The increasing tolerance of the last several decades is almost entirely due to replacement of less tolerant people born in the first half of the twentieth century by more tolerant boomers and X’ers. People born after about 1945 are now and always have been more tolerant than those born before. However, this generational engine producing greater tolerance appears to have halted with the advent of the boomers. As sociologist James C. Davis noted some years ago, people born in the 1970s or 1980s are no more tolerant than their parents born in the 1940s and 1950s. The generational turning point is quite different for social capital, as I noted in chapter 14. There is little difference in the civic habits of people born in the 1920s and those born in the 1940s, but those born in the 1940s and even the 1950s are more civic than those born in the 1970s and 1980s.11
Something in the first half of the twentieth century made successive cohorts of Americans more tolerant, but that generational engine failed to produce further increases in tolerance among those born in the second half of the century. The late X’ers are no more tolerant than the early boomers. So the biggest generational gains in tolerance are already behind us. By contrast, something happened in America in the second half of the twentieth century to make people less civically engaged. The late X’ers are a lot less engaged than the early boomers. As a result, the biggest generational losses in engagement still lie ahead.
Virtually no cohort in America is more engaged or more tolerant than those born around 1940–45. They are the liberal communitarians par excellence. Their parents were as engaged, but less tolerant. Their children are as tolerant, but less engaged. For some reason, that cohort inherited most of their parents’ sense of community, but they discarded their parents’ intolerance. For the most part, they successfully passed their tolerance to their children, but they failed to transmit the communitarian habits they had themselves inherited. It was from this liberal communitarian cultural matrix that the civil rights movement emerged. But that cultural matrix has already begun to fade, leaving a nation as we enter the new century that is increasingly disengaged, but no longer increasingly tolerant. Closely examined, the generational roots of the growing tolerance and declining civic engagement of the last several decades are quite distinct. There is no reason to assume that community engagement must necessarily have illiberal consequences. Indeed, looking across the varie-gated states and communities in this diverse land, precisely the opposite appears true: social capital and tolerance have a symbiotic relationship.
Henry David Thoreau and Sinclair Lewis and Walter Bagehot were not entirely mistaken. No doubt community connections are sometimes oppressive. American clubs and churches are even more racially segregated than our neighborhoods and schools.12 Bonding social capital (as distinct from bridging social capital) is particularly likely to have illiberal effects. As political philosopher Amy Gutmann has observed:
Although many associational activities in America are clearly and directly supportive of liberal democracy, others are not so clearly or directly supportive, and still others are downright hostile to, and potentially destructive of, liberal democracy…. Other things being equal, the more economically, ethnically, and religiously heterogeneous the membership of an association is, the greater its capacity to cultivate the kind of public discourse and deliberation that is conducive to democratic citizenship.13
Community-mongers have fostered intolerance in the past, and their twenty-first-century heirs need to be held to a higher standard. That said, the greatest threat to American liberty comes from the disengaged, not the engaged. The most intolerant individuals and communities in America today are the least connected, not the most connected. There is no evidence whatever that civic disengagement is a useful tool against bigotry, or even that tolerance is a convenient side effect of disengagement.
Is social capital at war with equality? Thoughtful radicals have long feared so. Social capital, particularly social capital that bonds us with others like us, often reinforces social stratification. The abundant social capital of the 1950s was often exclusionary along racial and gender and class lines. Generally speaking, the haves engage in much more civic activity than the have-nots. Thus, strengthening the social and political power of voluntary associations may well widen class differences.
Liberals and egalitarians have often attacked some forms of social capital (from medieval guilds to neighborhood schools) in the name of individual opportunity. We have not always reckoned with the indirect social costs of our policies, but we were right to be worried about the power of private associations. Social inequalities may be embedded in social capital. Norms and networks that serve some groups may obstruct others, particularly if the norms are discriminatory or the networks socially segregated. A recognition of the importance of social capital in sustaining community life does not exempt us from the need to worry about how that “community” is defined—who is inside and thus benefits from social capital and who is outside and does not.
Does this logic mean that we must in some fundamental sense choose between community and equality? The empirical evidence on recent trends is unambiguous: No. Community and equality are mutually reinforcing, not mutually incompatible. Social capital and economic equality moved in tandem through most of the twentieth century. In terms of the distribution of wealth and income, America in the 1950s and 1960s was more egalitarian than it had been in more than a century. As we saw in section II, those same decades were also the high point of social connectedness and civic engagement. Record highs in equality and in social capital coincided. In both cases circumstantial evidence points to the World War II epoch as key.14
Conversely, the last third of the twentieth century was a time of growing inequality and eroding social capital. By the end of the twentieth century the gap between rich and poor in the United States had been increasing for nearly three decades, the longest sustained increase in inequality in at least a century, coupled with the first sustained decline in social capital in at least that long.15
The timing of the two trends is striking: Sometime around 1965–70 America reversed course and started becoming both less just economically and less well connected socially and politically. This pair of trends illustrates that fraternity and equality are complementary, not warring values.
This same conclusion is reinforced by comparing equality and social capital across the American states. Figure 92 and figure 93 show that the American states with the highest levels of social capital are precisely the states most characterized by economic and civic equality.16 Figure 92 shows that income is distributed more equally in high-social-capital states and that the gap between rich and poor is especially large in low-social-capital states. Figure 93 shows that in high-social-capital states people from different social classes are equally likely to attend public meetings, to lead local organizations, and the like, whereas in low-social-capital states civic life is monopolized by the haves, leaving the have-nots out. In short, both across space and across time, equality and fraternity are strongly positively correlated.
This simple analysis cannot detect what is causing what here. There are several plausible alternatives. First, social capital may help produce equality. Historically social capital has been the main weapon of the have-nots, who lacked other forms of capital. “Solidarity forever” is a proud, strategically sensible rallying cry for those, such as ethnic minorities or the working class, who lack access to conventional political clout. So it is plausible that well-knit communities can sustain more egalitarian social and political arrangements. Conversely, great disparities of wealth and power are inimical to widespread participation and broadly shared community integration, so it is also plausible that the causal arrow points from equality toward civic engagement and social capital. A third view is that social connectedness and equality are fostered by the same external forces, such as the leveling and annealing effects of massive (and victorious) war.
I cannot here adjudicate this complicated historical question, but the evidence powerful
ly contradicts the view that community engagement must necessarily amplify inequality. On the contrary, there is every reason to think that the twin master trends of our time—less equality, less engagement—reinforce
Figure 92: Social Capital and Economic Equality Go Together
one another. Thus, efforts to strengthen social capital should go hand in hand with efforts to increase equality.
Many practical tensions may arise between fraternity, on the one hand, and liberty and equality, on the other, for one could easily conceive of initiatives that would foster one of these values at the expense of the others. However, the empirical evidence clearly contradicts the simple view that the only way to have more fraternity is to sacrifice liberty and equality. To console ourselves that the collapse of American community has at least brought us a more liberal, egalitarian America is false optimism. To refrain from efforts to rebuild community for fear that such efforts will lead inevitably to intolerance and injustice is false pessimism.
However, we have not yet faced what is in some respects the deepest and most paradoxical indictment that might be made against advocates of fraternity— that is, the view that fraternity is in some sense at war with itself. Social capital
Figure 93: Social Capital and Civic Equality Go Together
is often most easily created in opposition to something or someone else. Fraternity is most natural within socially homogeneous groups. Traditional southern white identity was forged in part in resistance to racial integration, Jews are unified by anti-Semitism, and some African Americans fear that integration might undermine racial solidarity. Social divisiveness is the central normative issue raised by communitarianism. Does the exaltation of social capital and community solidarity lead inevitably to the murderous hatreds of Bosnia and Kosovo?
We need not travel across the Atlantic to find vivid examples of this dilemma, for it is quintessentially, as Gunnar Myrdal entitled his classic analysis of race in our history, “an American dilemma.” Race is the most important embodiment of the ethical crosscurrents that swirl around the rocks of social capital in contemporary America. It is perhaps foolhardy to offer a brief interpretation of those issues here, but it would be irresponsible to avoid them.
Slavery and its Jim Crow aftermath had the effect of thwarting connections that might otherwise have been made among the dispossessed of both races. As we saw in chapter 16, the parts of the United States where social trust and other forms of social capital are lowest today are the places where slavery and racialist policy were most entrenched historically. The civil rights movement was, in part, aimed at destroying certain exclusive, nonbridging forms of social capital—racially homegeneous schools, neighborhoods, and so forth. The deeper question was what was to follow, and in some sense this question remains as high on the national agenda at the beginning of the twenty-first century as it was at the beginning of the twentieth. The easy answer is “More bridging social capital”—that is, more bonds of connection that cross racial lines. Workplace integration, for all its difficulties, has been by far the greatest success for this approach as we noted in chapter 5.
On the other hand, school integration has posed much more sharply the trade-offs between bridging and bonding social capital. The busing controversy illustrates this dilemma quite clearly, for both sides in the controversy were fundamentally concerned about social capital (though, understandably, no one used that language). Proponents of busing believed that only through racially integrated schools could America ever generate sufficient social capital—familiarity, tolerance, solidarity, trust, habits of cooperation, and mutual respect—across the racial divide. Opponents of busing replied that in most parts of America, neighborhood schools provided a unique site for building social capital—friendship, habits of cooperation, solidarity. The deepest tragedy of the busing controversy is that both sides were probably right.
Here is one way of framing the central issue facing America as we become ever more diverse ethnically. If we had a golden magic wand that would miraculously create more bridging social capital, we would surely want to use it. But suppose we had only an aluminum magic wand that could create more social capital, but only of a bonding sort. This second-best magic wand would bring more blacks and more whites to church, but not to the same church, more Hispanics and Anglos to the soccer field, but not the same soccer field. Should we use it? As political scientist Eileen McDonagh has put the point vividly: “Is it better to have neighborhoods legally restricted on the basis of race, but with everyone having everyone else over for dinner, or is it better to have neighborhoods unrestricted on the basis of race, but with very little social interaction going on between neighbors?”17 That was the dilemma embodied in the busing controversy. If we ignore it, our efforts to reinvigorate community in America may simply lead to a more divided society.
Much of the evidence I have presented suggests that social capital at various levels is mutually reinforcing—that those who reach out to friends and family are often the most active in community outreach as well. But this is by no means always the case. The fraternity vs. fraternity dilemma highlights one aspect of this question of scope. Some kinds of bonding social capital may discourage the formation of bridging social capital and vice versa. That’s what happened in the case of busing.
Earlier in this book I observed that bridging and bonding social capital are good for different things. Strong ties with intimate friends may ensure chicken soup when you’re sick, but weak ties with distant acquaintances are more likely to produce leads for a new job. From a collective point of view the scope of the social capital we need depends on the scale of the problems we face. This maxim should help guide us as we deal with the “aluminum wand” dilemma I describe here. What if we need to choose between policies that build a little bridging social capital and those that build a lot of bonding social capital? For ensuring that small children get the stimulation and structure they need, bonding social capital may be optimal. Here a little “familism” would go a long way, no matter how civically “amoral” it might be. For improving public schools we need social capital at the community level, whether these be residential communities (as in the neighborhood school model) or communities of like-minded families (as in the charter school model). For other issues—such as deciding what sort of safety net, if any, should replace the welfare system— surely it is social capital of the most broad and bridging kind that will most improve the quality of public debate. In short, for our biggest collective problems we need precisely the sort of bridging social capital that is toughest to create.18 That challenge will be central as we turn in the following section to the most important question of this book: So what do we do now?
* * *
SECTION FIVE
What Is to Be Done?
* * *
CHAPTER 23
Lessons of History: The Gilded Age and the Progressive Era
OVER THE LAST THREE DECADES a variety of social, economic, and technological changes have rendered obsolete a significant stock of America’s social capital. Television, two-career families, suburban sprawl, generational changes in values—these and other changes in American society have meant that fewer and fewer of us find that the League of Women Voters, or the United Way, or the Shriners, or the monthly bridge club, or even a Sunday picnic with friends fits the way we have come to live. Our growing social-capital deficit threatens educational performance, safe neighborhoods, equitable tax collection, democratic responsiveness, everyday honesty, and even our health and happiness.
Is erosion of social capital an ineluctable consequence of modernity, or can we do something about it? Sometimes, in the face of fundamental questions like this one, history instructs. In this case, some unexpectedly relevant— and in many respects optimistic—lessons can be found in a period uncannily like our own—the decades at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century that American historians have dubbed the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era.* In a number of deep respe
cts the challenges facing American society at the end of the nineteenth century foreshadowed those that we face in our own time.
Almost exactly a century ago America had also just experienced a period of dramatic technological, economic, and social change that rendered obsolete a significant stock of social capital. In the three or four decades after the Civil War the Industrial Revolution, urbanization, and massive waves of immigration transformed American communities. Millions of Americans left family and friends behind on the farm when they moved to Chicago or Milwaukee or Pittsburgh, and millions more left community institutions behind in a Polish shtetl or an Italian village when they moved to the Lower East Side or the North End. America in the last quarter of the nineteenth century suffered from classic symptoms of a social-capital deficit—crime waves, degradation in the cities, inadequate education, a widening gap between rich and poor, what one contemporary called a “Saturnalia” of political corruption.
But even as these problems were erupting, Americans were beginning to fix them. Within a few decades around the turn of the century, a quickening sense of crisis, coupled with inspired grassroots and national leadership, produced an extraordinary burst of social inventiveness and political reform. In fact, most of the major community institutions in American life today were invented or refurbished in that most fecund period of civic innovation in American history. The Progressive Era was not the only example of practical civic enthusiasm in American history, and it was surely not flawless, but (partly for that reason) it contains many instructive parallels to our own era. This chapter tells the story of that exceptional epoch, offering inspiration, enlightenment, and a few cautionary tales that may illumine our own.1
BOWLING ALONE Page 44