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Chapter One: Thinking about Social Change in America

No one is left from the Glenn Valley, Pennsylvania, Bridge Club who can
tell us precisely when or why the group broke up, even though its
forty-odd members were still playing regularly as recently as 1990,
just as they had done for more than half a century. The shock in the
Little Rock, Arkansas, Sertoma club, however, is still painful: in the
mid-1980s, nearly fifty people had attended the weekly luncheon to plan
activities to help the hearing- and speech-impaired, but a decade later
only seven regulars continued to show up.

The Roanoke, Virginia, chapter of the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) had been an active force for
civil rights since 1918, but during the 1990s membership withered from
about 2,500 to a few hundred. By November 1998 even a heated contest
for president drew only fifty-seven voting members. Black city
councillor Carroll Swain observed ruefully, "Some people today are a
wee bit complacent until something jumps up and bites them." VFW Post
2378 in Berwyn, Illinois, a blue-collar suburb of Chicago, was long a
bustling "home away from home" for local veterans and a kind of
working-class country club for the neighborhood, hosting wedding
receptions and class reunions. By 1999, however, membership had so
dwindled that it was a struggle just to pay taxes on the yellow brick
post hall. Although numerous veterans of Vietnam and the post-Vietnam
military lived in the area, Tom Kissell, national membership director
for the VFW, observed, "Kids today just aren't joiners."

The Charity League of Dallas had met every Friday morning for
fifty-seven years to sew, knit, and visit, but on April 30, 1999, they
held their last meeting; the average age of the group had risen to
eighty, the last new member had joined two years earlier, and president
Pat Dilbeck said ruefully, "I feel like this is a sinking ship."
Precisely three days later and 1,200 miles to the northeast, the Vassar
alumnae of Washington, D.C., closed down their fifty-first -- and last
-- annual book sale. Even though they aimed to sell more than one
hundred thousand books to benefit college scholarships in the 1999
event, co-chair Alix Myerson explained, the volunteers who ran the
program "are in their sixties, seventies, and eighties. They're dying,
and they're not replaceable." Meanwhile, as Tewksbury Memorial High
School (TMHS), just north of Boston, opened in the fall of 1999, forty
brand-new royal blue uniforms newly purchased for the marching band
remained in storage, since only four students signed up to play. Roger
Whittlesey, TMHS band director, recalled that twenty years earlier the
band numbered more than eighty, but participation had waned ever since.
Somehow in the last several decades of the twentieth century all these
community groups and tens of thousands like them across America began
to fade.

It wasn't so much that old members dropped out -- at least not any more
rapidly than age and the accidents of life had always meant. But
community organizations were no longer continuously revitalized, as
they had been in the past, by freshets of new members. Organizational
leaders were flummoxed. For years they assumed that their problem must
have local roots or at least that it was peculiar to their
organization, so they commissioned dozens of studies to recommend
reforms. The slowdown was puzzling because for as long as anyone could
remember, membership rolls and activity lists had lengthened steadily.

In the 1960s, in fact, community groups across America had seemed to
stand on the threshold of a new era of expanded involvement. Except for
the civic drought induced by the Great Depression, their activity had
shot up year after year, cultivated by assiduous civic gardeners and
watered by increasing affluence and education. Each annual report
registered rising membership. Churches and synagogues were packed, as
more Americans worshiped together than only a few decades earlier,
perhaps more than ever in American history.

Moreover, Americans seemed to have time on their hands. A 1958 study
under the auspices of the newly inaugurated Center for the Study of
Leisure at the University of Chicago fretted that "the most dangerous
threat hanging over American society is the threat of leisure," a
startling claim in the decade in which the Soviets got the bomb. Life
magazine echoed the warning about the new challenge of free time:
"Americans now face a glut of leisure," ran a headline in February
1964. "The task ahead: how to take life easy."

As a matter of fact, mankind now possesses for the first time the tools
and knowledge to create whatever kind of world he wants....Despite our
Protestant ethic, there are many signs that the message is beginning to
get through to some people....Not only are Americans flocking into
bowling leagues and garden clubs, they are satisfying their gregarious
urges in countless neighborhood committees to improve the local roads
and garbage collections and to hound their public servants into doing
what the name implies.

The civic-minded World War II generation was, as its own John F.
Kennedy proclaimed at his inauguration, picking up the torch of
leadership, not only in the nation's highest office, but in cities and
towns across the land. Summarizing dozens of studies, political
scientist Robert E. Lane wrote in 1959 that "the ratio of political
activists to the general population, and even the ratio of male
activists to the male population, has generally increased over the past
fifty years." As the 1960s ended, sociologists Daniel Bell and Virginia
Held reported that "there is more participation than ever before in
America...and more opportunity for the active interested person to
express his personal and political concerns." Even the simplest
political act, voting, was becoming ever more common. From 1920, when
women got the vote, through 1960, turnout in presidential elections had
risen at the rate of 1.6 percent every four years, so on a simple
straight-line projection it seemed reasonable, as a leading political
scientist later observed, to expect turnout to be nearly 70 percent and
rising on the nation's two hundredth birthday in 1976.

By 1965 disrespect for public life, so endemic in our history, seemed
to be waning. Gallup pollsters discovered that the number of Americans
who would like to see their children "go into politics as a life's
work" had nearly doubled over little more than a decade. Although this
gauge of esteem for politics stood at only 36 percent, it had never
before been recorded so high, nor has it since. More strikingly,
Americans felt increased confidence in their neighbors. The proportion
that agreed that "most people can be trusted," for example, rose from
an already high 66 percent during and after World War II to a peak of
77 percent in 1964.

The fifties and sixties were hardly a "golden age," especially for
those Americans who were marginalized because of their race or gender
or social class or sexual orientation. Segregation, by race legally and
by gender socially, was the norm, and intolerance, though declining,
was still disturbingly high. Environmental degradation had only just
been exposed by Rachel Carson, and Betty Friedan had not yet
deconstructed the feminine mystique. Grinding rural poverty had still
to be discovered by the national media. Infant mortality, a standard
measure of public health, stood at twenty-six per one thousand births
-- forty-four per one thousand for black infants -- in 1960, nearly
four times worse than those indexes would be at the end of the century.
America in Life was white, straight, Christian, comfortable, and (in
the public square, at least) male. Social reformers had their work cut
out for them. However, engagement in community affairs and the sense of
shared identity and reciprocity had never been greater in modern
America, so the prospects for broad-based civic mobilization to address
our national failings seemed bright.

The signs of burgeoning civic vitality were also favorable among the
younger generation, as the first of the baby boomers approached
college. Dozens of studies confirmed that education was by far the best
predictor of engagement in civic life, and universities were in the
midst of the most far-reaching expansion in American history. Education
seemed the key to both greater tolerance and greater social
involvement. Simultaneously shamed and inspired by the quickening
struggle for civil rights launched by young African Americans in the
South, white colleges in the North began to awaken from the silence of
the fifties. Describing the induction of this new generation into the
civil rights struggles of the 1960s, sociologist Doug McAdam emphasizes
their self-assurance:

We were a "can do" people, who accomplished whatever we set out to do.
We had licked the Depression, turned the tide in World War II, and
rebuilt Europe after the war....Freedom Summer was an audacious
undertaking consistent with the exaggerated sense of importance and
potency shared by the privileged members of America's postwar
generation.

The baby boom meant that America's population was unusually young,
whereas civic involvement generally doesn't bloom until middle age. In
the short run, therefore, our youthful demography actually tended to
dampen the ebullience of civil society. But that very bulge at the
bottom of the nation's demographic pyramid boded well for the future of
community organizations, for they could look forward to swelling
membership rolls in the 1980s, when the boomers would reach the peak
"joining" years of the life cycle. And in the meantime, the bull
session buzz about "participatory democracy" and "all power to the
people" seemed to augur ever more widespread engagement in community
affairs. One of America's most acute social observers prophesied in
1968, "Participatory democracy has all along been the political style
(if not the slogan) of the American middle and upper class. It will
become a more widespread style as more persons enter into those
classes." Never in our history had the future of civic life looked
brighter.

What happened next to civic and social life in American communities is
the subject of this book. In recent years social scientists have framed
concerns about the changing character of American society in terms of
the concept of "social capital." By analogy with notions of physical
capital and human capital -- tools and training that enhance individual
productivity -- the core idea of social capital theory is that social
networks have value. Just as a screwdriver (physical capital) or a
college education (human capital) can increase productivity (both
individual and collective), so too social contacts affect the
productivity of individuals and groups.

Whereas physical capital refers to physical objects and human capital
refers to properties of individuals, social capital refers to
connections among individuals -- social networks and the norms of
reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them. In that sense
social capital is closely related to what some have called "civic
virtue." The difference is that "social capital" calls attention to the
fact that civic virtue is most powerful when embedded in a dense
network of reciprocal social relations. A society of many virtuous but
isolated individuals is not necessarily rich in social capital.

The term social capital itself turns out to have been independently
invented at least six times over the twentieth century, each time to
call attention to the ways in which our lives are made more productive
by social ties. The first known use of the concept was not by some
cloistered theoretician, but by a practical reformer of the Progressive
Era -- L. J. Hanifan, state supervisor of rural schools in West
Virginia. Writing in 1916 to urge the importance of community
involvement for successful schools, Hanifan invoked the idea of "social
capital" to explain why. For Hanifan, social capital referred to

those tangible substances [that] count for most in the daily lives of
people: namely good will, fellowship, sympathy, and social intercourse
among the individuals and families who make up a social unit....The
individual is helpless socially, if left to himself....If he comes into
contact with his neighbor, and they with other neighbors, there will be
an accumulation of social capital, which may immediately satisfy his
social needs and which may bear a social potentiality sufficient to the
substantial improvement of living conditions in the whole community.
The community as a whole will benefit by the cooperation of all its
parts, while the individual will find in his associations the
advantages of the help, the sympathy, and the fellowship of his
neighbors.

Hanifan's account of social capital anticipated virtually all the
crucial elements in later interpretations, but his conceptual invention
apparently attracted no notice from other social commentators and
disappeared without a trace. But like sunken treasure recurrently
revealed by shifting sands and tides, the same idea was independently
rediscovered in the 1950s by Canadian sociologists to characterize the
club memberships of arriviste suburbanites, in the 1960s by urbanist
Jane Jacobs to laud neighborliness in the modern metropolis, in the
1970s by economist Glenn Loury to analyze the social legacy of slavery,
and in the 1980s by French social theorist Pierre Bourdieu and by
German economist Ekkehart Schlicht to underline the social and economic
resources embodied in social networks. Sociologist James S. Coleman put
the term firmly and finally on the intellectual agenda in the late
1980s, using it (as Hanifan had originally done) to highlight the
social context of education.

As this array of independent coinages indicates, social capital has
both an individual and a collective aspect -- a private face and a
public face. First, individuals form connections that benefit our own
interests. One pervasive strategem of ambitious job seekers is
"networking," for most of us get our jobs because of whom we know, not
what we know -- that is, our social capital, not our human capital.
Economic sociologist Ronald Burt has shown that executives with
bounteous Rolodex files enjoy faster career advancement. Nor is the
private return to social capital limited to economic rewards. As Claude
S. Fischer, a sociologist of friendship, has noted, "Social networks
are important in all our lives, often for finding jobs, more often for
finding a helping hand, companionship, or a shoulder to cry on."

If individual clout and companionship were all there were to social
capital, we'd expect foresighted, self-interested individuals to invest
the right amount of time and energy in creating or acquiring it.
However, social capital also can have "externalities" that affect the
wider community, so that not all the costs and benefits of social
connections accrue to the person making the contact. As we shall see
later in this book, a well-connected individual in a poorly connected
society is not as productive as a well-connected individual in a
well-connected society. And even a poorly connected individual may
derive some of the spillover benefits from living in a well-connected
community. If the crime rate in my neighborhood is lowered by neighbors
keeping an eye on one another's homes, I benefit even if I personally
spend most of my time on the road and never even nod to another
resident on the street.

Social capital can thus be simultaneously a "private good" and a
"public good." Some of the benefit from an investment in social capital
goes to bystanders, while some of the benefit redounds to the immediate
interest of the person making the investment. For example, service
clubs, like Rotary or Lions, mobilize local energies to raise
scholarships or fight disease at the same time that they provide
members with friendships and business connections that pay off
personally.

Social connections are also important for the rules of conduct that
they sustain. Networks involve (almost by definition) mutual
obligations; they are not interesting as mere "contacts." Networks of
community engagement foster sturdy norms of reciprocity: I'll do this
for you now, in the expectation that you (or perhaps someone else) will
return the favor. "Social capital is akin to what Tom Wolfe called 'the
favor bank' in his novel The Bonfire of the Vanities," notes economist
Robert Frank. It was, however, neither a novelist nor an economist, but
Yogi Berra who offered the most succinct definition of reciprocity: "If
you don't go to somebody's funeral, they won't come to yours."

Sometimes, as in these cases, reciprocity is specific: I'll do this for
you if you do that for me. Even more valuable, however, is a norm of
generalized reciprocity: I'll do this for you without expecting
anything specific back from you, in the confident expectation that
someone else will do something for me down the road. The Golden Rule is
one formulation of generalized reciprocity. Equally instructive is the
T-shirt slogan used by the Gold Beach, Oregon, Volunteer Fire
Department to publicize their annual fund-raising effort: "Come to our
breakfast, we'll come to your fire." "We act on a norm of specific
reciprocity," the firefighters seem to be saying, but onlookers smile
because they recognize the underlying norm of generalized reciprocity
-- the firefighters will come even if you don't. When Blanche DuBois
depended on the kindness of strangers, she too was relying on
generalized reciprocity.

A society characterized by generalized reciprocity is more efficient
than a distrustful society, for the same reason that money is more
efficient than barter. If we don't have to balance every exchange
instantly, we can get a lot more accomplished. Trustworthiness
lubricates social life. Frequent interaction among a diverse set of
people tends to produce a norm of generalized reciprocity. Civic
engagement and social capital entail mutual obligation and
responsibility for action. As L. J. Hanifan and his successors
recognized, social networks and norms of reciprocity can facilitate
cooperation for mutual benefit. When economic and political dealing is
embedded in dense networks of social interaction, incentives for
opportunism and malfeasance are reduced. This is why the diamond trade,
with its extreme possibilities for fraud, is concentrated within
close-knit ethnic enclaves. Dense social ties facilitate gossip and
other valuable ways of cultivating reputation -- an essential
foundation for trust in a complex society.

Physical capital is not a single "thing," and different forms of
physical capital are not interchangeable. An eggbeater and an aircraft
carrier both appear as physical capital in our national accounts, but
the eggbeater is not much use for national defense, and the carrier
would not be much help with your morning omelet. Similarly, social
capital -- that is, social networks and the associated norms of
reciprocity -- comes in many different shapes and sizes with many
different uses. Your extended family represents a form of social
capital, as do your Sunday school class, the regulars who play poker on
your commuter train, your college roommates, the civic organizations to
which you belong, the Internet chat group in which you participate, and
the network of professional acquaintances recorded in your address
book.

Sometimes "social capital," like its conceptual cousin "community,"
sounds warm and cuddly. Urban sociologist Xavier de Souza Briggs,
however, properly warns us to beware of a treacly sweet, "kumbaya"
interpretation of social capital. Networks and the associated norms of
reciprocity are generally good for those inside the network, but the
external effects of social capital are by no means always positive. It
was social capital, for example, that enabled Timothy McVeigh to bomb
the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. McVeigh's
network of friends, bound together by a norm of reciprocity, enabled
him to do what he could not have done alone. Similarly, urban gangs,
NIMBY ("not in my backyard") movements, and power elites often exploit
social capital to achieve ends that are antisocial from a wider
perspective. Indeed, it is rhetorically useful for such groups to
obscure the difference between the pro-social and antisocial
consequences of community organizations. When Floridians objected to
plans by the Ku Klux Klan to "adopt a highway," Jeff Coleman, grand
wizard of the Royal Knights of the KKK, protested, "Really, we're just
like the Lions or the Elks. We want to be involved in the community."

Social capital, in short, can be directed toward malevolent, antisocial
purposes, just like any other form of capital. (McVeigh also relied on
physical capital, like the explosive-laden truck, and human capital,
like bomb-making expertise, to achieve his purposes.) Therefore it is
important to ask how the positive consequences of social capital --
mutual support, cooperation, trust, institutional effectiveness -- can
be maximized and the negative manifestations -- sectarianism,
ethnocentrism, corruption -- minimized. Toward this end, scholars have
begun to distinguish many different forms of social capital.

Some forms involve repeated, intensive, multistranded networks -- like
a group of steelworkers who meet for drinks every Friday after work and
see each other at mass on Sunday -- and some are episodic, single
stranded, and anonymous, like the faintly familiar face you see several
times a month in the supermarket checkout line. Some types of social
capital, like a Parent-Teacher Association, are formally organized,
with incorporation papers, regular meetings, a written constitution,
and connection to a national federation, whereas others, like a pickup
basketball game, are more informal. Some forms of social capital, like
a volunteer ambulance squad, have explicit public-regarding purposes;
some, like a bridge club, exist for the private enjoyment of the
members; and some, like the Rotary club mentioned earlier, serve both
public and private ends.

Of all the dimensions along which forms of social capital vary, perhaps
the most important is the distinction between bridging (or inclusive)
and bonding (or exclusive). Some forms of social capital are, by choice
or necessity, inward looking and tend to reinforce exclusive identities
and homogeneous groups. Examples of bonding social capital include
ethnic fraternal organizations, church-based women's reading groups,
and fashionable country clubs. Other networks are outward looking and
encompass people across diverse social cleavages. Examples of bridging
social capital include the civil rights movement, many youth service
groups, and ecumenical religious organizations.

Bonding social capital is good for undergirding specific reciprocity
and mobilizing solidarity. Dense networks in ethnic enclaves, for
example, provide crucial social and psychological support for less
fortunate members of the community, while furnishing start-up
financing, markets, and reliable labor for local entrepreneurs.
Bridging networks, by contrast, are better for linkage to external
assets and for information diffusion. Economic sociologist Mark
Granovetter has pointed out that when seeking jobs -- or political
allies -- the "weak" ties that link me to distant acquaintances who
move in different circles from mine are actually more valuable than the
"strong" ties that link me to relatives and intimate friends whose
sociological niche is very like my own. Bonding social capital is, as
Xavier de Souza Briggs puts it, good for "getting by," but bridging
social capital is crucial for "getting ahead."

Moreover, bridging social capital can generate broader identities and
reciprocity, whereas bonding social capital bolsters our narrower
selves. In 1829 at the founding of a community lyceum in the bustling
whaling port of New Bedford, Massachusetts, Thomas Greene eloquently
expressed this crucial insight:

We come from all the divisions, ranks and classes of society...to teach
and to be taught in our turn. While we mingle together in these
pursuits, we shall learn to know each other more intimately; we shall
remove many of the prejudices which ignorance or partial acquaintance
with each other had fostered....In the parties and sects into which we
are divided, we sometimes learn to love our brother at the expense of
him whom we do not in so many respects regard as a brother....We may
return to our homes and firesides [from the lyceum] with kindlier
feelings toward one another, because we have learned to know one
another better.

Bonding social capital constitutes a kind of sociological superglue,
whereas bridging social capital provides a sociological WD-40. Bonding
social capital, by creating strong in-group loyalty, may also create
strong out-group antagonism, as Thomas Greene and his neighbors in New
Bedford knew, and for that reason we might expect negative external
effects to be more common with this form of social capital.
Nevertheless, under many circumstances both bridging and bonding social
capital can have powerfully positive social effects.

Many groups simultaneously bond along some social dimensions and bridge
across others. The black church, for example, brings together people of
the same race and religion across class lines. The Knights of Columbus
was created to bridge cleavages among different ethnic communities
while bonding along religious and gender lines. Internet chat groups
may bridge across geography, gender, age, and religion, while being
tightly homogeneous in education and ideology. In short, bonding and
bridging are not "either-or" categories into which social networks can
be neatly divided, but "more or less" dimensions along which we can
compare different forms of social capital.

It would obviously be valuable to have distinct measures of the
evolution of these various forms of social capital over time. However,
like researchers on global warming, we must make do with the imperfect
evidence that we can find, not merely lament its deficiencies.
Exhaustive descriptions of social networks in America -- even at a
single point in time -- do not exist. I have found no reliable,
comprehensive, nationwide measures of social capital that neatly
distinguish "bridgingness" and "bondingness." In our empirical account
of recent social trends in this book, therefore, this distinction will
be less prominent than I would prefer. On the other hand, we must keep
this conceptual differentiation at the back of our minds as we proceed,
recognizing that bridging and bonding social capital are not
interchangeable.

"Social capital" is to some extent merely new language for a very old
debate in American intellectual circles. Community has warred
incessantly with individualism for preeminence in our political
hagiology. Liberation from ossified community bonds is a recurrent and
honored theme in our culture, from the Pilgrims' storied escape from
religious convention in the seventeenth century to the lyric
nineteenth-century paeans to individualism by Emerson
("Self-Reliance"), Thoreau ("Civil Disobedience"), and Whitman ("Song
of Myself") to Sherwood Anderson's twentieth-century celebration of the
struggle against conformism by ordinary citizens in Winesburg, Ohio to
the latest Clint Eastwood film. Even Alexis de Tocqueville, patron
saint of American communitarians, acknowledged the uniquely democratic
claim of individualism, "a calm and considered feeling which disposes
each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of his fellows and
withdraw into the circle of family and friends; with this little
society formed to his taste, he gladly leaves the greater society to
look after itself."

Our national myths often exaggerate the role of individual heroes and
understate the importance of collective effort. Historian David Hackett
Fischer's gripping account of opening night in the American Revolution,
for example, reminds us that Paul Revere's alarum was successful only
because of networks of civic engagement in the Middlesex villages.
Towns without well-organized local militia, no matter how patriotic
their inhabitants, were AWOL from Lexington and Concord.24
Nevertheless, the myth of rugged individualism continues to strike a
powerful inner chord in the American psyche.

Debates about the waxing and waning of "community" have been endemic
for at least two centuries. "Declensionist narratives" -- postmodernist
jargon for tales of decline and fall -- have a long pedigree in our
letters. We seem perennially tempted to contrast our tawdry todays with
past golden ages. We apparently share this nostalgic predilection with
the rest of humanity. As sociologist Barry Wellman observes,

It is likely that pundits have worried about the impact of social
change on communities ever since human beings ventured beyond their
caves....In the [past] two centuries many leading social commentators
have been gainfully employed suggesting various ways in which
large-scale social changes associated with the Industrial Revolution
may have affected the structure and operation of communities....This
ambivalence about the consequences of large-scale changes continued
well into the twentieth century. Analysts have kept asking if things
have, in fact, fallen apart.

At the conclusion of the twentieth century, ordinary Americans shared
this sense of civic malaise. We were reasonably content about our
economic prospects, hardly a surprise after an expansion of
unprecedented length, but we were not equally convinced that we were on
the right track morally or culturally. Of baby boomers interviewed in
1987, 53 percent thought their parents' generation was better in terms
of "being a concerned citizen, involved in helping others in the
community," as compared with only 21 percent who thought their own
generation was better. Fully 77 percent said the nation was worse off
because of "less involvement in community activities." In 1992
three-quarters of the U.S. workforce said that "the breakdown of
community" and "selfishness" were "serious" or "extremely serious"
problems in America. In 1996 only 8 percent of all Americans said that
"the honesty and integrity of the average American" were improving, as
compared with 50 percent of us who thought we were becoming less
trustworthy. Those of us who said that people had become less civil
over the preceding ten years outnumbered those who thought people had
become more civil, 80 percent to 12 percent. In several surveys in 1999
two-thirds of Americans said that America's civic life had weakened in
recent years, that social and moral values were higher when they were
growing up, and that our society was focused more on the individual
than the community. More than 80 percent said there should be more
emphasis on community, even if that put more demands on individuals.
Americans' concern about weakening community bonds may be misplaced or
exaggerated, but a decent respect for the opinion of our fellow
citizens suggests that we should explore the issue more thoroughly.

It is emphatically not my view that community bonds in America have
weakened steadily throughout our history -- or even throughout the last
hundred years. On the contrary, American history carefully examined is
a story of ups and downs in civic engagement, not just downs -- a story
of collapse and of renewal. As I have already hinted in the opening
pages of this book, within living memory the bonds of community in
America were becoming stronger, not weaker, and as I shall argue in the
concluding pages, it is within our power to reverse the decline of the
last several decades.

Nevertheless, my argument is, at least in appearance, in the
declensionist tradition, so it is important to avoid simple nostalgia.
Precisely because the theme of this book might lend itself to gauzy
self-deception, our methods must be transparent. Is life in communities
as we enter the twenty-first century really so different after all from
the reality of American communities in the 1950s and 1960s? One way of
curbing nostalgia is to count things. Are club meetings really less
crowded today than yesterday, or does it just seem so? Do we really
know our neighbors less well than our parents did, or is our childhood
recollection of neighborhood barbecues suffused with a golden glow of
wishful reminiscence? Are friendly poker games less common now, or is
it merely that we ourselves have outgrown poker? League bowling may be
passé, but how about softball and soccer? Are strangers less
trustworthy now? Are boomers and X'ers really less engaged in community
life? After all, it was the preceding generation that was once scorned
as "silent." Perhaps the younger generation today is no less engaged
than their predecessors, but engaged in new ways. In the chapters that
follow we explore these questions with the best available evidence.

The challenge of studying the evolving social climate is analogous in
some respects to the challenge facing meteorologists who measure global
warming: we know what kind of evidence we would ideally want from the
past, but time's arrow means that we can't go back to conduct those
well-designed studies. Thus if we are to explore how our society is
like or unlike our parents', we must make imperfect inferences from all
the evidence that we can find.

The most powerful strategy for paleometeorologists seeking to assess
global climate change is to triangulate among diverse sources of
evidence. If pollen counts in polar ice, and the width of southwestern
tree rings, and temperature records of the British Admiralty all point
in a similar direction, the inference of global warming is stronger
than if the cord of evidence has only a single strand. For much the
same reason, prudent journalists follow a "two source" rule: Never
report anything unless at least two independent sources confirm it.

In this book I follow that same maxim. Nearly every major
generalization here rests on more than one body of independent
evidence, and where I have discovered divergent results from credible
sources, I note that disparity as well. I have a case to make, but like
any officer of the court, I have a professional obligation to present
all relevant evidence I have found, exculpatory as well as
incriminating. To avoid cluttering the text with masses of redundant
evidence, I have typically put confirmatory evidence from multiple
studies in the notes, so skep among diverse sources of evidence. If
pollen counts in polar ice, and the width of southwestern tree rings,
and temperature records of the British Admiralty all point in a similar
direction, the inference of global warming is stronger than if the cord
of evidence has only a single strand. For much the same reason, prudent
journalists follow a "two source" rule: Never report anything unless at
least two independent sources confirm it.

In this book I follow that same maxim. Nearly every major
generalization here rests on more than one body of independent
evidence, and where I have discovered divergent results from credible
sources, I note that disparity as well. I have a case to make, but like
any officer of the court, I have a professional obligation to present
all relevant evidence I have found, exculpatory as well as
incriminating. To avoid cluttering the text with masses of redundant
evidence, I have typically put confirmatory evidence from multiple
studies in the notes, so skeptical "show me" readers should examine
those notes as well as the text.

I have sought as diverse a range of evidence as possible on
continuities and change in American social life. If the transformation
that I discern is as broad and deep as I believe it to be, it ought to
show up in many different places, so I have cast a broad net. Of
course, social change, like climatic change, is inevitably uneven. Life
is not lived in a single dimension. We should not expect to find
everything changing in the same direction and at the same speed, but
those very anomalies may contain important clues to what is happening.

American society, like the continent on which we live, is massive and
polymorphous, and our civic engagement historically has come in many
sizes and shapes. A few of us still share plowing chores with
neighbors, while many more pitch in to wire classrooms to the Internet.
Some of us run for Congress, and others join self-help groups. Some of
us hang out at the local bar association and others at the local bar.
Some of us attend mass once a day, while others struggle to remember to
send holiday greetings once a year. The forms of our social capital --
the ways in which we connect with friends and neighbors and strangers
-- are varied.

So our review of trends in social capital and civic engagement ranges
widely across various sectors of this complex society. In the chapters
that follow we begin by charting Americans' participation in the most
public forum -- politics and public affairs. We next turn to the
institutions of our communities -- clubs and community associations,
religious bodies, and work-related organizations, such as unions and
professional societies. Then we explore the almost infinite variety of
informal ties that link Americans -- card parties and bowling leagues,
bar cliques and ball games, picnics and parties. Next we examine the
changing patterns of trust and altruism in America -- philanthropy,
volunteering, honesty, reciprocity. Finally we turn to three apparent
counterexamples to the decline of connectedness -- small groups, social
movements, and the Internet.

In each domain we shall encounter currents and crosscurrents and
eddies, but in each we shall also discover common, powerful tidal
movements that have swept across American society in the twentieth
century. The dominant theme is simple: For the first two-thirds of the
twentieth century a powerful tide bore Americans into ever deeper
engagement in the life of their communities, but a few decades ago --
silently, without warning -- that tide reversed and we were overtaken
by a treacherous rip current. Without at first noticing, we have been
pulled apart from one another and from our communities over the last
third of the century.

The impact of these tides on all aspects of American society, their
causes and consequences and what we might do to reverse them, is the
subject of the rest of this book. Section III explores a wide range of
possible explanations -- from overwork to suburban sprawl, from the
welfare state to the women's revolution, from racism to television,
from the growth of mobility to the growth of divorce. Some of these
factors turn out to have played no significant role at all in the
erosion of social capital, but we shall be able to identify three or
four critical sources of our problem.

Whereas section III asks "Why?" section IV asks "So What?" Social
capital turns out to have forceful, even quantifiable effects on many
different aspects of our lives. What is at stake is not merely warm,
cuddly feelings or frissons of community pride. We shall review hard
evidence that our schools and neighborhoods don't work so well when
community bonds slacken, that our economy, our democracy, and even our
health and happiness depend on adequate stocks of social capital.

Finally, in section V we turn from the necessary but cheerless task of
diagnosis to the more optimistic challenge of contemplating possible
therapies. A century ago, it turns out, Americans faced social and
political issues that were strikingly similar to those that we must now
address. From our predecessors' responses, we have much to learn -- not
least that civic decay like that around us can be reversed. This volume
offers no simple cures for our contemporary ills. In the final section
my aim is to provoke (and perhaps contribute to) a period of national
deliberation and experimentation about how we can renew American civic
engagement and social connectedness in the twenty-first century.

Before October 29, 1997, John Lambert and Andy Boschma knew each other
only through their local bowling league at the Ypsi-Arbor Lanes in
Ypsilanti, Michigan. Lambert, a sixty-four-year-old retired employee of
the University of Michigan hospital, had been on a kidney transplant
waiting list for three years when Boschma, a thirty-three-year-old
accountant, learned casually of Lambert's need and unexpectedly
approached him to offer to donate one of his own kidneys.

"Andy saw something in me that others didn't," said Lambert. "When we
were in the hospital Andy said to me, 'John, I really like you and have
a lot of respect for you. I wouldn't hesitate to do this all over
again.' I got choked up." Boschma returned the feeling: "I obviously
feel a kinship [with Lambert]. I cared about him before, but now I'm
really rooting for him." This moving story speaks for itself, but the
photograph that accompanied this report in the Ann Arbor News reveals
that in addition to their differences in profession and generation,
Boschma is white and Lambert is African American. That they bowled
together made all the difference. In small ways like this -- and in
larger ways, too -- we Americans need to reconnect with one another.
That is the simple argument of this book.

Copyright © 2000 by Robert D. Putnam

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