Is America Coming Apart?

America is coming apart at the seams. People lack connection; they do not engage in constructive interaction. In the words of Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam, they bowl alone. That is, they do not join bowling leagues; they do not join teams. 

Over the past quarter century, Putnam opines in a New York Times interview, the situation has gotten worse:

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. 

Being socially isolated is bad for you and for everyone else:

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.

By Putnam’s calculus, the shift occurred in 1965. He is too kind to say so, but that locates the breakdown in social capital during the Vietnam counterculture. Whatever the reasons, losing a war turned the nation against itself. After all, as I remarked in the past, no one ever took responsibility for the debacle of Vietnam. 

And with no one taking responsibility for Vietnam, everyone blamed everyone else. Either the warmongering military failed or the student protesters constituted a fifth column that undermined the war effort.

This allows us to identify another adhesive that connects people-- shared national pride. It was bad enough that our leaders refused to accept responsibility for their failings, but it is difficult to sustain pride in a nation that fails.

Without shared national pride, I contend, people will not be able to get along with each other.

Putnam suggests that there are two forms of connection. You connect with your family and friends, on the one hand, and you also connect with people with whom you have less in common.

You connect with those near and dear because you share the same cultural habits. One cannot place too much emphasis on shared habits-- which is not the same as shared values. It’s one thing to believe in liberty and justice. It’s quite another to have good table manners. Groups adhere because of the latter more than because of the former. We certainly do not want to judge people on how fervently they believe in this or that, not the least because we never really know for a fact what anyone believes. We know for a fact whether he has good table manners. 

Sports and games are an excellent instance here, because everyone plays by the same rules and everyone accepts that one side wins or loses.

Now, I take some exception to Putnam’s liberalism here. He suggests that we can only connect by learning to care for other people. Sounds like the dread Welfare State. Like it or not, being part of a bowling team has nothing to do with caring or not.

If we look at the issue sociologically, the cause for the breakdown of social connection lies in-- you guessed it-- multiculturalism. When people are actively discouraged from adopting the dominant culture-- thinking that it is a criminal conspiracy-- they will see their neighbors as aliens, not as fellow citizens.

Putnam made precisely this point in a paper called E Pluribus Unum. In it he argues that only an encompassing monoculture will produce social connection. In a country where certain groups demonize the national culture, people will not be getting along.

It’s not enough to feel like an American. We all need to feel proud to be Americans.

Otherwise, as Putnam argued:

In the short run... immigration and ethnic diversity tend to reduce social solidarity and social capital. New evidence from the US suggests that in ethnically diverse neighborhoods residents tend to 'hunker down.' Trust (even of one's own race) is lower; altruism and community cooperation rarer; friends fewer."

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