Figure 89: Tax Evasion Is Low Where Social Capital Is High
Conversely, in a community that lacks bonds of reciprocity among its inhabitants, I won’t feel bound to pay taxes voluntarily, because I believe that most people cheat, and I will see the tax system as yet another broken government program, instituted by “them,” not “us.”
In this context it is not surprising that one of the best predictors of cooperation with the decennial census is one’s level of civic participation. Even more striking is the finding that communities that rank high on measures of social capital, such as turnout and social trust, provide significantly higher contributions to public broadcasting, even when we control for all the other factors that are said to affect audience preferences and expenditures—education, affluence, race, tax deductibility, and public spending.55 Public broadcasting is a classic example of a public good—I obtain the benefit whether or not I pay, and my contribution in itself is unlikely to keep the station on the air. Why should any rational, self-interested listener, even one addicted to Jim Lehrer, send off a check to the local station? The answer appears to be that, at least in communities that are rich in social capital, civic norms sustain an expanded sense of “self-interest” and a firmer confidence in reciprocity. Thus if our stocks of social capital diminish, more and more of us will be tempted to “free-ride,” not merely by ignoring the appeals to “viewers like you,” but by neglecting the myriad civic duties that allow our democracy to work.
Similarly, research has found that military units are more effective when bonds of solidarity and trust are high, and that communities with strong social networks and grassroots associations are better at confronting unexpected crises than communities that lack such civic resources.56 In all these instances our collective interest requires actions that violate our immediate self-interest and that assume our neighbors will act collectively, too. Modern society is replete with opportunities for free-riding and opportunism. Democracy does not require that citizens be selfless saints, but in many modest ways it does assume that most of us much of the time will resist the temptation to cheat. Social capital, the evidence increasingly suggests, strengthens our better, more expansive selves. The performance of our democratic institutions depends in measurable ways upon social capital.
CHAPTER 22
The Dark Side of Social Capital
THE DOLTISH, NARROW-MINDED, materialistic, snobbish, glad-handing, bigoted, middle-class joiner is a stock figure in American letters. The 1998 movie Pleasantville lampooned the 1950s as provincial, misogynist, racist, protofascist, and (worst of all) boring, compared with the enlightened, liberated, Technicolor 1990s. The satirical theme was hardly original. As early as 1865 Henry David Thoreau wrote contemptuously in the Atlantic Monthly that “the American has dwindled into an Odd Fellow, one who may be known by the development of his organ of gregariousness and his manifest lack of intellect.”1
Sinclair Lewis, the first American Nobel laureate for literature, added “babbittry” to our language with his 1922 novel about George F. Babbitt, realtor, 100 percent booster of Zenith, Ohio, and of the Republican Party, who wore on his watch chain
a large, yellowish elk’s-tooth—proclamation of his membership in the Brotherly and Protective Order of Elks, and on the lapel of his well-cut, well-made, undistinguished grey suit stuck his Boosters’ Club button. With the conciseness of great art the button displayed two words: “Boosters-Pep!” It made Babbitt feel loyal and important. It associated him with Good Fellows, with men who were nice and human and important in business circles. It was his V.C., his Legion of Honor ribbon, his Phi Beta Kappa key.
His clubs and associations were food comfortable to his spirit. Of a decent man in Zenith it was required that he should belong to one, preferably two or three, of the innumerous “lodges” and prosperity-boosting lunch-clubs; to the Rotarians, the Kiwanis, or the Boosters; to the Oddfellows, Moose, Masons, Red Men, Woodmen, Owls, Eagles, Maccabees, Knights of Pythias, Knights of Columbus, and other secret orders characterized by a high degree of heartiness, sound morals, and reverence for the Constitution. There were four reasons for joining these orders: It was the thing to do. It was good for business, since lodge-brothers frequently became customers. It gave to Americans unable to become Geheimräte or Commendatori such unctuous honorifics as High Worthy Recording Scribe and Grand Hoogow to add to the commonplace distinctions of Colonel, Judge, and Professor. And it permitted the swaddled American husband to stay away from home for one evening a week. The lodge was his piazza, his pavement café. He could shoot pool and talk man-talk and be obscene and valiant. Babbitt was what he called a “joiner” for all these reasons.2
Figures like George Babbitt give social capital a bad name. They force us to examine carefully what vices might be hidden on the dark side of civic virtue.
ON THE BANNERS of the French Revolution was inscribed a triad of ideals—liberty, equality, and fraternity. Fraternity, as the French democrats intended it, was another name for what I term “social capital.” The question not resolved on those banners, or in subsequent philosophical debates, is whether those three good things always go together. Much of Western political debate for two hundred years has revolved about the trade-offs between liberty and equality. Too much liberty, or at least too much liberty in certain forms, may undermine equality. Too much equality, or at least too much equality in certain forms, may undermine liberty. Less familiar but no less portentous are the trade-offs involving the third value of the triad: Is too much fraternity bad for liberty and equality? All good things don’t necessarily go together, so perhaps a single-minded pursuit of social capital might unacceptably infringe on freedom and justice. This chapter addresses some of those difficult normative issues.
Is social capital at war with liberty and tolerance? This was and remains the classic liberal objection to community ties: community restricts freedom and encourages intolerance. The discerning nineteenth-century Englishman Walter Bagehot described how oppressive the soft shackles of community could be.
You may talk of the tyranny of Nero and Tiberius; but the real tyranny is the tyranny of your next-door neighbour. What law is so cruel as the law of doing what he does? What yoke is so galling as the necessity of being like him? What espionage of despotism comes to your door so effectually as the eye of the man who lives at your door? Public opinion is a permeating influence, and it exacts obedience to itself; it requires us to think other men’s thoughts, to speak other men’s words, to follow other men’s habits.3
In small-town America in the 1950s people were deeply engaged in community life, but to many this surfeit of social capital seemed to impose conformity and social division. Then in the sixties tolerance and diversity blossomed, matching almost precisely the decline in social capital.4 Thoughtful commentators like Michael Schudson and Alan Wolfe have suggested that in the ensuing years Americans have become more tolerant while becoming less connected with one another.5 “Might not the gain in liberty be worth the cost in community?” they have asked.
Without a doubt America in the 1990s was a more tolerant place than America in the 1950s or even the 1970s. Drawing on the General Social Survey archive, table 7 summarizes three broad measures of support for racial integration, gender equality, and civil liberties, that is, freedom of speech and writing in support of controversial views. Figure 90 provides an overview of how Americans’ views in each of these three domains changed over the last quarter of the twentieth century. In fact, attitudes on all twenty-one questions summarized in table 7 moved in a more tolerant direction over the last quarter of the twentieth century: more tolerance for racial intermarriage, more tolerance for working women, more tolerance for homosexuality, and so on.
The increase in tolerance in recent decades has been stark and broad. In 1956, 50 percent of white Americans said that whites and blacks should go to separate schools; in 1995, only 4 percent said so. In 1963, 45 percent of white Americans said they would move out if blacks moved in next
door; in 1997, 1 percent said the same thing. In 1973, only 20 percent of Americans reported that someone of another race had been to their house for dinner recently, but by 1996 that had more than doubled to 42 percent. As recently as 1987, 46 percent of all Americans opposed interracial dating, but by 1999 that figure had been cut in half to 23 percent. In 1963, 61 percent of Americans supported laws banning interracial marriage, but by 1998 only 11 percent did. Interracial social bridges were being strengthened, even though—or perhaps because— most forms of social capital were becoming attenuated.
In 1973 nearly half of all Americans (45 percent) favored banning from the local public library books that advocated homosexuality, but twenty-five years later that figure had fallen to 26 percent. Between 1987 and 1999 the fraction of Americans who favored firing homosexual teachers fell from more than half to less than one in three. In 1975 half of all Americans still agreed that “most men are better suited emotionally for politics than most women” and that “a woman’s place is in the home.” By 1999 less than one-quarter endorsed these views. Behind each of these statistical trends stands a category of Americans increasingly liberated from stigma and oppression.6
Table 7: Indexes of Tolerance for Racial Integration, Gender Equality, and Civil Liberties
* * *
A. Tolerance for racial integration (whites only)
1. White people have a right to keep [Negroes/blacks/African Americans] out of their neighborhoods if they want to, and [Negroes/blacks/African Americans] should respect that right. (agree/disagree)
2. Do you think there should be laws against marriages between [Negroes/blacks/African Americans] and whites? (yes/no)
3. During the last few years, has anyone in your family brought a friend who was a [Negro/black/African American] home for dinner? (yes/no)
4. Suppose there is a community-wide vote on the general housing issue. There are two possible laws to vote on. One law says that a homeowner can decide for himself whom to sell his house to, even if he prefers not to sell to [Negroes/blacks/African Americans]; the second law says that a homeowner cannot refuse to sell to someone because of his or her race or color. Which law would you vote for?
5. If your party nominated a [Negro/black/African American] for president, would you vote for him if he were qualified for the job? (yes/no)
6. If you and your friends belonged to a social club that would not let [Negroes/blacks/African Americans] join, would you try to change the rules so that [Negroes/blacks/African Americans] could join? (yes/no)
B. Tolerance for feminism
1. Women should take care of running their homes and leave running the country up to men. (agree/disagree)
2. Do you approve or disapprove of a married woman earning money in business or industry if she has a husband capable of supporting her? (approve/disapprove)
3. If your party nominated a woman for president, would you vote for her if she were qualified for the job? (yes/no)
4. Most men are better suited emotionally for politics than are most women. (agree/disagree)
5. It is much better for everyone involved if the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of the home and family. (agree/disagree)
C. Tolerance for civil liberties
1. There are always some people whose ideas are considered bad or dangerous by other people. For instance, someone who is against all churches and religion. If such a person wanted to make a speech in your community against churches and religion, should he be allowed to speak or not?
2. If some people in your community suggested that a book he wrote against churches and religion should be taken out of your public library, would you favor removing this book or not?
This same pair of questions was also posed about
• a person who believes that blacks are genetically inferior.
• a man who admits that he is a Communist.
• a person who advocates doing away with elections and letting the military run the country.
• a man who admits that he is a homosexual.
* * *
Figure 90: Tolerance Grows for Racial Integration, Civil Liberties, and Gender Equality
So between the mid-1960s and the late 1990s Americans became substantially more tolerant, precisely the same period when (as we saw in section II) they were becoming disconnected from civic life and from one another. Can it be a coincidence that as social capital has crumbled, tolerance has increased? Didn’t the decline of old-fashioned clubs simply reflect people dropping out (or never joining) because they were more tolerant of women, blacks, and so on than their parents had been, while the clubs weren’t? Didn’t we become more tolerant precisely because we were freed from the suffocating, parochial influences of those hermetic social compartments? Is there not, in short, a kind of iron law linking social capital and intolerance, so that the decline of social capital is simply an inevitable concomitant of the rise of tolerant individualism? Don’t we face in the end a painful and even arbitrary choice of values— community or individualism, but not both? Liberty or fraternity, but not both. If we aspire to the close-knit community of Salem, isn’t it just part of the deal, as Arthur Miller argued in 1953 in The Crucible, that we shun “witches”—that is, anyone who does not fit in? No “witches,” no Salem.7
If this conceptual framework is accurate, then those who care about both liberty and community face a painful trade-off, but every cloud has a silver lining. Michael Schudson argues, “The decline in organizational solidarity is truly a loss, but is also the flip side of a rise in individual freedom, which is truly a gain.”8 We no longer connect, but at least I don’t bother you and you don’t bother me.
Table 8: Social Capital and Tolerance: Four Types of Society
Low Social Capital
High Social Capital
High tolerance
(1) Individualistic: You do your thing, and I’ll do mine
(3) Civic community (Salem without “witches”)
Low tolerance
(2) Anarchic: War of all against all
(4) Sectarian community (in-group vs. out-group; Salem with “witches”)
But does solidarity inevitably come at the cost of freedom, just as heads inevitably comes at the cost of tails? Is disengagement really just “the flip side” of liberation? Before accepting this beguiling interpretation, consider table 8. Conceptually, at least, tolerance and social capital are not opposite ends of a single continuum from extreme individualism to extreme sectarianism. In fact, there are four logically possible types of society. The simple “liberty vs. community” interpretation highlights cells (1) and (4)—the individualistic society with much liberty but little community, and the sectarian society with much community but little liberty. But we should not too quickly dismiss the other two types, especially the attractive cell (3) that combines social capital with tolerance. Might community and liberty, at least under some circumstances, be compatible?
The first evidence in favor of this more hopeful interpretation is that individuals who are more engaged with their communities are generally more tolerant than their stay-at-home neighbors, not less. Many studies have found that the correlation between social participation and tolerance is, if anything, positive, not negative, even holding education constant. The positive link between connectedness and tolerance is especially strong with respect to gender and race: the more people are involved with community organizations, the more open they are to gender equality and racial integration.
Social joiners and civic activists are as a rule more tolerant of dissent and unconventional behavior than social isolates are, a pattern first discovered by social scientists during the repressive McCarthy period of the 1950s and confirmed repeatedly since then. One comprehensive study of citizen-participation initiatives in five American cities found that, irrespective of socioeconomic status, people who were very active in these initiatives were considerably more tolerant toward the rights of unpopular and controversial speakers than wer
e nonparticipants. Except for the very common finding that religious involvement, especially involvement in fundamentalist churches, is linked to intolerance, I have not found a single empirical study that confirms the supposed link between community involvement and intolerance.9 George Babbitt may have been arrogant and opinionated, but (the empirical evidence suggests) his bigotry might well have been even worse if he had not been exposed to the bustle of Zenith’s community life.
The linkage between social capital and civic tolerance is even more positive
Figure 91: Social Capital and Tolerance Go Together
at the community level. Figure 91 shows that citizens of high-social-capital states are far more tolerant of civil liberties and far more committed to racial and gender equality than citizens of low-social-capital states. Far from being incompatible, liberty and fraternity are mutually supportive, and this remains true when we control for other factors like education, income, urbanism, and so on. The most tolerant communities in America are precisely the places with the greatest civic involvement. Conversely, communities whose residents bowl alone are the least tolerant places in America.10
Moreover, on closer inspection, the trends toward greater tolerance and civic disengagement over the last thirty years are not simply two sides of the same coin. Most of the changes in both tolerance and civic engagement over the last several decades are traceable to generational succession. That is, the main reason that people have become less engaged and more tolerant is that newer, more tolerant, less engaged generations have gradually replaced older, less tolerant, more engaged cohorts. But the generational dividing line between tolerant and intolerant Americans is not the same as the generational dividing line between engaged and disengaged Americans.
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