Bowling with the Social Scientists

...The private dream of many scholars is that the book they write will be among the most important books ever written on a particular subject and that it will have an influential role in changing the thinking of their audience...

...It was, rather, an extension of an earlier book he had written on democratic experience in Italy...

...In the main, Putnam refines and elaborates on these arguments with extraordinary detail, responding to many (though not all) of the criticisms his article received...

...As Tocqueville put it, “Americans of all ages, all stations in life, and all types of disposition are forever forming associations...

...We must brace ourselves, Wills contends, “to bear the good news that America has never been more participative, interactive, inclusive, or charitable...

...Our democratic arrangements date from the Enlightenment, when they were established by a relatively small and mostly homogeneous population with an agrarian and mercantile economy...

...He is the author of The Death of Character: Moral Education in An Age Without Good or Evil, recently issued by Basic Books...

...As Fukuyama puts it, “it is not clear that democracy is necessarily healthiest when large numbers of citizens are perpetually eager to strike, demonstrate, or pressure Congress via lobbying groups in Washington...

...In Talbot’s view, “with women in the paid labor force, we will never enjoy quite the level of associational life we had in the 1950s...

...Not everyone was unkind, but the reaction was still emphatic...

...The public culture within which democratic institutions formulate their agenda has collapsed, turning political philosophy into slick marketing appeals and public policy into image-conscious popular theater...

...indeed, reproducing one in the thinly populated new world would have been impossible...

...We may not know until it is put to the test...

...He examines the effects of electronic communication, especially television’s privatizing of leisure time...

...We don’t know yet...

...Dionne, Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy by James Fallows, and Democracy’s Discontent by Michael Sandel...

...It’s absurd to imagine that we once possessed a bucolic Eden and foolishly traded it for the Babel of selfabsorbed materialism...

...In a review of the book in the American Prospect, for example, Garry Wills chalked up Putnam’s assessment to “‘good old days’-ism,” which led Putnam to chase the wrong phenomenon...

...This is the intellectual context for Putnam’s 1995 essay and the new book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, which has at last followed it...

...And his answer turns on the fact that America had not inherited a centralized and bureaucratic government...

...There are others: the thinning of our public philosophy, the erosion of the normative (not just the social) foundations of civil society, the ideological transformation of political leadership, the fragmentation of social groups and political identity, the cynicism and disaffection of the electorate, the debasement of public discourse, and the social restructuring of communities imposed by technological innovation in a globalized economy...

...The glaring reality of this situation has led many authors over the last few years to examine America’s democratic culture...

...It is a question that has become more interesting with the recent contributions of Robert Putnam...

...In this short piece, Putnam argued that the high levels of social capital—the networks of civic engagement and involvement— that America once had in abundance are now in sharp decline...

...And while these institutions have evolved considerably, American democracy now faces problems that would have been unimaginable to its founders—problems, perhaps, that no mere evolution of our institutions will be able to address...

...We have nothing but Enlightenment-era institutions to face post-Enlightenment social, economic, and cultural circumstances, and the lessons that Putnam would have us learn from the Gilded Age and his beloved, civically inclined, associationforming Progressive era are far less applicable than he imagines...

...But structural and historical factors almost always play out in ways over which individuals have little influence— which means, if Putnam’s analysis of decline is right, that very much less than he hopes can be achieved by the solution he proposes in the assertion of individual and collective will...

...Cumulatively, these factors leave democracy’s health very much in doubt, particularly when the time comes again for us to face a national crisis like war or financial collapse...

...All we need to do, he suggests, is to commit ourselves to regenerating civic engagement and with it, high levels of social capital: So I set before America’s parents, educators, and, above all, America’s young adults the following challenge: Let us find ways to ensure that by 2010 the level of civic engagement among Americans then coming of age in all parts of our society will match that of their grandparents when they were that same age, and that at the same time bridging social capital will be substantially greater than it was in their grandparents’ era...

...Margaret Talbot’s assessment in the New York Times Book Review was more nuanced...

...The American Behavioral Scientist and the American Prospect devoted entire issues to an assessment of his argument, the American Association of Retired Persons sponsored a survey on civic involvement, as did the Pew Center for the People and the Press, and Everett Carll Ladd performed a book-length dissection in 1999...

...The rather severe mainline Protestant consensus about manners and morals lasted for many years, but it has disintegrated into innumerable ethnic, racial, national, and religious particularities, often joined by little more than the thin fabric of therapeutic, consumeroriented individualism...

...I suspect his insight has a corollary at the national level: Adversity introduces a country to itself...

...More than two hundred years later, our circumstances are profoundly different...

...The words are inspiring...

...While she recognized that the evidence demonstrates a weakening of associational life, that does not justify, she argues, “Putnam’s overarching narrative of decline...

...The parallels between Making Democracy Work and Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America are not accidental...

...The article turned him into an intellectual celebrity with an agent and a contract from a mainstream publisher to write a book on the subject...

...Beneath that debate, however, lurks the question of the future: We don’t know how an Enlightenment-era institution will survive in a post-Enlightenment public culture and social order, and if it does, whether it will embody our received notions of justice, representation, community, and the public good...

...He takes up the growth of suburbanization and urban sprawl and the time given to commuting...

...But the state itself was poorly organized, and it had limited power...

...Finally, dense networks of interaction probably broaden the participants’ sense of self, developing the “I” into the “we...

...The solution lies in an assertion of individual and collective will...

...Is the decline (or perhaps the transformation) of social capital a problem for democracy...

...These were largely absent in southern Italy...

...In religious life, “Americans are going to church less often than we did three or four decades ago, and the churches we go to are less engaged with the wider community...

...Needless to say, most academics are disappointed, but for Robert Putnam, a political scientist from Harvard, dream became reality with an article he wrote for the Journal of Democracy in 1995 entitled, “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital...

...The difference, he argues, is both quantitative and qualitative...

...Most important, he notes the generational change that has come from “the replacement of the long civic generation by their less-involved children and grandchildren...

...Robert Putnam’s achievement in 1995 was to generate not a public consensus but a public debate on one aspect of the larger and more complex quandary of how democracy survives...

...He offers similar challenges to employers, urban developers and regional planners, clergy and laity, media and Internet executives, artists and art benefactors, politicians, government officials, and ordinary citizens...

...Bowling with the Social Scientists Robert Putnam surveys America By JAMES DAVISON HUNTER The health of American democracy has been much disputed over the last decade—and for good reason...

...In civic life, “active involvement in face-to-face organizations has plummeted,” and “only mailing list membership has continued to expand, with the creation of an entirely new species of ‘tertiary’ association whose members never actually meet...

...Reviewing Putnam’s book in the Washington Post, Francis Fukuyama expressed a similar ambivalence...

...The grandchild’s more numerous social connections are shallower, more transient, and imbued with less moral content than the grandfather’s...

...Putnam cites the pressures of time and money, not least the special pressures faced by the two-career family...

...Needless to say, Putnam looked far beyond bowling leagues to voter turnout, attendance at town meetings, and membership in labor unions, PTAs, and such civic and fraternal organizations as the Lions, the Elks, the Shriners, the Jaycees, and the League of Women Voters...

...Fukuyama is also persuaded that there exist important new sources of social capital (such as those generated by the Internet...

...Nearly every reader of Bowling Alone has noticed this chasm between the dismal analysis of social decline in the book’s central chapters and the sunny vision of democratic possibilities in the book’s conclusion...

...As these things go, Putnam enjoyed a fantastic run...

...Andrew Sullivan, in the London Sunday Times, also sees health where Putnam sees danger...

...This is not simply a facile story of decline, though many (from the far right of the Southern agrarians to the far left of the contemporary environmentalists) have tried to picture it as such...

...The third part of Bowling Alone is given to unpacking the complex reasons for the decline in social capital in America...

...As a consequence, Americans engaged in collective action and built their nation through local voluntary associations...

...These arrangements were inspired and sustained by a strong public culture informed by classical and biblical ideals...

...When economic and political negotiation is embedded in dense networks of social interaction, incentives for opportunism are reduced...

...They all challenged his definition of social capital and social trust and his analysis of key data...

...In eight chapters, he lays out with considerable precision and far more subtlety than he has yet been given credit for, the trends in civic engagement and social capital in all aspects of life...

...Has it occurred to Putnam,” he writes, “that voting rates may be down not because people loathe their government but because they are actually quite happy with it...

...The narrative focused on the contrasting social and political circumstances that led in Northern Italy to the evolution of a vigorous and independent civil society— voluntary institutions that fostered trust, public cooperation, good citizenship, and self-government...

...In this, Putnam has at least earned the right to make the strong claims he makes about the decline of social capital in America and its specific effects in the realm of education, child welfare, the quality of neighborhoods, health and well-being, and economic prosperity...

...Yet, he argued, none of these offer the kind of thick and binding associations that traditional social and civic organizations provided...

...He examined rates of volunteering in mainline civic organizations such as the Boy Scouts and the Red Cross, and he tallied attendance at religious services...

...In the workplace, “Americans at the beginning of the twenty-first century are demonstrably less likely than our parents were to join with our co-workers in formal association,” while “we have witnessed a striking diminution of regular contacts with our friends and neighbors...

...Technological advances and the globalization of markets have restructured the economy in ways that involve complex entanglements with government...

...As Richard Morin put it in the Washington Post, reading Bowling Alone is “like sipping sociology from a fire hose...

...Putnam’s critics want, for the most part, to argue that all will be well as soon as we adjust to new forms of associational life, and thus they have been entirely consistent in embracing Putnam’s optimism and attacking his pessimistic evidence...

...Rather than indicating a decline of traditional forms of social capital, the data, they say, actually reveal considerable political health...

...In the midst of this, his colleague, John Helliwell, discovered that the General Social Survey Putnam had relied upon had systematically undercounted the average number of memberships to which Americans belonged...

...In the 1830s, Tocqueville toured America in search of the reasons the American democratic experiment enjoyed such vitality while France did not...

...And in the end, that trade-off may be worth it...

...Robert Putnam did not stumble accidentally into his controversial thesis...

...The answer, however, may be exactly the opposite: The hard lines of Putnam’s analysis may be the truth of things, and the cheery conclusion only wishful thinking...

...While acknowledging the impossibility of proclaiming any panacea for civic disengagement, Putnam is singularly optimistic that citizens today can be as civically creative as were those who lived in the Progressive era...

...She points to the different forms of social capital that are emerging nowadays, and she rightly emphasizes (where Putnam had only gestured at) the effects of women’s presence in the workplace...

...As Ladd concluded, “Contemporary America hasn’t dissipated the country’s historic reserve of social capital...

...Putnam doesn’t end there...

...Where that leaves us is in a very anxious place, indeed...

...In the first place, networks of civic engagement foster sturdy norms of generalized reciprocity and encourage the emergence of social trust...

...He found some interesting countertrends within the environmental movement, feminism, organizations for the elderly, as well as voluntary associations and small groups oriented toward self-help, hobbies, and book discussions...

...But the question of what it all means still remains...

...Prominent columnists picked up the ideas in his essay, and he was soon besieged by reporters from all over the country, profiled by People magazine, and invited to the White House...

...Such networks facilitate coordination and communication, amplify reputations, and thus allow dilemmas to collective action to be resolved...

...To list just a few of the more significant works is to name The Idea of Civil Society by Adam Seligman, Democracy in Dark Times by Jeffrey Isaac, The Revolt of the Elite and the Betrayal of Democracy by Christopher Lasch, Democracy on Trial by Jean Bethke Elshtain, False Dawn: The DeluJames Davison Hunter is Kenan professor of sociology at the University of Virginia...

...Even if one wanted to weight these factors differently or to add a few others (the changes that have taken place in moral culture, for example), the list of reasons would still be largely structural and historical in nature...

...Bowling Alone does not stray from the central arguments laid out in 1995...

...In volunteerism, there have been some rises, but they tend to be concentrated among the baby-boomers’ aging parents...

...In other words, the reasons Putnam himself gives for the decline in social capital are factors largely independent of choice...

...The real story becomes clear when we focus on new forms of civic participation and engagement and old forms that are actually increasing...

...Indeed, this is the most conspicuous weakness to Bowling Alone...

...Sullivan’s main response is a shrug...

...At the same time, networks of civic engagement embody past success at collaboration, which can serve as a cultural template for future collaboration...

...The state is large, powerful, and bureaucratically abstruse, with few authentic connections to ordinary citizens...

...In short, American democracy developed a strong civil society: robust institutions and associations mediating the private interests of individuals and families with collective interests, not least those of a democratic government...

...At the end, he concluded, social capital in the form of civic associations has significantly eroded over the last generation—which has serious consequences: Life is easier in a community blessed with a substantial stock of social capital...

...The strength of Putnam’s book is not its theoretical or conceptual novelty but its accumulation and sifting of data...

...In this light, Putnam’s critics may be too hasty in giving American democracy a clean bill of health...

...But the real question is, So what...

...Putnam’s argument, of course, focuses on one—and only one—of the many challenges now facing democratic life and practice in America...

...Putnam, they argued, conflated the norms, networks, and consequences of social capital, ignored other sources of voluntary association and civic engagement, and underestimated the role of economic and governmental organizations in generating social trust...

...Where alternative networks of association are emerging, they tend to be “one-shot, special purpose, and selforiented...

...sions of Global Capitalism by John Gray, The End of Equality by Mickey Kaus, Why Americans Hate Politics by E.J...

...The debate among these authors begins with a question about the current health of American democracy...

...The point to consider is rather that American democratic institutions were designed to operate in a different world than that in which we live today...

...Through it all, he found significant decline...

...His conclusions are hard to miss: • In politics, “we remain . . . reasonably well-informed spectators of public affairs, but many fewer of us actually partake in the game...

...Has it occurred to him that large numbers of people are no longer involved in political causes such as the civil rights movement because most of their goals have actually been met...

...Academics generally don’t write books for the fun of it...

...Emerson wrote that adversity introduces a man to himself...

...Alan Ryan, writing in the New York Review of Books, is right when he asks, “Why then does [Putnam] expect anyone to listen when he presents them with a task they do not know how to perform...

...His colleagues in the social sciences, however, were less sure of his thesis...

...Cultural elites are now distinguished—indeed, almost defined—by their disaffection from what remains of the beliefs, values, social arrangements, and aspirations of Middle America...

...His expansion into a book has done little to quell the objections of his critics, who tend to argue that Putnam has it wrong...

...The suspicion that the problems facing American democracy may be more serious than we hope is only reinforced by Putnam’s roseate prescription...

...Whenever there was a need, Americans organized themselves within voluntary alliances and affiliations to address it...

...We live in a time of peace and prosperity, not a season of national crisis...

...The example he chose for his title seemed particularly telling: People go bowling as much today as they ever did, but bowling in organized leagues plummeted as much as 40 percent between 1980 and 1993...

...Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, published in 1993, was a first-rate work of political science that explored the historical and institutional reasons strong democratic politics developed in the north of Italy and failed to do so in the south...

...Still, where he has earned the right to make strong statements about the decline of social capital, his prescriptions are, so to speak, wholly unearned...