Tag Archives: Robert Putnam

Robert Putnam in his 80’s: The cause of our aloneness is moral

A life in the Spirit, Building community, , , ,

I was impressed to see 83-year-old Robert Putnam in the New York Times Sunday Magazine this week.  I was going back to use some of the article about him for this post last Saturday when something terrible caught my eye instead. It was the news that Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, of Bethel Park, PA tried to kill former president, Donald Trump. The first information included, “Law enforcement officials recovered an AR-15-type semiautomatic rifle from a deceased white male they believe was the gunman.”

I won’t be surprised if we discover another loner male with a gun causing havoc. Putnam has warned us about how our society is spawning such people since 2000. But our aloneness, especially among men, has only become more pronounced.

Hope springs eternal

Almost 25 years ago, Robert Putnam became something rare: a celebrity academic. His  groundbreaking book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, received a lot of attention and has been widely quoted ever since. In the book he demonstrated that America was transforming from a nation of joiners to a nation of loners. You know for yourself that Americans go to church less, join clubs less and have lost trust in our fellow citizens and our institutions because those things probably describe your aloneness, too. Putnam wanted his prophecy to reverse the trends, but it didn’t. Americans have also heard too much bogus prophecy to trust prophets.

I wrote about being disconnected myself not long ago. I referred to Putnam. But I admit I also expected to be ignored for the most part, just like he has been, for the most part.

Nevertheless, hope springs eternal in our hearts. A man after Putnam’s own heart wrote that in 1733.

Hope humbly then; with trembling pinions soar;
Wait the great teacher Death; and God adore!
What future bliss, he gives not thee to know,
But gives that hope to be thy blessing now.
Hope springs eternal in the human breast:
Man never is, but always to be blest:
The soul, uneasy and confin’d from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come. — An Essay on Man: Epistle I by Alexander Pope.(1733)

And hope springs eternal, apparently, in the New York Times Magazine. Upon the screening of a new documentary lionizing Putnam’s work, the magazine got on the bandwagon. Here’s the trailer:

It seems a bit obscene to be hopeful when a twentysomething has just shot up a political rally. But Putnam persists, and so do I. So here are three excerpts from the interview which I hope move you to keep doing what you can to build community.

When it comes to social connection, things look bad

I think we’re in a really important turning point in American history. What I wrote in Bowling Alone is even more relevant now. Because what we’ve seen over the last 25 years is a deepening and intensifying of that trend. We’ve become more socially isolated, and we can see it in every facet in our lives. We can see it in the surgeon general’s talk about loneliness. He’s been talking recently about the psychological state of being lonely. Social isolation leads to lots of bad things. It’s bad for your health, but it’s really bad for the country, because people who are isolated, and especially young men who are isolated, are vulnerable to the appeals of some false community. I can cite chapter and verse on this: Eager recruits to the Nazi Party in the 1930s were lonely young German men, and it’s not an accident that the people who are attracted today to white nationalist groups are lonely young white men. Loneliness. It’s bad for your health, but it’s also bad for the health of the people around you.

Bonding social capital and bridging social capital. 

Ties that link you to people like yourself are called bonding social capital. So, my ties to other elderly, male, white, Jewish professors — that’s my bonding social capital. And bridging social capital is your ties to people unlike yourself. So my ties to people of a different generation or a different gender or a different religion or a different politic or whatever, that’s my bridging social capital. I’m not saying “bridging good, bonding bad,” because if you get sick, the people who bring you chicken soup are likely to reflect your bonding social capital. But I am saying that in a diverse society like ours, we need a lot of bridging social capital. And some forms of bonding social capital are really awful. The K.K.K. is pure social capital — bonding social capital can be very useful, but it can also be extremely dangerous. So far, so good, except that bridging social capital is harder to build than bonding social capital. That’s the challenge, as I see it, of America today.

We’re disconnected because morality is dead.

Putnam’s most recent hopeful book is called The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again (2020). He and Shaylyn Romney Garrett looked at long-run trends in connectedness and trends in loneliness over the last 125 years. Here is how he sums it up:

That trend in political depolarization follows the same pattern exactly that the trends in social connectedness follow: low in the beginning of the 20th century, high in the ’60s and then plunging to where we are now. So now we have a very politically polarized country, just as we did 125 years ago.

The next dimension is inequality. America was very unequal in what was called the Gilded Age, in the 1890s and 1900s, but then that turned around, and the level of equality in America went up until the middle ’60s. In the middle ’60s, America was more equal economically than socialist Sweden! And then beginning in 1965, that turns around and we plunge and now we’re back down to where we were. We’re in a second Gilded Age.

And the third variable that we look at is harder to discuss and measure, but it’s sort of culture. To what extent do we think that we’re all in this together, or it’s every man for himself, or every man or woman? And that has exactly the same trend. What caused that? I am trying to get to the issues of causation because it turns out to be morality, according to my reading of this evidence. What stands upstream of all these other trends is morality, a sense that we’re all in this together and that we have obligations to other people. Now, suddenly, I’m no longer the social scientist, I’m a preacher. I’m trying to say, we’re not going to fix polarization, inequality, social isolation until, first of all, we start feeling we have an obligation to care for other people. And that’s not easy, so don’t ask me how to do that.

I follow Jesus, so I feel an obligation to care for other people. I won’t list the Bible verses that inspire my morality, they are too numerous.

I have also experienced the disintegration of a church due to the political polarization zeitgeist combined with frustration over inequality. It tested my morality.

But hope springs eternal. (I’ve written about that too!). In the face of aloneness I joined a new church, I was elected to my very diverse HOA Board (keep praying for me), I created a new small group to be part of, and I have a schedule of dinner parties in mind. If enough of us throw our little efforts into the basket of loaves and fishes, Jesus may change our world, too.

I am Disconnected: Why? Can I change?

A life in the Spirit, Psychological growth, Spiritual direction, , , ,

How we associate, kind of, now

How we connect to ourselves, others and God has changed, and we feel it.

The Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty is a conservative/libertarian research and education think tank. In a 2021 article for them, Joseph Sunde tried to add to the big discussion among researchers about why Americans are so disconnected. He sidestepped the obvious by not mentioning being locked down for a year by a virus that made us suspicious that relationships might be contagious. And he neglected to highlight the Trump effect that made family reunions (and churches) minefields of politics. Instead, he took the long view.

The unraveling of the U.S. social fabric has been well-documented since Robert Putnam published Bowling Alone in 2000. When I was a pastor in 2000, that book gave facts to bolster our instinct that one of the main directions the Spirit was moving us was to create community in a city where every other force was tearing it apart. Sunde reviews what studies are showing two decades later, and they are revealing. One researcher says, “Today, Americans tend to have fewer ties of association with each other and fewer organizational memberships, but they also spend less time on friendships….Many of the ties to social identity Americans do have are less conducive to social flourishing. For example, church attendance has fallen dramatically despite its social benefits, whereas entertainment-focused associations such as sports teams have risen in popularity.”

At some point, sports reached the tipping point vis a vis other associations, especially the church. We could see it tipping when soccer practices began to invade Sunday morning. Another good reason we had our worship times on Sunday nights was so parents did not have to force their children to choose. However, we still had to adjust for the national holiday called “Superbowl Sunday” to take up a Sunday night. We were definitely “second fiddle” then.

Swifties in fan outfits. Click pic for more.

Another example of “entertainment-focused associations” presented itself in Philadelphia  last month when Taylor Swift’s tour arrived. The local CBS outlet said, “Lincoln Financial Field is ‘holy ground’ for Swifties tonight as Taylor Swift will hold the first of three concerts of her Eras Tour.” Tickets were hard to get but “fans who were able to score a ticket dressed up for the occasion inspired by their favorite Taylor Swift songs.”

All that goes to validate how you feel disconnected and why. You probably do. I am a lot more disconnected that I was in 2019. A perfect storm of troubles has atomized the country and wicked people are capitalizing on our disconnection to seize power and keep us divided, as they historically do in such circumstances.  It’s an evil instinct.

So what do we do? Maybe you can fill in your own personal details as we brainstorm how to claw back some connection.

To reconnect with yourself

Now that the church is so weak in many places, we’ve really got to step up our personal spiritual disciplines. After many people lost their churches during the pandemic, they realized their love for the Lord — heart, soul, mind, and strength, was mainly about being associated with the church. That’s a good thing, of course, but it is not the only thing. Without a growing personal relationship with God, spirit to Spirit, we lose ourselves quickly when trouble comes. And it is likely to keep coming.

You probably have some moribund disciplines that could be reignited. And you probably have some you’ve always thought you should try. Look at what your heart, soul, mind and strength each need and do something right now.

Here are some ways to reconnect that might not have some to mind.

  • Sing with a karaoke version of a worship song on YouTube. Singing is very integrative. Here’s one of my son’s childhood favorites.
  • Try sex with your partner again. Stress is bad for sex but sex is good for stress. We feel better about ourselves and our connectability when we get close physically. If you don’t have a sex partner, touch people, kiss your parents, hug friends.
  • Take a pilgrimage. It could be to Portugal or King of Prussia. I just got back. Being out of the rut for a while and rubbing up against new things is a good way to see yourself as who you are now. It is also good for meeting God in surprising ways, which is the crucial element of knowing one’s true self.
From: 5 tips to spice up dining with friends

To reconnect with others

The problem with connecting with others is connecting. We have to do something, move toward someone, organize to connect. The deepest parts of us say this is just supposed to happen, like mom should feed me. But once we’re over 30 or so, we need to take responsibility for meeting our connection needs.

Apart from changing your mind, here are smaller things to try:

  • We decided to end our disconnection with the church by going to a church meeting six weeks in a row during Lent. It worked!
  • Eat with someone. You don’t have to go through a drive through all the time. Make the family gather for dinner. Go out with a couple. Plan a monthly date with a friend or group. At least eat inside where other people are once a day.
  • Do some therapy. The experience of being listened to loosens up our capacity to connect with others.

To reconnect with purpose

The last few years have left use reeling. The huge problems of our politics, climate and disconnection have reduced us to survivors. It is no wonder huge spectacles are welcome distractions from the huge forces that plague us.

The associations for which America was once famous were built by people with a common purpose. Do you think we can still act out such purpose? Here are foundational ways to do it.

  • Listen. Who are you God? Who am I? What shall I do? These basic prayers are the kind that get answered. I don’t think they are answered by books as well as they are answered by meditation. Take the time.
  • Plan. Write down what you hear and let it get shaped into a plan. “I need to stop drinking. What shall I do after rehab?” I don’t think things happen to us as much as we would like. We need to happen ourselves.
  • Create. We just watched the movie “Air.” The theme was, unsurprisingly, “Just do it.” It was a good depiction of how hard it is to give your gifts and do what is best. But that is what are meant to do. We were created to create. Take the best thought you have now that aligns with the resources your have now and do something about it every day. You’ll feel better.