From a civic point of view, a new Great Awakening (if it happened) would not be an unmixed blessing. As we noted in chapters 4 and 22, proselytizing religions are better at creating bonding social capital than bridging social capital, and tolerance of unbelievers is not a virtue notably associated with fundamentalism. In our culture, if not our jurisprudence, a new Great Awakening would raise issues about the constitutional separation of church and state, as illustrated by the controversy surrounding the “charitable choice” provision of welfare reform that provides public funds for religiously linked social services. On the other hand, one can also detect signs of a broadly ecumenical and socially engaged religiosity in movements like the evangelical Call to Renewal. In addition, some of the innovations of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, like the settlement house and the Chautauqua movement, though not narrowly religious, could inspire twenty-first century equivalents.13
NO SECTOR OF AMERICAN SOCIETY will have more influence on the future state of our social capital than the electronic mass media and especially the Internet. If we are to reverse the adverse trends of the last three decades in any fundamental way, the electronic entertainment and telecommunications industry must become a big part of the solution instead of a big part of the problem. So I challenge America’s media moguls, journalists, and Internet gurus, along with viewers like you (and me): Let us find ways to ensure that by 2010 Americans will spend less leisure time sitting passively alone in front of glowing screens and more time in active connection with our fellow citizens. Let us foster new forms of electronic entertainment and communication that reinforce community engagement rather than forestalling it. The recent flurry of interest in “civic journalism” could be one strand to this strategy, if it is interpreted not as a substitute for genuine grassroots participation, but as a goad and soapbox for such participation.14 I noted in chapter 13 that, as a technical matter, the extraordinary power of television can encourage as well as discourage civic involvement. Let us challenge those talented people who preside over America’s entertainment industry to create new forms of entertainment that draw the viewer off the couch and into his community.
We saw in chapter 9 that the Internet can be used to reinforce real, face-to-face communities, not merely to displace them with a counterfeit “virtual community.” Let us challenge software designers and communications technologists to heed the call of University of Michigan computer scientist Paul Resnick to make the Internet social capital–friendly and to create a Community Information Corps to encourage youthful computer professionals to use their skills to help rebuild community in America.
In chapter 9 I discussed several important obstacles to the use of computer-mediated communication to build social capital. Some of those obstacles, like the digital divide, can (and must) be addressed by public policy. Others, like anonymity and single strandedness, might be amenable to technological “fixes.” On the other hand, computer-mediated communication also opens opportunities for hitherto unthinkable forms of democratic deliberation and community building—like citywide citizen debates about local issues or joint explorations of local history or even announcements of a local ultimate Frisbee tournament. Several early studies of well-wired communities suggest— tentatively, but hopefully—that residents who have easy access to local computer-based communication use that new tool to strengthen, not supplant, face-to-face ties with their neighbors and that some of them become more actively involved in community life, precisely as we social capitalists would wish.15 Electronic support groups for elderly shut-ins might be useful complements to (not substitutes for) regular personal visits. The key, in my view, is to find ways in which Internet technology can reinforce rather than supplant place-based, face-to-face, enduring social networks.
TO BUILD BRIDGING SOCIAL CAPITAL requires that we transcend our social and political and professional identities to connect with people unlike ourselves. This is why team sports provide good venues for social-capital creation. Equally important and less exploited in this connection are the arts and cultural activities. Singing together (like bowling together) does not require shared ideology or shared social or ethnic provenance. For this reason, among others, I challenge America’s artists, the leaders and funders of our cultural institutions, as well as ordinary Americans: Let us find ways to ensure that by 2010 significantly more Americans will participate in (not merely consume or “appreciate”) cultural activities from group dancing to songfests to community theater to rap festivals. Let us discover new ways to use the arts as a vehicle for convening diverse groups of fellow citizens.
Art manifestly matters for its own sake, far beyond the favorable effect it can have on rebuilding American communities. Aesthetic objectives, not merely social ones, are obviously important. That said, art is especially useful in transcending conventional social barriers. Moreover, social capital is often a valuable by-product of cultural activities whose main purpose is purely artistic.
Liz Lerman’s Dance Exchange has built unlikely community togetherness using community-based modern dance, bringing together, for example, unemployed shipyard workers and white-collar professionals when the closing of the Portsmouth (N.H.) shipyard strained local community bonds. The Roadside Theater Company has mustered diverse local folks in declining towns in Appalachia to celebrate their traditions and restore community confidence through dramatization of local stories and music. The Museum of the National Center for African American Artists in Boston has convened diverse groups of black Americans (Haitians, Jamaicans, Afro-Brazilians, and native African Americans) to build and then parade twenty-foot fish sculptures to the New England Aquarium. Toni Blackman’s Freestyle Union in Washington, D.C., uses ciphering, a novel combination of hip-hop, rap poetry, and improvisational poetry slams, to attract people from all walks of life, from a Filipino break-dancer to a right-to-life Christian. The Baltimore Museum of Art urges local residents to exploit its public spaces on “Freestyle Thursdays” by inviting local choral groups and others to perform. Chicago’s Gallery 37 provides apprenticeships for diverse young budding artists—rich and poor, suburban and inner city, black, white, Latino—to follow their own muses, building social connections among artist-mentors, artist-apprentices, and observers. In the Mattole Valley of northern California, David Simpson has used community theater to build bridges between loggers and environmentalists. Many of these activities produce great art, but all of them produce great bridging social capital—in some respects an even more impressive achievement.16
POLITICS AND GOVERNMENT is the domain where our voyage of inquiry about the state of social capital in America began, and it is where I conclude my challenges to readers who are as concerned as I am about restoring community bonds in America. Nowhere is the need to restore connectedness, trust, and civic engagement clearer than in the now often empty public forums of our democracy. So I challenge America’s government officials, political consultants, politicians, and (above all) my fellow citizens: Let us find ways to ensure that by 2010 many more Americans will participate in the public life of our communities—running for office, attending public meetings, serving on committees, campaigning in elections, and even voting. It is perhaps foolhardy to hope that we could reverse the entire decline of the last three to four decades in ten years, but American democracy would surely feel the beneficent effects of even a partial reversal.
Campaign reform (above all, campaign finance reform) should be aimed at increasing the importance of social capital—and decreasing the importance of financial capital—in our elections, federal, state, and local. Since time is distributed more equally across the population than money, privileging time-based participation over check-based participation would begin to reverse the growing inequality in American politics. Government authority should be decentralized as far as possible to bring decisions to smaller, local jurisdictions, while recognizing and offsetting the potential negative effect of that decentralization on equality and redistribution. Indeed, liberals alert to the benefi
ts of social capital should be readier to transfer governmental authority downward in exactly the same measure that compassionate conservatives should be readier to transfer resources from have to have-not communities. Decentralization of government resources and authority to neighborhood councils has worked in cities like Minneapolis, Portland, and Seattle, creating new social capital in the form of potluck dinners, community gardens, and flea markets, though deft design is needed to be sure that the balance between bridging and bonding does not tip too far toward urban fragmentation.
Policy designers of whatever partisan persuasion should become more social capital–savvy, seeking to do minimum damage to existing stocks of social capital even as they look for opportunities to add new stocks. How about a “social-capital impact statement” for new programs, less bureaucratic and legalistic than environmental impact statements have become, but equally effective at calling attention to unanticipated consequences? For example, the greatest damage to social capital in the inner city of Indianapolis, Indiana, in the last half century was the unintended disruption of neighborhood networks when those neighborhoods were pierced by Interstate 65 in the early 1960s. The Front-Porch Alliance created by former mayor Stephen Goldsmith more than a quarter century later was a worthy effort to help restore some Indianapolis neighborhood institutions, but Goldsmith himself would be the first to say that it would have been better to avoid the damage in the first place.17
In all the domains of social-capital creation that I have discussed here all too briefly, social capitalists need to avoid false debates. One such debate is “top-down versus bottom-up.” The roles of national and local institutions in restoring American community need to be complementary; neither alone can solve the problem. Another false debate is whether government is the problem or the solution. The accurate answer, judging from the historical record (as I argued in chapter 15), is that it can be both. Many of the most creative investments in social capital in American history—from county agents and the 4-H to community colleges and the March of Dimes—were the direct result of government policy. Government may be responsible for some small portion of the declines in social capital I have traced in this volume, and it cannot be the sole solution, but it is hard to imagine that we can meet the challenges I have set for America in 2010 without using government.
The final false debate to be avoided is whether what is needed to restore trust and community bonds in America is individual change or institutional change. Again, the honest answer is “Both.” America’s major civic institutions, both public and private, are somewhat antiquated a century after most of them were created, and they need to be reformed in ways that invite more active participation. Whether the specific suggestions I have made for institutional reform are persuasive or not is less important than the possibility that we may have a national debate about how to make our institutions more social capital–friendly. In the end, however, institutional reform will not work—indeed, it will not happen—unless you and I, along with our fellow citizens, resolve to become reconnected with our friends and neighbors. Henry Ward Beecher’s advice a century ago to “multiply picnics” is not entirely ridiculous today. We should do this, ironically, not because it will be good for America—though it will be—but because it will be good for us.
APPENDIX 1
Measuring Social Change
MUCH OF THIS BOOK consists of systematic, quantitative evidence about social trends over the last half of the twentieth century. This appendix summarizes key methodological challenges involved in that exercise, as well as the most important sources of data on which I have drawn.
My primary strategy, as explained in chapter 1, has been to triangulate among as many independent sources of evidence as possible, following the model of researchers into global warming. Our exploration of social change is inevitably constrained by the fact that, just as in the case of global warming, no one thought ahead to collect the really perfect evidence that we now need—a half century’s measurement of the reliability of friends or the helpfulness of strangers or the honesty of shopkeepers or the frequency of block parties. As a result, we need to look for convincing proof not in a single pair of polls, or even a single series of surveys, but instead for convergence across a number of different series, each carried out by different researchers. And where possible, we should look for change not merely in poll data, but also in institutions and behavior.
The core principle, thus, is this: No single source of data is flawless, but the more numerous and diverse the sources, the less likely that they could all be influenced by the same flaw. Two independent (though necessarily imperfect) strands of evidence are better than one, and more than two are better still, especially if they have different imperfections. What are the main sources of evidence used in this study—our equivalent of tree rings, ice cores, and weather records?
In some respects organizational records are the firmest indicators, for through them we can directly compare the civic involvement of Americans in the 1950s, the 1970s, and the 1990s. The assiduous record keeping of thousands of club secretaries and county clerks and church treasurers across the decades is much more reliable than frail recollections of “how things used to be.” Much is held constant (or nearly so) in this comparison: the constituency of the group, the meaning of “membership,” the assiduousness of information gathering. Of course, even these things can change. “Membership” in a union may not mean the same thing in 1998 as in 1938, and the occupation of “teamsters” has surely changed. Still, problems of comparability are less severe for organizational records than for most other sorts of data. Moreover, because organizations keep records over long periods, our comparisons can extend back decades or even centuries, giving us a longer perspective on recent events. Is a 10 percent slump in membership or contributions from one year to the next truly signifi-cant, or is it merely a commonplace down-tick? Only long-term records can really tell.
However, membership records have several grave defects as metrics of social change. First, organizations themselves have life cycles that may be independent of the vitality of the communities in which they exist. If the Elks club is fading, perhaps its place is being taken by myriad other organizations, all of them still too young and small and effervescent to worry about keeping careful membership records. If we confine ourselves to examining membership records of long-standing organizations, we will miss new and rapidly growing groups.
Another important caution follows from the fact that organizations have life cycles. Nothing whatever can be inferred about the civic vitality of a community from the birth rate of new organizations, unless at the same time we also examine the death rate of older ones. The discovery that, say, half of all environmental organizations now in existence were founded in the last decade proves absolutely nothing about organizational trends, unless we also know how many similar groups have disappeared over the same period.1 This issue is especially problematic if (as is true, for example, of the Internal Revenue Service records of nonprofit organizations) a list of organizations is not pruned regularly to eliminate defunct organizations.
Third, not all community activity is embodied in record-keeping organizations—indeed, probably most is not. One scholar, for example, estimates that 80 percent of all community groups represent social “dark matter”—that is, without formal structure, without an address, without archives, without notice in newspapers, and thus invisible to conventional chroniclers.2 If we confine our attention to membership rosters, we may miss massive change or massive stability. Worse yet, if community life is, for whatever reason, becoming richer, but less formally organized, tracking membership figures alone would lead us to precisely the wrong conclusion.
These deficiencies in organizational records can to some extent be offset by one of the most useful inventions of the twentieth century—the systematic social survey. A well-designed poll can provide a useful snapshot of opinions and behavior. Even better, a series of comparable surveys can yield a kind of social
time-lapse photography. Just as one snapshot a day from a single camera pointed unvaryingly at the same garden patch can yield a marvelous movie of botanical birth and growth, so a single survey question, if repeated regularly, can produce a striking image of social change.
Moreover, if the question has been formulated deftly enough, it can encompass a more diverse and changing social landscape than the study of any single organization. Through surveys we can examine involvement not merely in the League of Women Voters, say, but in any club that a respondent thinks worth mentioning. We can assess attendance not merely at an official “town meeting,” but at any local meeting. Best of all, surveys can capture informal activities—not merely voting, but chatting with your neighbor; not merely organizational membership, but poker games. Surveys, in short, can illuminate the “dark matter” of community life.
Yet for all their utility, surveys have at least four important limitations.
Comparability: Just as the camera in time-lapse photography must be motionless to capture motion, so survey questions must be (more or less) unchanging to capture change. For example, experienced pollsters know that the harder you probe, the more responses you get. Thus the number of organizational memberships that a poll uncovers is heavily dependent on the number of probes. So true is this that to the question “How many groups do you find the average American belongs to?” it is only a slight exaggeration to respond “As many as you’d like, if I ask hard enough.”3 Moreover, as survey researchers have become more sophisticated, they have discovered many other pitfalls for the unwary student of change: “order effects” (answers depend in part on the order in which questions are posed), “house effects” (different survey organizations obtain consistently different results to the same question), and so on. In other words, our social camera can be jiggled easily. It is especially risky to compare results from questions posed at different times by different survey organizations. Only a few survey archives contain data carefully enough controlled to ensure that our social time-lapse photograph is reliable.
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