Beyond Bob
By granting Robert Putnam intellectual hegemony on all things community in America, we limit our understanding of the past and constrain our visions of what’s possible for the future
I’ve had five different people send me five different interviews and events featuring Robert Putnam this past week alone (see here, here, here, here, and here).
America’s “Old Testament prophet with charts” is seemingly everywhere these days. He’s doing the conference circuit and the TV circuit and the podcast circuit and I presume some sort of workout circuit to keep his endurance up. He’s in our earholes and our eyeholes and, with Join or Die now on Netflix, our living rooms whenever we want.
Putnam would not be off base in quoting the famous rapper and litigator, Aubrey Drake Graham, “I deserve this shit, I deserve this shit.” He’s been one of the most influential political scientists of the past 50 years, not only for Bowling Alone, but also for Making Democracy Work, Our Kids, and American Grace. His research has been invaluable in helping millions of Americans — academics, community builders, and ordinary citizens alike — deepen their understanding of community in America. He even received the National Humanities Medal from Barack Obama in large part because of how his thinking shaped that of the former President. (But did he, like me, win the “Nicest Eyes” superlative in 8th and 12th grade? I don’t think so).
In recent months, however, I’ve come to see Bob’s re-emergence in the zeitgeist as a sign of our cultural decadence, particularly when it comes to community in America. Bob is a vitally important voice, but he is far from the only voice. By granting one emeritus professor intellectual hegemony on all things community in America, we inadvertently limit our understanding of the past and constrain our visions of what’s possible for the future.
This generational moment of civic renewal demands intellectual abundance, not constraint. We need an expanded range of stories of our past because we need to imagine new possibilities for our future. In short, we need to honor all of Bob’s contributions — and we need to go beyond Bob. But where do we begin?
To start, expanding our intellectual horizons beyond Bob could help us better understand how our lives in community have changed. For instance, Theda Skocpol (a colleague and friend of Putnam’s) has long asserted that a fundamental problem in civic life is not its decline, but its transformation in governance and funding. Skocpol’s main concern was the contraction of interconnected, grassroots membership groups throughout the late 20th century and their replacement with corporatized nonprofits and advocacy organizations. The former have organizing models that prioritize participation, centering members as the source of revenue and governance; the latter emphasize management, privileging professional administrators, centralized decision-making, and distant philanthropic funding. In Skocpol’s telling, this shift has left us with a “diminished democracy,” where we are treated less as agentic citizens who can co-create our lives in community and more as clients who passively receive services, programs, and products.
Engaging with a host of contemporary thinkers beyond Bob can also sharpen our understanding of where and for whom civic life has most deteriorated. Foremost among today’s scholars is Hahrie Han, who has found that “civic opportunity” — the third places, activities, and groups that make up the “supply-side of social capital” — is unevenly distributed across U.S. regions, counties, and neighborhoods. Wealthier and more educated places tend to have more civic opportunity, and poorer and less educated places tend to have less of it. Hahrie’s research complements many of the findings that
has uncovered at the Survey Center on American Life: there are stark class divides in everything from access to civic opportunity, to participation and membership in community, to friendship and social support. Hahrie, Dan, and several other thinkers help clarify a story of civic life that extends beyond the traditional narrative of community decline, and elevates the degree to which Americans’ experiences of community are shaped by place and class.Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, going beyond Bob could help us deepen our understanding of when our modern challenges of disconnection began. A reading of Bowling Alone and The Upswing would make us think that the decline of community is a 20th- and 21st-century phenomenon. But the civic groups that Putnam highlights (e.g., Rotary, Elks, American Legion) were mere attempts to re-create an experience of small town, village, and agrarian community that was already fast eroding. A broader reading list — from Robert Nisbet’s The Quest for Community, to Robert Bellah’s Habits of the Heart, to Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age — complicates this 20th-century story and situates the decline of community on a much longer timeline: with industrialization and the rise of modernity itself. Wrestling with these types of readings pushes us beyond the simple, surface-level solutions and introduces a deeper set of questions: what would it take to re-member, re-villagize, and re-enchant our communities?
Our stories of what happened matter because they shape our visions for what can be done. And the story of community and civic life in America is, in many ways, the dynamic, interconnected story of our cultural, social, economic, technological, and political transformation over three centuries. It’s also tens of thousands of stories of the tens of thousands of particular places in the U.S. A reading of Putnam alone — or any scholar alone, for that matter — could never come close to capturing the richness and complexity of our civic stories. It is because our past civic stories are endless that our future civic possibilities are endless.
If we are at the start of a generational moment of civic renewal (which, I believe we are), we need to create space for the abundance of these imaginative possibilities. We don’t just need to “join,” we need to imagine different ways of being when we show up. We don’t just need to “start clubs,” we need to imagine new approaches to organizing and gathering (and relearn forgotten ones, as Skocpol would point out). And we don’t just need to do these things because they are good for some measurable economic or health outcome, we need to imagine how they may affect the ineffable and undefinable — our collective culture, spirit, and flourishing.
Our civic possibilities are endless. Our civic stories should reflect this abundance.
This is excellent. By the way, I got "class eyes" in high school--perhaps my greatest life achievement, even if unearned. But really, you make some great points here. Thank you.
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