Notes
social capital refers to connections among individuals—social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them. In that sense social capital is closely related to what some have called “civic virtue.” The difference is that “social capital” calls attention to the fact that civic virtue is most powerful when embedded in a dense network of reciprocal social relations. A society of many virtuous but isolated individuals is not necessarily rich in social capital.
social capital has both an individual and a collective aspect—a private face and a public face. First, individuals form connections that benefit our own interests. One pervasive strategem of ambitious job seekers is “networking,” for most of us get our jobs because of whom we know, not what we know—that is, our social capital, not our human capital.
However, social capital also can have “externalities” that affect the wider community, so that not all the costs and benefits of social connections accrue to the person making the contact.15 As we shall see later in this book, a well-connected individual in a poorly connected society is not as productive as a well-connected individual in a well-connected society. And even a poorly connected individual may derive some of the spillover benefits from living in a well-connected community.
Of all the dimensions along which forms of social capital vary, perhaps the most important is the distinction between bridging (or inclusive) and bonding (or exclusive).20 Some forms of social capital are, by choice or necessity, inward looking and tend to reinforce exclusive identities and homogeneous groups. Examples of bonding social capital include ethnic fraternal organizations, church-based women’s reading groups, and fashionable country clubs. Other networks are outward looking and encompass people across diverse social cleavages. Examples of bridging social capital include the civil rights movement, many youth service groups, and ecumenical religious organizations. Bonding social capital is good for undergirding specific reciprocity and mobilizing solidarity.
Bridging networks, by contrast, are better for linkage to external assets and for information diffusion.
Bonding social capital is, as Xavier de Souza Briggs puts it, good for “getting by,” but bridging social capital is crucial for “getting ahead.”21
Many groups simultaneously bond along some social dimensions and bridge across others.
Community has warred incessantly with individualism for preeminence in our political hagiology.
Our national myths often exaggerate the role of individual heroes and understate the importance of collective effort.
While Americans are spending less time doing sports, we are spending more time and money watching sports now than we were only a few decades ago. Sports spectatorship has been rising rapidly, which helps explain the rapid rise in the salaries of professional athletes. In part, the growth in spectatorship reflects our television viewing habits, but it is also reflected in live attendance figures. Adjusted for population growth, attendance at major sporting events has nearly doubled since the 1960s.58
In football, as in politics, watching a team play is not the same thing as playing on a team.
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.
Between roughly 1870 and 1900 America evolved rapidly from a rural, localized, traditional society to a modern, industrialized, urban nation. At the end of the Civil War, America remained, as it had been at the time of Tocqueville’s visit in the 1830s, predominantly a land of small farms, small towns, and small businesses. By the turn of the century America was rapidly becoming a nation of cities, teeming with immigrants born in villages in Europe or America but now toiling in factories operated by massive industrial combines. Technological change was one key to this transformation.
For the first time, whole industries came to be identified with the names of the powerful individuals who dominated them—Cornelius Vanderbilt, E. H. Harriman, and James J. Hill in railroads, Cyrus McCormick in reapers, John D. Rockefeller in oil, J. P. Morgan in finance, James B. Duke in tobacco, Gustavus Swift and Philip Armour in meatpacking, Andrew Carnegie in steel…. Similarly, the improvements in transportation and communications and the growth of cities opened opportunities for mass merchandising in the new fields of department stores, mail-order houses, and chain stores. Montgomery Ward and Sears, Roe- buck & Company led the way among the mail-order firms, while distributors such as A&P and Woolworth’s set new patterns in chain store retailing.6
A decade later Harvard philosopher William James would express the same disdain in the elevated language of Yankee reformers, as he bemoaned “the moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That—with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word ‘success’— is our national disease.”17
However, nothing in the experience of the average American at the end of the twentieth century matches the wrenching transformation experienced at the beginning of the century by an immigrant raised as a peasant in a Polish village little changed from the sixteenth century who within a few years was helping to construct the avant-garde skyscrapers of Louis Sullivan in the city of “big shoulders” beside Lake Michigan. Even for native-born Americans, the pace of change in the last decades of the nineteenth century was extraordinary. As Bostonian Henry Adams later wrote of his own boyhood. “The American boy of 1854 stood nearer the year 1 than to the year 1900.”19
Philosopher Herbert Croly argued that the new communications media would allow an active citizenry to “meet” despite distance and thus would reduce or eliminate the need for representation. Replace electricity and the telephone with the Internet in these arguments, and the thesis sounds exceptionally timely at the beginning of the twenty-first century. On the other hand, more cautious social observers like John Dewey and Mary Parker Follett were concerned with how to intertwine the new technology with face-to-face ties. Although they recognized and honored the larger new society, they also cherished the smaller, older social networks of neighborhoods.
The Great Society created by steam and electricity may be a society [wrote Dewey], but it is no community. The invasion of the community by the new and relatively impersonal and mechanical modes of combined human behavior is the outstanding fact of modern life. …The machine age in developing the Great Society has invaded and partially disintegrated the small communities of former times without generating a Great Community.34
Real solidarity [added Follett] will never be accomplished except by beginning somewhere the joining of one small group with another…. Only by actual union, not by appeals to the imagination, can the …varied neighborhood groups be made the constituents of a sound, normal, unpartisan city life. Then being a member of a neighborhood group will mean at the same time being a member and a responsible member of the state.35
Follett observed that “a free, full community life lived within the sustaining and nourishing power of the community bond … is almost unknown now.” Seeking to re-create face-to-face neighborhood bonds, historian Jean Quandt reports, Follett sought to make [community] centers into institutions for overcoming civic apathy, furthering mutual understanding among groups, and creating a local framework for the integration of churches, trade associations, lodges, and youth groups…. [T]he face-to-face communication which started at
“In politics, religion, art and sport we are represented now by proxies where formerly we participated in person. All the forms of communal and cultural activity in which we … formerly shared have been taken over by professionals and the great mass of men are no longer actors, but spectators.”
#thesis
Social reformers in the Progressive Era (as in our own era) were caught on the horns of a dilemma. In social service, in public health, in urban design, in education, in neighborhood organization, in cultural philanthropy, even in lobbying, professional staff could often do a more effective, more efficient job in the task at hand than “well-meaning” volunteers. However, disempowering ordinary members of voluntary associations could easily diminish grassroots civic engagement and foster oligarchy.
Progressive intellectuals articulated a broader yearning for the community values of small-town life, nostalgia provoked by the materialism, individualism, and “bigness” of the new America.
“in our own life the intimacy of the neighborhood has been broken up by the growth of an intricate mesh of wider contacts which leaves us strangers to people who live in the same house …diminishing our economic and spiritual community with our neighbors.”43
Urbanization, industrialization, and immigration had undermined neighborliness.
Progressive thinkers came mostly from small towns, and they recognized the oppressive features of small-town life—”the small-town herd,” as one of them put it. But they also recalled the virtues of a community rooted in interpersonal ties. “Reading of a wedding or the birth of a child,” William Allen White noted, “we have that neighborly feeling that breeds the real democracy.” Such neighborliness constituted an informal network of mutual aid, social capital in a particularly pure form.
hand.”…Along with a feeling of intimacy and a sense of classlessness, the small-town ethos which shaped the values of these intellectuals emphasized widespread participation in the public affairs of the community….
Emile Durkheim’s mechanical versus organic solidarity,
In great cities men are brought together by the desire of gain. They are not in a state of co-operation, but of isolation, as to the making of fortunes; and for all the rest they are careless of neighbours. Christianity teaches us to love our neighbour as ourself; modern society acknowledges no neighbour.
In the newer social order, his American successors concurred, “relations tended to be superficial, the restraints imposed by public opinion weak, and common cause with one’s neighbor lacking.”45
Finding or shaping new tools for cultivating community in the alien soil of industrial society was, thus, a central task for the Progressives.
Progressives did not deny the importance of self-interest but added that men and women were also moved by nonmaterial values—affection, reputation, even altruism.
“by the turn of the century … sociability alone appeared to be an inadequate response to the feeling of crisis that gripped the middle class…. [S]ocial redemption required a new type of cooperative activism … serving the community.”47
Campaigning for president in 1912, Woodrow Wilson spoke of the transformation that had overtaken America in the preceding four decades in terms he knew voters would understand. We have come upon a very different age from any that preceded us…. Yesterday, and ever since history began, men were related to one another as individuals…. All over the Union, people are coming to feel they have no control over the course of their affairs. To-day, the everyday relationships of men are largely with great impersonal concerns, with organizations, not with other individual men. Now this is nothing short of a new social age, a new era of human relationships, a new stage-setting for the drama of life.48
IT WAS, IN SHORT, A time very like our own, brimming with promise of technological advance and unparalleled prosperity, but nostalgic for a more integrated sense of connectedness. Then, as now, new modes of communication seemed to promise new forms of community, but thoughtful men and women wondered whether those new forms would be fool’s gold. Then, as now, optimism nurtured by recent economic advances battled pessimism grounded in the hard realities of seemingly intractable social ills.
Then, as now, materialism, political cynicism, and a penchant for spectatorship rather than action seemed to thwart idealistic reformism.
Serious observers understood that the path from the past could not be retraced, but few saw clearly the path to a better future.
While reactionary romantics mused about a return to a smaller, simpler, pastoral age, Progressives were too practical to be attracted by that appeal. They admired the virtues of the past but understood that we could not go back.
The Industrial Age, despite its defects, had made possible a material prosperity that was an essential precondition for civic progress. The issue was not “modernity, yes or no?” but rather how to reform our institutions and adapt our habits in this new world to secure the enduring values of our tradition.
Their outlook was activist and optimistic, not fatalist and despondent. The distinctive characteristic of the Progressives was their conviction that social evils would not remedy themselves and that it was foolhardy to wait passively for time’s cure. As Herbert Croly put it, they did not believe that the future would take care of itself.49 Neither should we.
During the years from 1870 to 1920 civic inventiveness reached a crescendo unmatched in American history, not merely in terms of numbers of clubs, but in the range and durability of the newly founded organizations.
By joining a lodge, an initiate adopted, at least implicitly, a set of values. Societies dedicated themselves to the advancement of mutualism, self-reliance, business training, thrift, leadership skills, self-government, self-control, and good moral character. These values reflected a fraternal consensus that cut across such seemingly intractable divisions as race, gender, and income.
“How can I participate effectively in the public life of my community?”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Participated in any sports activity, such as softball, basketball, swimming, golf, bowling, skiing, or tennis 59% 69% Played softball and/or went swimming and/or played golf and/or went bowling and/or went skiing and/or played tennisb Attended an amateur or professional sports event Attended a sporting event 56% 56%