everything is falling apart. Indeed, participation in evangelical religion is rising, as is interest in some newer sports, like Nascar and "extreme" sports. But some clouds exist here too. It is interest in watching sports that is rising, not playing sports-- and just watching generates less social capital. Also, even though interest in politics has hardly waned in recent decades, it is increasingly "hands-off." This means that political organizations are increasingly Washington-based, employing lawyers, lobbyists, and policy wonks, while the "members" participate mostly by sending checks. That's not much of a powerhouse in civic participation.
What happened? Putnam analyzes the situation in some detail. First, it is important to understand that there are two broad ways in which social capital can decline. People can individually be doing less of it, or it can be a generational decline, where members of an active generation are dying off and younger people are less community-oriented. And even within these broad categories, there are numerous factors to consider-- women increasingly working outside the home, greater busyness due to the fast pace of life nowadays, changes in the economy, etc.
Putnam concludes that the greatest effect comes from a generational shift, although several other factors have contributed a small amount to the "collapse of American community." By far, what matters is that our great-grandparents and grandparents were participants in community to a greater degree than people who are middle-aged or younger adults today. In fact, it was the supposedly communitarian Baby Boomers who began the decline and fall. In the 60's and 70's, when they should have been filling in the fresh ranks of social capital generation as their parents aged, they did not do so, and the total amount began, imperceptively at first, to diminish. People started noticing around the 80's, and by the 90's the effects were obvious. (My own Gen X didn't fare much better than the Boomers in generating new social capital, either).
Putnam notes that some of the few bright spots in the bleak picture of social capital-- such as the increase in volunteer work-- are in fact the result of retired people spending their time this way. That is, the people just older than the Boomers, who still have a strong sense of community.
But wait. This is not a depressing book. The second part of the subtitle-- the "revival of American community"-- is part of Putnam's story too. It seems that early patterns indicate that the children of the Boomers (sometimes called "Gen Y") are again picking up the baton. They seem to be more participatory than their parents, possibly acting to regenerate some of the social capital we have lost.
Why do we care? Putnam has a whole section on this. Societies or communities with high social capital are, on average, healthier places to live. Children get better educations, people feel less stressed, democracy is stronger, and societal stability is greater. More social capital means its easier to get a job when you lose yours, or to get a helping hand when your parents fall ill. And on a larger scale, political participation is stronger and social programs run more smoothly.
That is not to say social capital is a uniform good, leading to utopian bliss. As noted above, bonding social capital has a dark side, and this will increase as social capital in general increases. After all, the KKK is considered a social group in the same sense that AA is. An insular white city that makes blacks feel unwelcome (or worse) or an elite golf club that caters only to ultrarich men are valid examples of high-social-capital groups, but not the ones we want to encourage.
Putnam strongly believes that the greater tolerance we have developed over the past century for various racial groups and alternative food, music, and lifestyles is a positive thing. But it adds less social capital than a close-knit group would have. Similarly, the far-flung friends people find over the Internet indeed represent a form of social capital, but not as much as face-to-face friends. You can disconnect from a chat room more easily than a real-world living room. And organizing events (or war protests) over the Internet, while reaching out to more people, results in less commitment by participants. It's easy not to show up if no one knew you were thinking about it. This resembles the "political participation by check" noted above-- if all you are doing to support the Sierra Club is sending them a check, how committed are you really?
Putnam does not believe we should go back to the world of the 1950's, when everyone and their neighbor was part of a baking club, the Lion's Club, the Boy Scouts, or a neighborhood improvement club. He has no illusions that such a society could be created today, given our busy two-income lifestyles and other changes in culture. But he does believe that new forms of social-capital-generating groups can be invented, and that it is imperative that we do so in order to stop the slide of social capital.
He lays out a series of challenges to individual citizens, businesses, government, and the media: Find ways to create new forms of (bridging) social capital in your life or in your organization, compatible with the lifestyles of people today, the economy, and your organization's goals. It may be challenging, but it is worth it. Society needs it, and we are responsible for improving society. (Who else would be?)
Putnam also gives a history lesson about another time in America's past when new social groups were formed after a period of rapid economic expansion and societal fragmentation due to new immigrants and a faster pace of life for all. This was the Progressive Era, the first couple of decades of the 20th century. At that time, life had undergone major changes-- people had moved off the farms, cities were growing at a stunning rate, new waves of immigrants were flooding in, and jobs were changing as more people worked in factories. It was a time of great upheaval (perhaps greater than in our own time), and yet, social reformers ("Progressives") found ways to create new organizations that could serve people in their new lives. They didn't try to look back longingly to the times on the farm-- they rolled up their sleeves, looked forward, and got to work on the realities of the new society.
Putnam implores us to do the same. Sure, we're busy, our lives revolve around the cell phone and the minivan, Washington seems populated with a bunch of losers, and we're hardly sure that it's worth sending a check for a starving child in Ecuador when our own neighborhood school is falling apart (and who has time to organize a campaign to clean it up?). But we must find ways to reconnect with real people. Surely we're smart enough to do that. It could do a lot to stabilize a society that is cracking a bit at the seams.
I enjoyed this book. Putnam's evidence seems solid, and his arguments for why social capital matters are compelling. I think he left out a few things here and there, while needlessly belaboring some other points. But the basic idea is surely valid. I'll give the book a "strong +."
Copyright © Kim Allen 2003
