![Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community](https://www.proleacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Bowling-Alone-Putnam.jpg)
Bowling Alone was a my college professors recommended to me during my first semester. They thought it would help me understand a whole host of other discussions I’d find over the next four years. I was getting adjusted as a young adult away at school, reading about new disciplines, meeting new friends. And to be honest, I was also finding new ways to screw up and waste time. The things that would capture my interest over the next decade and a half, and the paths I’d choose, could have led anywhere. It was 2006 – I think the entire country still felt like it could be heading in any direction. This time is all about what you want. There will be time for responsibility later. You’re immortal and invincible. Universities can cater to that instinct in a student’s mind as much as they encourage service and connection. That’s probably always going to happen, because both are impulses we need as people. We’re pulled toward the personal and the collective, the private and the political. And so people with credentials would tell me that this book was essential. It chronicles how and why America was losing its sense of “civic engagement” and “community participation.” This loss was critical to understanding where we were, and where we were headed. I’d nod, say sure, sounds interesting. But I never read it – it sat on my shelf for about a decade once I got it. Then came it COVID-19, in many ways the most isolating period of my lifetime. It took that push for me to want to learn what this book predicts for the social trajectory of this country.
Robert Putnam compares entire generations in this book. To begin, we visit the civic groups, churches, book clubs and game nights that are increasingly under-attended, or empty. When attended, they’re filled by aging Americans while young people find something else to do. Per Putnam, younger people just aren’t interested in joining these groups. As the old guard of a book club or a church group pass on, and no younger people join to replace them, the group itself winnows and eventually fades away. Putnam has traced a trend of this happening more and more for over thirty years. Since he published this book about twenty years ago, it’s really been even longer.
What kind of groups make up a community, in Putnam’s view?
- Political groups – parties (ex. County Republicans), Issue Based Organizations (ex. Mothers Against Drunk Driving)
- Civic groups – ex. labor unions, lawyers’ and doctors’ associations, the PTA in your school district, your HOA, Rotary Club, Alcoholics Anonymous
- Religious groups – ex. Bible studies, small group worship, church, temple or mosque-based volunteer groups
- Work-related groups – ex. unions, guilds
- Volunteer / Philanthropy – ex. soup kitchens, playground cleanup,
- Informal social groups – your happy hour, weekly poker game, reading group or neighborhood BBQ
The data’s here in this book. For decades, the rate of participation in most of these groups has been declining. However, some of them, like religious groups, show surprising growth in certain areas. The social capital we get from participating in these associations makes our communities better, more productive, and more trusting. It builds a sense of community to get us through hard times and make the most of the good ones. Sometimes the ties we build through these groups help us bridge the gap between our community and others around us.
Without these activities, what do we lose? Putnam argues that this is what makes up a community, in the long run. Without participation, our lives are poorer in a social as well as an absolute financial sense. We network less, we make fewer friends and discover fewer opportunities. We lose chances to understand and build empathy. Stress relief and leisure become individual pursuits, not group ones. We become balkanized, islands unto ourselves. For someone like me, an introvert with social anxiety, the costs are familiar. We don’t necessarily need our parents’ and grandparents’ organizations, but we need something.
This is a text chock-full of data that still reads as anecdotes you could give a layman. It’s got all the content and value of specialized knowledge – really, dense sociology. Yet any high-school educated, literate adult could engage with the material. That’s quite a feat and, partly, that’s due to the quality of the writing. It’s clear, focused, and grounded in the realities of the daily lives of American citizens. Everyone will find a part of themselves in this book, because it is about how we live as social beings, or fail to do it.
After describing where Americans are “bowling alone” and what this costs us, Putnam starts looking for the cause. He calls out how Americans are working harder for less. Most nuclear households (two parents plus children) now have both adults employed. He also notes that busy people give up their leisure time first. They do this before sacrificing anything essential. But that’s not the only cause. Even those with free time fall exhibit this decline in public participation and social capital. Now, our coworkers live farther away from us than before. You’re less likely to find people getting happy hour because more of us have a long commute home. The role of tech and TV is explored too. I’m sure this factor has only gotten bigger since the book’s publication. TV watching in particular was a big indicator of less civic participation. It privatizes our leisure time in a way other generations didn’t experience.
Finally, Putnam explores the generational divide between Generation X and their forbears. Their habits diverged from their parents in a lot of ways. For one thing, they were more materialistic and more introverted. They had a rougher economy in some ways, more turbulent home lives. They also, unfortunately, had Ronald Reagan. If the book was written today, Putnam might discuss millennials’ tech-savvy culture. He’d note our 9/11 formative traumas, our wars and recessions. There’d be charts showing our rising costs of living, student loan debt, and stagnant wages. He’d detail a job market where boomers were late to retire, and a culture that has been fracturing all this time.
That’s the biggest question I’d like to see answered with an update. I know there’s been a revised edition since I bought mine, but I have no idea if it updates the data. Putnam wrote the book as millennials were just starting to reach adulthood. Meanwhile, Gen Y / zoomers were basically learning to walk. I’d be interested to see if some of these trends held up. I suspect that millennials accumulated social capital in ways that Putnam did not expect. Internet and social-media based groups are almost entirely outside the timeframe discussed here. That goes doubly for the Tea Party, Occupy Movement, Trumpism, Black Lives Matter and other social movements of the last twenty years. I may have to read his later works and revisions to get more context, or find other authors inspired by him.
There’s much more to discuss here, and I hope to bring some of it to light in future articles. I want to put this data in conversation with the other books I’m reading, as well as my own experiences. It’s out of date, and even what isn’t out of date could benefit from incorporating the last twenty years. Still, this book still gripped me and invited me to examine our changing social landscape. I don’t think you can absorb fully all at once, or in isolation. When you read it, you’re entering into a more than twenty-year old conversation about where we’re going as an increasingly fractured, insular and terminally online society. You’re invited to wonder whether we need to change course to get some of that community back in MeatSpace.
Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community
An obsessively researched and shockingly readable study of how American community life fractured (and why we felt isolated even before social media).
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