Let’s go bowling
I think I may not have done a great job at the last book club meeting explaining where I heard about Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community and why I chose it for our next read. I first heard about the book around a year ago on a listerv that I am on and just haven’t gotten around to reading it. The listserv discusses urban planning issues and promotes something known as “New Urbanism”. The book came up because apparently the author’s data indicts suburban sprawl as one of the factors that hinders “social capital” from developing.
You often hear people lament how society seems so disconnected. We seem angrier. Our insane work schedules leave little time for anything beyond dinner, catching up with the kids or spouse, and maybe watching some men on CNN or FOX yell at each other. Political and cultural groups don’t just disagree with their “opponents’” worldviews. They frequently bash others for their beliefs in a very personal way. Otherwise, we’re finding our “community” in internet chat rooms with strangers who may share a similar interest, but their investment in your life is usually very limited. What happened to bridge clubs, bowling leagues, church groups, poker night, book clubs, a random, unexpected visit from a friend, etc.? Of course, there are many new forms of social capital that have replaced some of these things, and are possibly of equal value. Ralph Nader recently packed 10,000 people in a Portland arena –extolling the virtues of democracy made stronger by civic engagement.
But I really feel that despite some positive changes, there is a reason that “we tell pollsters that we wish we lived in a more civil, more trustworthy, more collectively caring community.” Putnam’s book, I suspect, will provide hard data to demonstrate the decline of social capital and civic engagment, and also explain the negative consequences of this phenomenon.
This book was the extension of an essay Putnam wrote 5 years ago that was both lauded and attacked. And while his book, with the same name, is widely regarded as a groundbreaking success, its not without its detractors. One Amazon reader-reviewer writes:
Economic theory teaches that individuals seek to maximize the expected utility they can derive from their environment. “Social organization” is merely a composite view of individuals interacting in ways that enhance their separate private utilities. Coercing individuals to live and interact differently through the compulsions of law, as Putnam proposes, cannot increase aggregate social welfare; doing so would merely move most individuals away from their revealed optima while increasing the far-reaching disutility that is an unavoidable cost of coercive public policy. Putnam’s proposals ultimately rest on the weakest and most potentially dangerous implication of the Standard Social Science Model that an omnipotent state pursuing normative policy ends can and indeed ought to treat individuals like sheep.
links
interview with the author
Amazon reviews
January 2nd, 2001
