Loyalty and Trust in a World of Couch Potatoes
Remnant Review
Twenty years ago, Robert Putnam, a scholar at Harvard University, wrote an article: "Bowling Alone." Five years later he wrote a book with the same title, and it remains a bestseller for an academic book.
One of the tremendous advantages that the book has is this: its title conveys its basic thesis. Even better, the title invokes an image in our minds, and the image is an accurate summary of the book's thesis. This almost never happens. Scholars are rarely able to pull off anything like this. As a result, it made his reputation, and he made a lot of money and royalties, which also doesn't happen very often.
On Amazon, there is a good book review of it. Unlike most book reviews, this one is worth quoting at length.
Few people outside certain scholarly circles had heard the name Robert D. Putnam before 1995. But then this self-described "obscure academic" hit a nerve with a journal article called "Bowling Alone." Suddenly he found himself invited to Camp David, his picture in People magazine, and his thesis at the center of a raging debate. In a nutshell, he argued that civil society was breaking down as Americans became more disconnected from their families, neighbors, communities, and the republic itself. The organizations that gave life to democracy were fraying. Bowling became his driving metaphor. Years ago, he wrote, thousands of people belonged to bowling leagues. Today, however, they're more likely to bowl alone:Television, two-career families, suburban sprawl, generational changes in values--these and other changes in American society have meant that fewer and fewer of us find that the League of Women Voters, or the United Way, or the Shriners, or the monthly bridge club, or even a Sunday picnic with friends fits the way we have come to live. Our growing social-capital deficit threatens educational performance, safe neighborhoods, equitable tax collection, democratic responsiveness, everyday honesty, and even our health and happiness.The conclusions reached in the book Bowling Alone rest on a mountain of data gathered by Putnam and a team of researchers since his original essay appeared. Its breadth of information is astounding--yes, he really has statistics showing people are less likely to take Sunday picnics nowadays. Dozens of charts and graphs track everything from trends in PTA participation to the number of times Americans say they give "the finger" to other drivers each year. If nothing else, Bowling Alone is a fascinating collection of factoids. Yet it does seem to provide an explanation for why "we tell pollsters that we wish we lived in a more civil, more trustworthy, more collectively caring community." What's more, writes Putnam, "Americans are right that the bonds of our communities have withered, and we are right to fear that this transformation has very real costs." Putnam takes a stab at suggesting how things might change, but the book's real strength is in its diagnosis rather than its proposed solutions. Bowling Alone won't make Putnam any less controversial, but it may come to be known as a path-breaking work of scholarship, one whose influence has a long reach into the 21st century.
TRUST AND LOYALTY
I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation for a committee. One of the men on the committee was Robert Nisbet. I studied sociology in graduate school under him. Bowling Alone raises the kinds of issues that Nisbet was concerned with. His book, The Quest for Community (1953), is a classic. It shows what happened when local ties to voluntary associations either broke down or declined in importance in Western Europe after 1900. The result was totalitarianism. The temptation, he argued, is for loyalty to the state to replace men's fading loyalties to local institutions.
What Nisbet wrote about in 1953 was the mere beginning of the process. Today, Americans have very little contact with the traditional institutions that long provided meaning in support in people's lives. Most of the fraternal organizations have faded into obscurity. We never read about them. Even the Freemasons, who were dominant in American culture and politics from the late 18th century until the early 20th century, have fallen on hard times. The organization appeals mainly to old men, and they are desperately attempting to recruit younger men. Younger men are ignoring the appeal.
People still belong to churches, synagogues, and mosques. But do they attend? Do they tithe? To what degree are they committed? Mega-churches have been dominant. The Pareto principle of 20/80 applies here, so most church members are members of mega-churches. Mega-churches tend to become impersonal, simply because of the managerial problems associated with their size. There have been some attempts within the church growth movement to create smaller units within the mega-churches, which people can join and become active participants. I have heard about this in theory, but I have never seen it work.
I don't see that the nation-state is benefiting from this loss of local loyalties (plural). On the contrary, I see a declining trust in the nation-state. Distrust is becoming common. So, what is replacing the local loyalties that once marked Western society?
In a world of couch potatoes, we do not communicate with the outside world in a visible way. Children do not play in their front yards any longer, let alone the sidewalks. They did when I was a boy, but those days are long gone.
Facebook is one way that women have found a way to connect with each other. My wife is an avid participant. I am not. She says that this is a way she stays in contact with relatives and friends. The only relatives I have are my wife and three children, plus grandchildren, so Facebook is not a major factor in my life. I am too busy writing to spend much time with social media. Actually, I don't spend any time with social media. But that is a personal preference. I have never been a joiner.
Most people have been joiners in history. They are no longer. The totalitarian states of the 20th century were best represented by the Soviet Union. It was created in a matter of weeks in October 1917, and it disappeared in a matter of weeks in December 1991. Totalitarian movements are finished. The World Wide Web will never allow any totalitarian movement to take over. Decentralization is now escalating so fast that central governments are impotent to stop it. People who are tied to social media and the Internet are never again going to place much trust in distant bureaucrats in the nation's capital city.
So, the question remains: what will replace the local institutions, as well as the national government, now that strong allegiances to anything outside the family and maybe a local church no longer exist? The bonds of loyalty, meaning allegiance, have broken down in the last 45 years, and this has taken place all over the West. This is not simply an American problem. This is a crisis of Western civilization.
Nisbet's textbook is titled, The Social Bond. There is no social bond for people who bowl alone.
BALKANIZATION
The term "Balkanization" has been used to describe American politics. But this description is not limited to American politics. It is a comprehensive social phenomenon.
In one sense, the term is not accurate. Balkanization always rested on strong local ties. These local ties undermined any commitment to larger political units. Hence, we speak of this political fragmentation as Balkanization. But what happens to society when there is no loyalty to the local community, tribe, ethnic group, or any other social organization? This is not Balkanization. It is fragmentation. It is isolation. It is what Nisbet described, but devoid of trust in political parties.
There are racial loyalties. If you want to see what happens to strong racial loyalties, take a close look at an American inner-city. There is racism here on a scale never seen before in American history, but except for the gangs, no inner-city organizations retain much loyalty. Nobody can trust his neighbor in the ghetto. The crime rate in the ghetto is astronomical. There is no loyalty. There is no defense against the gangs. There is no defense against random drive-by shootings. People are on their own, and they cannot trust people of their own color. Yet racism divides the ghetto from the broader American society that surrounds the ghettos. The Blacks in the ghettos see white society on television, but they have no contact with it. They resent it.
The concept of loyalty and the related concept of trust are crucial concepts. Both are declining in our era. They have been declining rapidly since about 1965. The counterculture let the twin genies of distrust and disloyalty out of the bottles. The loyalties that briefly existed in the antiwar movement from 1965 to 1970 faded fast. There was great distrust in that era. The common phrase was this: "Never trust anybody over 30." That was the common phrase of people who are now 70. What you do for an encore when your guiding principle was "never trust anybody over 30"? If ever there was a short-run principle to live by, it was that one.
The antiwar movement barely survived after 1970: the Kent State shootings and Nixon's recession. It pretty much disappeared from public view. The mass protests stopped. Nixon ended the draft in 1973. Gerald Ford ended the war in 1975. But by the time they did this, the antiwar movement was a spent force. The "me decade" began in 1971, and it rapidly replaced the antiwar movement.
I was basically a man of the late 1950's. There wasn't much culture in the first third of the 1960's, other than the Beach Boys, Jan and Dean, and Annette Funicello. I left that culture in 1959 -- literally. I did not like the beach. I never went back. But I was not part of the antiwar movement, although I opposed the Vietnam war. I opposed it on the basis of a derided principle: non-interventionism. I was opposed to every American war stretching back to the War of Jenkins' Ear. So, I observed from the sidelines when the antiwar movement escalated. I have seen nothing else comparable to it since then. The green movement symbolically began on April 22, 1970, but it has never had the intensity of the antiwar movement.
So, to what do men today pledge their lives, fortunes, and would-be sacred honor? What do men go off to war to defend today? The answer is clear: nothing. They do not join the Army out of commitment to the ideals of America, as defended by military honor. They join because they cannot get secure jobs anywhere else.
I don't think this can go on indefinitely. I don't think people can build a free society without making local commitments. That was Tocqueville's message in Democracy in America in the late 1830's. I believe in decentralization. I believe that there will be a political trend toward decentralization, because decentralization has escalated digitally. Politics will follow the Internet. But is the Internet a reliable means of building loyalty that is worth sacrificing for? So far, it is not.
Not only do we bowl alone today, we bowl digitally. We do not go to bowling alleys.
We are now a spectator nation. But you do not sustain a civilization with spectators. That is the lesson of classical Rome after A.D. 150. There is bread, but also much more. Half of the American population is receiving money from the federal government. There are also circuses. These are mostly profit-seeking. Think "professional sports." Digital technologies are transforming the next generations into low-ticket spectators. There are digital interactive technologies today that did not exist prior to 2000. These interactions are best represented by online video gaming. Even more bizarre, there is a new spectator sport: watching video gaming.
I don't think this will substitute for the interactions that once existed in the town hall, the fraternal society, and the local civic improvement association.
Virtual reality beckons.
Nisbet once told me that the most important institution ever to come out of the United States was the Rotary Club. It has been more successful around the world than any other American institution. I suspect that Alcoholics Anonymous is probably in second place.
Can you build a society on the Rotary Club and Alcoholics Anonymous?
This is not a hypothetical question. It is a real-world question. The answer is going to shape the world our grandchildren live in. Because we really don't have any answer yet, we have difficulty imagining such a world. We like to think of that world as governed by radical new technologies, but technologies are ultimately only clever gadgets. The life-and-death issues of the world are shaped by our gadgets, but they are not solved by them.
If I were to limit myself to a single book of the 19th century by which to build a social movement, it would be Tocqueville's Democracy in America. It is a long book. His literary rule was this: "Never put into one paragraph what you can put into three." But, page for page, idea for idea, this book is a gold mine. It has been quoted ever since. How he wrote it, based on a nine-month visit in 1831, remains a mystery. A superb new French/English translation of it is available in 4 volumes. I think this translation will become definitive. If I had any spare time, I would produce a video course on it for YouTube.