Can We Become a Country of “Joiners”?
We also talk about how clubs are the place where people learn civic skills. It’s associations where we practice how to run a meeting, give a speech, plan an event, organize a protest, resolve tensions, recruit collaborators, spread ideas, build bridges, and gather and wield power.
There have been many explanations for the broad atomizing trends Putnam observed in Bowling Alone. Which do you find most convincing?
PETE DAVIS: There is not one clear answer. However, in Bowling Alone, Bob found two interesting clues. First, he found a good amount of evidence that the popularization of television was a significant factor—the timing lines up, and there are many studies hinting that watching television replaced social and civic activity in our weekly schedules. (You can imagine how this might translate to other screens we’re spending time in front of more recently!) More profoundly, Bob found really strong evidence that the civic decline was generational. The same people who were civic 50 years ago in their thirties are still civic today in their eighties—it’s their kids who are less civic than their parents, and their kids’ kids are, in turn, even less civic than they are. So something must have gone on in the generational transfer of civic habits.
However, both we and Bob think these are just hints—and that there is a much bigger story than “television and ‘kids these days’ killed civic life.” The best metaphor for what I think happened is the idea of an “unraveling,” where one trend fed another trend which fed another trend, and you wake up 50 years later and the fabric is gone.