America Drawn Inward: Assessing Bowling Alone at 20

by Ian Marcus Corbin

Robert Putnam’s classic Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community turned 20 this year. There are few modern academic books whose central premise has so effectively burned itself into America’s self understanding. Surveying the state of American society from 1970 - 2000, the Harvard political scientist famously reported that Americans hadn’t stopped bowling, but they no longer bowled in leagues - they bowled alone. This small data point served as a vivid synecdoche for what Putnam saw as a national crisis: a drastic thinning out of that thick web of local institutions, associations and practices that draw us out of our private lives and into public sociality. Summing up his central finding, Putnam writes, 

"During the first two-thirds of the century, Americans took a more and more active role in the social and political life of their communities - in churches and union halls, in bowling alleys and clubrooms, around committee tables and card tables and dinner tables ... then, mysteriously and more or less simultaneously, we began to do all those things less often.” 

Bowling Alone is long, and densely packed with data - I won’t attempt to summarize all its findings here. Instead, I’d like to step back and look at the major trends the book captured, and how they’ve morphed over the past twenty years. If Putnam didn’t see everything with perfect clarity, some of the deep forces he caught a glimpse of have only become stronger and more inescapable in the past two decades. 

Bowling Alone’s central story is one of Americans drawing inward, and away from each other. This Putnam measures in hundreds of ways. He finds, for instance, that religious participation has declined, with the portion of Americans who said they ascribed to "no religion" rising from 2% to 11% between 1967 and 1990. Voting, another key measure of public engagement for Putnam, suffered even more: in 1960, 62.8% of the voting-age population turned out to vote for president, while in 1996, only 48.9% did so. (This year’s spike appears to have been motivated more by a highly polarizing candidate than civic revival). He also found that our personal sociality had declined - in the 1970s, the average American entertained friends at home fifteen times a year. That number had fallen to eight times per year by the time Putnam published his book. 

Perhaps most strikingly, Americans’ self-reported trust in one another plummeted in the second half of the twentieth century. According to Bowling Alone, from 1952 to 1998, the number of Americans who thought their fellow citizens led good and honest lives fell from 50% to less than 30%. When asked whether “most people can be trusted" 55% of Americans surveyed in 1960 thought they could. When researchers asked the same question in the 80’s and 90’s, the number fell to around 35%. It is unclear which way the causality runs, but there is a strong correlation between expressions of general mistrust, and withdrawal from public life. As Putnam puts it, “the civically disengaged feel themselves to be surrounded by miscreants.” All of this adds up to a decline in “social capital” which Putnam defines as "connections among individuals – social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them." This capital is, he argues, a prime ingredient for the building and maintaining of democracy, and it is in increasingly short supply. 

Putnam is generally cautious and nuanced when adducing the causal forces behind these trends - the phenomena he’s tracking are incredibly complex, and drawing a single single causal narrative out of countless different data piles is an excessively difficult, and often impossible task. When it is time to name culprits, Putnam points to a number of probable suspects - suburban sprawl, geographic mobility, financial pressures, the rise of two-income households, etc. He singles out two factors in particular as likely leaders. The largest is the natural passing of the “Greatest Generation” that fought World War II, and was formed by that experience of collective struggle into an “unusually civic” generation. The generations that have followed them have simply not sustained this heightened level of engagement. This suggests that the declines of the last 70 years may be in large part a return to the mean, rather than a precipitous fall from some Edenic norm. 

The other major factor, though, is distinctly new, modern and sui generis - the invention and dizzyingly rapid spread of television, which Putnam estimates is responsible for 25% of the decline in civic participation. It is no coincidence, he suggests, that “the epidemic of civic disengagement began little more than a decade after the widespread availability of television.” There are many ways of passing one’s free time that bear no correlation with withdrawal from public social life, but television is not one of them. It is, Putnam argues, “the only leisure activity that seems to inhibit participation in other leisure activities.” Classical music listeners are not prone to withdrawal. What is so special about television? 

Few people reading this will have any memory of a pre-televisual age, so it’s easy to forget what a leap forward television was in home technology and entertainment. Television takes your average human - from a species that evolved to its current form while navigating hills and beaches, hunting expeditions, farming, sex and childrearing - and pumps in an astonishing, carefully composed stream of bright, undemanding, frenetic stimulation. It occupies our inner lives so that we don’t have to be our difficult, boring, ambiguous selves, or be in our difficult, boring, ambiguous places, surrounded by difficult, boring, ambiguous people.  

There is good TV, of course, some that instructs us or cultivates our moral imaginations, and there is a time for dumb, soothing entertainment, but for a lot of people, at a lot of times, a television functions as a glowing portal of escape, from local reality out into some fantastical other reality. As Putnam puts us, TV draws us away from “communities of place.” It’s not especially pleasant to watch TV - according to Putnam, experiments show that for the average viewer, TV is “about as enjoyable as housework and cooking, ranking well below all other leisure activities and indeed below work itself”, but it is easy. The dull, frictionlessness stimulation is the hook.

Ian Marcus Corbin is a researcher and writer from the North Shore of Boston, currently serving as Co-Director of the Human Network Initiative at Brigham and Women’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School. Prior to this, he studied politics, religion and philosophy at Gordon College, Oxford University, Yale University and Boston College, with an eye to the ways that deep human values affect the formation and evolution of human communities. He has taught at a number of colleges in the Boston area, and published widely in venues such as the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal. He is currently writing a book about friendship in America and is a non-resident senior fellow at Capita.

“Television takes your average human - from a species that evolved to its current form while navigating hills and beaches, hunting expeditions, farming, sex and childrearing - and pumps in an astonishing, carefully composed stream of bright, undemanding, frenetic stimulation. It occupies our inner lives so that we don’t have to be our difficult, boring, ambiguous selves, or be in our difficult, boring, ambiguous places, surrounded by difficult, boring, ambiguous people.  ”

Other friction-reducing technologies seem, to Putnam, to have had a more benign effect on social life in America, notably the telephone. Some early observers predicted that the rise of the telephone would disembed us from physical neighborhoods, allowing us to live instead in “psychological neighborhoods” - the people we interact with day to day might live anywhere, so this particular place is less important for us than it otherwise would be. Putnam quotes an early observer of the telephone, who suggests that the telephonic age would be “an epoch of neighborship without propinquity.” Putnam doesn’t exactly deny the reality of psychological neighborhoods, but he does point out that actually, many of our calls are placed to people who live relatively nearby, and most are made to people we know well. In short, while the phone might substitute for some in-person get togethers, it also serves to keep us connected to people we know and love. 

The internet, too, Putnam sees as a mixed bag in terms of interpersonal connection and civic involvement, perhaps even a wash. It depends, he sensibly remarks, on how you use it. In both the original 2000 text and an afterword pinned to the 20th anniversary edition, Putnam points out that many of us use digital life to augment our connections with real, flesh and blood friends. These digital-cum-real life relationships are what Putnam refers to as “alloys.” Putnam is well aware that digital interactions lack some things that flesh and blood interactions offer; when I interact with another human, in person, we are both constantly reading a myriad of sensory cues, our brains are processing far more information than the literal content of the words exchanged. And this makes a massive difference in our ability to connect. As Putnam puts it, “the richer the medium of communication, the more sociable, personal, trusting and friendly the encounter.” Also, we might add, the more difficult and risky the encounter. 

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The publication of Bowling Alone made Robert Putnam an academic celebrity, called upon by news anchors and presidents to explain to us just how badly things had gone wrong in America, and how we might put them right. The book is still regularly cited by journalists and politicians bemoaning the fraying of our social fabric. Putnam clearly struck a nerve, but it wasn’t a new one. As far back as 1983, Jane E. Brody, health editor at the New York Times, could write the following: 

“Loneliness is now a national epidemic, according to many sociologists and psychologists, who point to such contributing causes as our highly technological society where many workers interact more with machines than with other people; to our mobility, with the average American moving 14 times during a lifetime; to the impersonality of large urban settings where many people don't even know their immediate neighbors; to the prevalence of divorce, which now ends half of American marriages.” 

The idea of a loneliness epidemic resonates, and has for a while. Most of us feel it intuitively to be true - something is out of whack in the ways that Americans relate to each other, or don’t. We are not connected in the way that we should be, that we would like to be. Vivek Murthy, Barack Obama’s Surgeon General (and as of this writing, Joe Biden’s nominee for the same post), declared loneliness a public health crisis. News reports abound, touting the latest study showing that Americans are more isolated and lonelier than ever before. Bowling Alone took this long-running sense of crisis, this sense of the world coming apart thanks to our own social and technological machinations, and swathed it in a vast accumulation of statistics. This lent our fears and longings a sense of undeniable legitimacy. 

Not everyone was equally moved, however. Some of Putnam’s colleagues, while respecting Putnam’s general skill and care as a social scientist, found his accumulated conclusions overblown. One colleague in particular, UC-Berkeley's Claude Fischer, took a fresh look at the surveys, and reached a different conclusion than Putnam. In his 2010 book Still Connected: Family and Friends in America Since 1970, Fischer found that the numbers in many cases were difficult to clearly interpret, but using the most careful methods, we should conclude that Americans were not more isolated at the end of the 20th century than they had been in the 1970’s, at least not much more, at least not in absolute terms. There had been changes, to be sure, but if Americans were entertaining less in their homes, say, they were meeting more in restaurants. As Fischer puts it, 

“Over the long run—say, the last couple of centuries—Americans' ties to kin have diminished, in number at least, if for no other reason than that families have shrunk in size. In addition, nonkin relationships have probably displaced weaker kinship and local ties—people may now turn to friends instead of cousins, to coworkers instead of neighbors.”

This is emblematic of Fischer’s findings - things have changed, to be sure. Our patterns of sociality have shifted in the past half century, but those shifts do not add up to a catastrophic disintegration of community in America, but rather a normal, relatively stable evolution, in tandem with other large shifts. Things may or may not be bad in America, but they don’t appear to be much worse than they were in 1970, when Putnam thinks the big collapse began. 

This is good news, if puzzling. It makes a mystery of Americans’ readiness to believe that things are, in fact, falling apart, that we know each other far too little, that we find ourselves too much alone among our countrymen. In his review of Still Connected, the historian Michael Zuckerman zeroes in on this mystery: 

As Fischer's own statistics show, just 2% of Americans are actually alone - without close friends - but ten to fifteen times as many tell pollsters that loneliness is a personal problem . . . Fischer is at a loss to account for the prevalence of belief that social relations are fraying when the survey data suggests that they are not. 

He is also impotent to explain the dramatic deterioration of trust over the past forty years. In the 1960s, a majority of Americans said that "most people can be trusted." In the twenty-first century, only a third of us still say we feel that way. Fischer reports this transformation but dismisses it as peripheral to his project since it concerns strangers rather than family and friends. But this is too glib. People's feelings about "most people" are inescapably conditioned by their intimate relations. Their sense of public life cannot be disengaged so casually from their evaluation of their private experience. 

This all seems right to me. We can’t afford to look away from this pervasive public sentiment, this intuitive feel we have of each other, and ourselves. The fact that these realities don’t show up when we apply our best social scientific instruments might mean that those instruments need to be augmented with others. 

We might start by casting a more searching eye on what the best social science can tell us. There is, for instance, a lot that Putnam and Fischer agree on. In both readings of the data, our social lives have become less localized. That is, we may or may not have a similar number of close contacts, but everyone agrees that they are more likely to live outside of our homes and neighborhoods. Our interactions with them are more likely to take place via electronic media like phone calls, texting, social media posts, etc. This is far better than having no friends, to be clear, but the increasingly curated, smoothed-over character of our sociality cannot come without implications.

To begin with, consider the increasing ability to choose our social contacts, to see and interact only with people whom we would ideally like to see and interact with. The lottery of who happens to share our last name, or some of our DNA, or inhabit a home on our street has less and less impact on our social lives. We have less and less need to wrestle our way to reconciliation with a person with whom we are not naturally simpatico, who comes from a different world and sees reality through a different lens. Our networks may be numerically robust or not, but they are likely joined by filaments of similarity and agreement. The friction of sharing space and projects with radically different people is gradually being worked out of our experience. 

This de-frictioning extends also into our chosen relationships. Sitting face to face with another human is an immense thing - their personality shows itself in words, yes, but also postures and glances and a thousand other small things. Your personality, too, is oozing out of your pores, and so meeting in person is a large, rich and dangerous activity. Boundaries are harder to maintain, disagreements and dislikes harder to hide. To have a friendly conversation in person is a much greater achievement than to have it via telephone, email or text. Again, our social lives are becoming smoother and easier for us, and of course we welcome this development. 

But perhaps we shouldn’t. It turns out that friendship is something we can be more or less good at, and that this skill level is susceptible to change. Friendship requires virtues like courage and generosity and patience and self-discipline. You need to be willing and able to hang in there, to know when to keep probing and when to leave well enough alone. You need to learn how to love someone in the way they need to be loved, not the way you need to. You need to develop the confidence that beneath our natural self defenses and stupidities, there is a good and well-intentioned person who shares a lot with you, and who wants to love and be loved. You need to endure some very difficult interactions to build up this stamina.  As Aristotle says, this kind of virtue is built up over time, through practice. If you want to become courageous, you need to begin acting courageously. It will hurt at first, but the more you do it, the less it hurts, and you will know when you have become truly brave, because courageous actions will come to feel good. 

In other words, the friction of being with people is a sign that you need to stay with people, until you become better at it. We have too much ability now to stay “connected” with minimal friction. It’s certainly more comfortable, but it’s a bad gymnasium for the social virtues. It lowers the quality of our connections, and also our confidence in the general decency and trustworthiness of our fellow humans. When those who feel distant at first contact are allowed to stay distant, they become, effectively, alien to us. There’s nothing like the habit of overcoming initial social discomfort to show us that people in general are deep down like us. The gradual loss of this experience is reflected in the differential between, as Zuckerman says, our number of connections, and our reported feelings of loneliness and mistrust. In our defrictionalized society, there is a massive rift between us and our chosen few close ones, and the rest of humanity. 

There is one last level where we should consider re-frictioning our lives in 2021. Aristotle, in his famous discussion of friendship, writes that we must be friends with ourselves before we can be true friends with others. The rise of television and cell phones and social media is not just significant in its impact on our interpersonal relationships, it has also transformed our intrapersonal relationships. That is, we all need time and solitude to set our inner life in order, to understand what we have done and what we intend to do, to choose between our warring desires, to figure out what truly matters to us, what we truly love. But this, like other kinds of friend-making, is hard. It hurts. Technologies like television and social media provide a smooth and ready out from this hard work. A moment spent waiting for the bus is no longer an opportunity to assess and reflect, or even to absorb the emotional fallout of our actions and experiences. It becomes a terrifying void that must be filled with some sort of smooth stimulation. This is, again, easy, and it is, again, unhealthy. Walking into a lunch with a friend, having spent the previous eight hours in a state of constant stimulation and distraction is much different than walking into that same lunch having spent just five minutes truly dwelling with my difficult, ambiguous self. In the former case, I will be far more able to present him with a person who is easy to know and love. 

“We all need time and solitude to set our inner life in order, to understand what we have done and what we intend to do, to choose between our warring desires, to figure out what truly matters to us, what we truly love.”

Those of us who would like to see an increase in the virtues of friendship in 2021 have our work cut out for us, on various fronts. Much of it can be tackled now, to some degree or another, but some of it awaits the departure of our global pandemic, which has cut us off, physically, from some of the frictioned interactions we so badly need. Perhaps we can take this as a societal reset, and once Covid releases us back to something like our native state, we can take it as our task to build the daily habit of interacting with different kinds of people, in person, as much as possible. 

This will include, very importantly, people wearing campaign gear from politicians we loathe, people beat up and rejected by the systems we inhabit, people with demographics different than our own, people who strike us as dead dull and stupid, or even vicious and malevolent. It will hurt a lot at first. And then it will still hurt for awhile, and then it will hurt less, and less, and then it will feel like a muscle that has grown to strength, and it will be a pleasure to use it. This is our task - or one of them at least - as we look past the implosion-year of 2020, and try to build something better for ourselves and our communities in 2021.

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Catch Ian in a conversation “at” the American Enterprise Institute this Wednesday, December 16 at 11 am ET. Hosted by AEI’s Timothy P. Carney they’ll discuss Capita's essay How Money Culture Hurts the American Family, and how we can more incisively identify the aspects of American life that need reform to strengthen social cohesion and support the most vulnerable in our society.