Strike, Spare and Scratch

Forty years ago, C. Wright Mills argued in a manifesto for social scientists called “The Sociological Imagination” that their primary role ought to be to help ordinary citizens to see the way in which their everyday lives were shaped by social forces and social structures and to understand that what appears as “private troubles” might be better understood as “public issues.”

Mills’ call has been much echoed but little practiced in the intervening years. Every so often, however, a serious social study gains a wider readership and expands the sociological imagination. In 1995, Robert Putnam, a respected Harvard political scientist, published a brief article in an obscure journal. The article, “Bowling Alone,” was copied and faxed by all manner of people. Its very title was intriguing, and it quickly became a phrase that condensed a good deal of contemporary social life. Putnam’s observations were the subject of a raft of columns and op-ed essays; he was profiled in People and invited to Camp David.

“Bowling Alone” referred to the fact that, over the last quarter of a century, the number of people who bowled as members of bowling leagues had sharply dropped (even though bowling alleys were still popular). This seemingly trivial fact, Putnam claimed, symbolized a wider trend: the general and rapid erosion of all kinds of community ties, social networks, political involvements, formal associations and informal bonds. These declines, according to Putnam, indicated that “social capital” in America was shrinking. He argued that the problem-solving capacities of society depend on the richness and scope of its social connections and on the store of trust and trustworthiness that such connections sustain.

Social scientists and commentators debated Putnam’s claims soon after they were published. Was there really enough empirical evidence to suggest that social connection and civic engagement were declining? Putnam was certainly right that a wide range of well-established and widely disparate national organizations--the American Legion, the AFL-CIO, the NAACP, the PTA, the Kiwanis and the League of Women Voters--had experienced sharp membership drops since the 1960s. It was, critics conceded, worthwhile to note that these drops paralleled decline in voter turnout and other indicators of political engagement. Still, these declines were offset by increases in other kinds of social connection--soccer leagues, for example, environmental activism, self-help groups and the virtual connections provided by the Internet. The prevailing conclusion was that Putnam pointed to something real but that he hadn’t demonstrated that the fabric of social connections was altogether unraveling.

Rather than engage in verbal jousts, Putnam has tried, since 1995, to buttress his evidence for declining social capital by amassing data that might fill in the gaps his critics had identified. If he could confirm the diagnosis, he hoped, people would start debating the cure. “Bowling Alone” reports the outcome of what became an ambitious research program. It is, first of all, a remarkable achievement in the writing of social science. Putnam styles himself as a kind of sociological detective, and he unfolds his argument as a mystery story in which masses of survey data, analyzed over time, masterfully define the crime (“the loss of community”) and suggest what has caused it. The reader experiences the suspense that can happen in both detective fiction and science.

In addition to providing more data to support his 1995 findings, Putnam offers some new ones. We are schmoozing less: giving fewer dinner parties, playing fewer card games and team sports, visiting less with friends and family and neighbors. Families are less likely to eat together. Recreational and leisure activity is more homebound and more solitary; physical activity is more individualized; sports spectatorship has mushroomed. Leisure-time spectatorship is paralleled in the political realm. For example, instead of participating in political organizations, we respond to mail-order appeals for donations from professional advocacy groups.

Putnam offers equally intriguing data on the behavioral patterns that might account for the apparent dearth of civic engagement. Among these:

* The movement of women en masse into the labor force has meant that many have less time for both the club work and the neighborliness more characteristic of the past.

* Urban sprawl has increased time spent commuting and has destroyed neighborhood and town identities. Small cities are more nurturing of community involvement; fragmented, sprawling suburbs are toxic for community identity.

* Dependence on TV for entertainment has significantly increased, a trend associated with “cocooning.” Putnam’s chapter on the social effects of TV highlights the degree to which we have become passive consumers of virtual life rather than active bonders with others.

* The demographic ascendance of the baby boom generation has significantly eroded social capital. Those born from 1910 to ‘40, Putnam shows, were remarkably engaged and participatory. The baby boomers (born from 1946 to ‘64) have been less so; and Generation Xers (1965 to ‘80) even less. The “long generation” came of age in the Depression and World War II; these traumatic shared experiences, he argues, created a sense of the need and the possibility for civic responsibility. In contrast, the cultural transformations of the ‘60s highlighted demands for individual expression and autonomy.

The term “social capital” is shorthand for the argument that social networks that we take for granted and reciprocities we hardly notice enable individuals and communities to achieve goals and solve problems that might otherwise be intractable. Putnam argues that the consequence for the United States of declining social capital has been economic stagnation and a decline in public safety, two big sources of public worry when he started to write in the early ‘90s. Unfortunately for his thesis, the last few years turned out to be a time of spectacular economic growth and declining crime.

Putnam is nostalgic for the ‘50s, when the “long generation” he so identifies with became ascendant, forming bowling leagues, joining the Kiwanis, giving dinner parties and visiting neighbors. In the ‘50s and early ‘60s, a spate of books appeared that, like “Bowling Alone,” used social science to diagnose the ills of the time. Such works as “The Lonely Crowd,” “The Organization Man,” “The Hidden Persuaders” and “The Power Elite” hardly celebrated that time as an era of civic engagement; instead, they were calling attention to the ways in which social conformism, consumerism and mass society were undermining individuality, democracy and community.

In the ‘60s, baby boomers rebelled against that version of America, and it is the social world their ascendance has created that troubles Putnam. In post-’60s America, personal choice has guided behavior far more than social obligation. The flourishing of such individualism has led many to be skeptical about and to withdraw from organized structures, to have a disdain for meetings, routinized roles, disciplined schedules and team playing, and to prefer self-expression rather than blending in.

But we have traded some social capital for more personal autonomy, for rights for women and men, for greater social tolerance and for a greater skepticism of authority. Meanwhile, new ties and collective projects have taken shape in our era. For example, in my own town, Santa Barbara, in the last 20 years a variety of activities and institutions has emerged that foster community. There are ethnic festivals, farmers markets, a summer solstice parade, Casa de la Raza, a gay and lesbian resource center, a film festival, a Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, the Fund for Santa Barbara, the Environmental Defense Center, the Faith Initiative and myriad self-help groups, community media projects, music venues, coffeehouses, grass-roots planning projects and a constant hum of controversy in every local governmental arena. Such loosely organized, highly localized and very fluid kinds of mobilization and collective actions have reshaped a range of communities across the country. The post-’60s quest for self-expression has spawned social experiments, movements and vocations that may not be easily captured by Putnam’s research radar.

Indeed, by the end of the book, Putnam says as much, acknowledging that civic engagement is not, in fact, dead. He proposes an “agenda for social capitalists” that features a set of exhortations and proposals that build on current efforts and promises to reinvigorate communities in the next decade. Unlike the social conservatives who have embraced the “bowling alone” thesis because it seems to validate their own diagnoses of post-’60s decline, Putnam identifies with the Progressive tradition in which government policy supports private initiative to cure social ills. But the remedies he offers seem thin: more support for extracurricular activities, plan development to reduce sprawl, encouraging more workers (women?) to work part- rather than full-time, using the arts and telecommunications to promote community and other worthy but rather minimalist notions.

A far more interesting agenda would be based on the recognition that our disconnections are as much from power as from one another. Missing from Putnam’s agenda is mention of reforms that might actually open space for democratic empowerment as well as community involvement. We need, for example, to provide real protection for workers to form effective unions and to have a voice in their work. To give working men and women real time for community and family the work week ought to be shortened and child care made adequate. Community involvement might grow if poor neighborhoods had access to financial capital and control over key social services. Enabling people of all classes to have a real voice in the decisions that affect them is the best part of the Progressive vision that Putnam wants to promote. Making that vision of a participatory democracy real is central to reviving American community. *