BOWLING ALONE

by Robert D. Putnam

  These patterns hint that being raised after World War II was a quite different experience from being raised before that watershed. It is as though the post-war generations were exposed to some anticivic X-ray that permanently and increasingly rendered them less likely to connect with the community. Whatever that force might have been, it—rather than anything that happened during the 1970s and 1980s—accounts for most of the civic disengagement that lies at the core of our mystery. But why did it take so long for the effects of that mysterious X-ray to become manifest? If the roots of civic disengagement can be traced to the 1940s and 1950s, why did the effects not become conspicuous in PTA meetings and Masonic lodges, in the Red Cross and the bar association, and in polling places and church pews and bowling alleys across the land until the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s?

  The visible effects of generational disengagement were delayed several decades by two important factors. First, the postwar boom in college enrollments gave America a timely civic booster shot that forestalled a cataclysmic decline in political and social involvement that might otherwise have occurred.13 More important, the effects of generational developments lag several decades after their onset, because it takes that long for a given generation to become numerically dominant in the adult population. The long civic generation (born between 1910 and 1940) did not reach its zenith until 1960, when it comprised two-thirds of those who chose between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon. Not coincidentally, many indexes of social capital that we examined in section II peaked at high noon of the long civic generation’s day in the sun.

  Only after the mid-1960s did significant numbers of the “postcivic” generation reach adulthood, diluting and then supplanting the civic engagement of older cohorts. By the time that Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992, the long civic generation’s share in the electorate had been cut precisely in half compared to 1960. Conversely, in the last quarter of the twentieth century, boomers and X’ers (that is, Americans born after 1945) tripled from one out of every four adults to three out of four. This generational math (coupled with the civic differences among the successive generations) is the single most important explanation for the collapse of civic engagement over the last several decades.

  In short, the decades that have seen a national deterioration in social capital are the very decades during which the numerical dominance of an exceptionally civic generation was replaced by the dominion of “postcivic” cohorts. Although the long civic generation has enjoyed unprecedented life expectancy, allowing its members to contribute more than their share to American social capital in recent decades, they are now passing from the scene. Even the youngest members of that generation reached retirement as the century ended. Thus a generational analysis leads almost inevitably to the conclusion that the national slump in civic engagement is likely to continue.

  More than a quarter century ago, just as the first signs of disengagement were beginning to appear in American politics, political scientist Ithiel de Sola Pool observed that the central issue would be—it was then too soon to judge, as he rightly noted—whether the development represented a temporary change in the weather or a more enduring change in the climate.14 It now appears that he had spotted the initial signs of a climatic shift. Moreover, just as the erosion of the ozone layer was not proven scientifically until many years after the proliferation of the chlorofluorocarbons that caused it, so too the erosion of America’s social capital became visible only several decades after the underlying process had begun. Like Minerva’s owl that flies at dusk, we come to appreciate how important the long civic generation has been to American community life just as its members are retiring. And reversing the effects of their departure will be as difficult as trying to heat a tubful of bathwater that has become cold: a lot of really hot water will have to be added to raise the average temperature. Unless America experiences a dramatic upward boost in civic engagement in the next few years, Americans in the twenty-first century will join, trust, vote, and give even less than we did at the end of the twentieth.

  One important consequence is the graying of civic America. Older people have almost always voted somewhat more than younger people, but this generation gap in electoral turnout widened significantly from the 1960s to the 1990s. In fact, civic life in this country has been graying for nearly forty years, partly because seniors remain vigorous longer nowadays, but mainly because younger and middle-aged groups have been dropping out (or not joining in the first place), compared with people that same age a few decades earlier. In the early 1970s people sixty and over provided 12 percent of the officers and committee members of local organizations, 20 percent of all community volunteers, and 24 percent of the attendance at club meetings. By the mid-1990s these figures had risen to 20 percent, 35 percent, and 38 percent, respectively. Even though the seniors’ share in the adult population barely budged during these two decades, their contribution to community life almost doubled.15

  This overrepresentation of the older generation in civic life reflects the free choice of different cohorts about how to spend their time. Indeed, the older generation is upholding more than its share of the civic burden. At the same time, its voice on controversial issues is amplified by its activism. When the interests of the older generation differ from those of younger people—on local taxes to support schools, for example—it is reasonable to suspect that the views of the older generation have greater weight than they had a few decades ago. In the mid-1970s people forty-five and over accounted for one-third of the participants in local meetings about town and school affairs and the same fraction of all letters to the editor, but twenty years later their share in both public meetings and editorial pages had risen to one-half.16 One does not have to assume that this older civic generation is unusually selfish—the opposite is probably true—to be concerned about the self-disenfranchisement of younger groups.

  IF THE LONG CIVIC GENERATION is the first notable actor in our civic morality play, the second is the baby boom generation, born between 1946 and 1964. As the new century opens, the oldest members of this massive cohort are in their mid-fifties, the youngest in their mid-thirties. Boomers constitute more than one-third of the adult population, as they have for the last two decades and as they will for nearly another two decades. They are the best-educated generation in American history. Boomers experienced unprecedented affluence and community vitality in their youth, but as adults they have endured hard times, though less so than their parents did during the Great Depression.17

  The boomers were the first generation to be exposed to television throughout their lives, and they are much more likely than their elders to turn on the TV without knowing what they are going to watch and to leave it on when they are not watching. Political scientist Paul Light reports that

  by the time the average baby boomer reached age 16, he or she had watched from 12,000 to 15,000 hours of TV, or the equivalent of 24 hours a day for 15 to 20 solid months…. There can be little doubt that television reduced the baby boom’s contact with its peers and parents, and that the generation made its first contacts with the real world through the medium.18

  In political terms, this generation was indelibly marked by the events of the sixties—the civil rights movement (which happened while most of them were still in elementary school), the Kennedy and King assassinations, the trauma of Vietnam, and Watergate. Perhaps with reason—they surely think so—they are distrusting of institutions, alienated from politics, and (despite their campus flings of the sixties and seventies) distinctively less involved in civic life—even less so their own children, some of whom have begun (as we saw in chapter 7 and will see again later in this chapter) a boomlet in volunteering. Despite their unusual education, boomers are less knowledgeable about politics than their parents were at a comparable age. As Michael Delli Carpini, the political biographer of the sixties generation, observes, “They are less likely to be interested in politics, less likely to follow politics with any regularity, less likely to express a political o
pinion, and less likely to have accurate information relevant to politics.”19 They vote less, campaign less, attend political meetings less, contribute less, and in general avoid their civic duties more than other generations.20 Delli Carpini concludes,

  It is the rejection of mainstream politics rather than the development of an alternative political direction that most clearly distinguishes the sixties generation from preceding cohorts…. In short, it is a generation which, relative to earlier generations, rejects the norms and institutions that are central to the political system of which they are a part. What distinguishes this generation most is what it does not like or does not do, and not what it likes or does.21

  Politics is, however, not the only aspect of community life from which the boomers disengaged. Boomers were slow to marry and quick to divorce. Both marriage and parenthood became choices, not obligations. Although 96 percent of boomers were raised in a religious tradition, 58 percent abandoned that tradition, and only about one in three of the apostates have returned. In their work life they are less comfortable in bureaucracies, less loyal to a particular firm, more insistent on autonomy. Perhaps because of the very uniformity of the postwar society into which they were born—two-parent, two-child families, chrome-laden cars and prefab homes, packed classrooms and I Love Lucy— they put great emphasis on individualism and tolerance for diversity and rejected traditional social roles. One cost of the crowded schools the boomers attended was a reduced opportunity for social learning, for research shows that participation in extracurricular activities is substantially diminished in larger schools. In part because of competitive pressures inherent in their large cohort, boomers have had to endure diminished expectations and economic frustrations.22

  Throughout their lives they have expressed more libertarian attitudes than their elders and less respect for authority, religion, and patriotism. Comparisons of the high school graduating classes of 1967 and 1973 make clear that even in high school late boomers were less trusting, less participatory, more cynical about authorities, more self-centered, and more materialistic, even by comparison to early boomers. Boomers in general are highly individualistic, more comfortable on their own than on a team, more comfortable with values than with rules. They are less moralistic about drug use, for example, than their parents—more inclined to blame drug problems on society than on the individual and less likely to accept drug testing in the workplace. To their credit, the boomers have been from the beginning an unusually tolerant generation—more open-minded toward racial, sexual, and political minorities, less inclined to impose their own morality on others.23 We shall examine this admirable facet of their political outlook in more detail in chapter 22.

  On any given issue, the tolerant, cynical, “laid-back” boomers may have a point, but as a syndrome their attitudes have had a high social cost. Survey analyst Cheryl Russell perceptively characterizes boomers as “free agents.”24 The evidence on social capital and civic engagement that we have reviewed in earlier chapters makes clear that this free agency has reduced the vitality of American communities—less volunteering, less philanthropy, less trust, less shared responsibility for community life.

  Generational nomenclature after the boomers becomes more controversial. At some risk of unintentional insult to its members, I here follow the custom of referring to those born between 1965 and 1980 as the “X Generation.” Although X’ers have often been blamed by their elders (especially the boomers) for the troubles of contemporary American society—especially the emphasis on materialism and individualism—the evidence that I have already presented makes clear that this indictment is misplaced. The erosion of American social capital began before any X’er was born, so the X’ers cannot reasonably be blamed for these adverse trends. That said, the X Generation reflects in many respects a continuation of the generational course begun just after World War II.

  Closely examined, table 3 clearly shows that almost all forms of civic engagement—from union membership to church attendance to petition signing to public meeting attendance—continued to plummet among young people who were in their twenties in the nineties—that is, Gen X’ers. In many respects this generation accelerated the tendencies to individualism found among boomers, for X’ers are the second consecutive generation of free agents. X’ers have an extremely personal and individualistic view of politics. They came of age in an era that celebrated personal goods and private initiative over shared public concerns. Unlike boomers, who were once engaged, X’ers have never made the connection to politics, so they emphasize the personal and private over the public and collective. Moreover, they are visually oriented, perpetual surfers, multitaskers, interactive media specialists. In both personal and national terms, this generation is shaped by uncertainty (especially given the slow growth, inflation-prone 1970s and 1980s), insecurity (for these are the children of the divorce explosion), and an absence of collective success stories—no victorious D-Day and triumph over Hitler, no exhilarating, liberating marches on Washington and triumph over racism and war, indeed hardly any “great collective events” at all. For understandable reasons, this cohort is very inwardly focused.

  Gen X’ers are also more materialist than their predecessors were at this age, although perhaps no more materialist than the boomers themselves have become in middle age. One useful window onto the changing values of American youth over the last three decades is provided by the annual UCLA survey of college freshmen. (See figure 72 for an overview of key trends.) In the late 1960s and early 1970s, as the boomers entered college, 45–50 percent of them rated keeping up-to-date with politics and helping clean up the environment as very important personal objectives, compared with roughly 40 percent of them who rated “being very well off financially” that high. By 1998, as the last of the X’ers entered college, three decades of growing materialism had reduced ratings for politics and the environment to 26 percent and 19 percent, respectively, while financial well-being had shot up to a rating of 75 percent. An independent annual nationwide survey of high school seniors by the University of Michigan confirms this trend toward growing materialism, as the fraction of students who rated “having lots of money” as quite important burgeoned from 46 percent in 1976 to 70 percent in 1990, before drifting back to 60–65 percent in the mid-1990s.25

  These values are consistent with the self-reported behavior of X’ers. According to the UCLA surveys, political discussions among high school students were only half as common in the late 1990s as in the late 1960s. Participation in student elections plummeted even faster than participation by their parents in national elections, falling from roughly 75 percent in the late 1960s to 20 percent in the late 1990s. When high school seniors were given a long list of potential recipients of charitable donations, from the United Way to citizens’ lobbies to the cancer society, the proportion who said that they would “definitely” make such contribution to at least one such organization (or already had) fell by about a quarter between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s.26 Most portentous of all, X’ers are much less likely to trust other people than people their age were twenty years ago: the fraction of high school seniors who agreed

  Figure 72: Greed Trumps Community Among College Freshmen, 1966–1998

  that “most people can be trusted” was sliced exactly in half between the late boomers of 1976 (of whom 46 percent were trusting) and the late X’ers of 1995 (of whom only 23 percent were trusting).27

  These distinctions persisted when the X’ers moved into adulthood. Only 54 percent of X’er adults feel guilty when they don’t vote, as compared with over 70 percent for older generations, and X’ers are in fact much less likely to vote, particularly in local elections. Compared with older generations—even when those older generations were the same age as the X’ers are now—they are less interested in politics, less informed about current events (except for scandal, personality, and sports), less likely to attend a public meeting, less likely to contact public officials, less likely to attend church, less likely to work
with others on some community project, and less likely to contribute financially to a church or charity or political cause. X’ers are not especially cynical about politics or critical of political leaders—those are traits they share with their elders—but X’ers are less inclined to get involved themselves.28 Whether these changes are “the fault” of the students themselves or of their parents, teachers, and the broader society is quite another matter—I am inclined to blame the latter, not the former—but the facts appear clear. Collective action—and especially politics—is even more foreign to the X’ers than to the boomers.

  Evidence of the distinctive challenges that have faced recent cohorts comes from a quite unexpected source: public health epidemiologists using a variety of different methodologies have confirmed a long-term trend toward increasing depression and suicide that is generationally based. Depression has struck earlier and much more pervasively in each successive generation, beginning with the cohorts born after 1940. For example, one study reported that “of those Americans born before 1955, only 1 percent had suffered a major depression by age 75; of those born after 1955, 6 percent had become depressed by age 24.”29 Psychologist Martin Seligman concludes that “the rate of depression over the last two generations has increased roughly tenfold.”30

  Unfortunately, this same generational trend also appeared as a veritable epidemic of suicide among American youth in the last half of the twentieth century. Between 1950 and 1995 the suicide rate among adolescents aged fif-teen to nineteen more than quadrupled, while the rate among young adults aged twenty to twenty-four, beginning at a higher level, nearly tripled. Most, though not all, of this increase was concentrated among young men, although young women attempt suicide more frequently. Was this rise in youthful suicide simply part of a general rise in suicide among Americans in our harried age? Quite the contrary, as figure 73 shows, this explosive growth in youthful suicide coincided with an equally remarkable decline in suicide among older groups.31