Morality in the 21st Century: Robert Putnam

BBC Radio 4 - Morality in the 21st Century, Episode 9: Robert Putnam

"‘I decided to use as an example of that membership in bowling leagues. And bowling is I know not so big in Britain as it is in America... it was and actually still is the largest participatory sport in America. And it's, even today, it's widely, people, a lot of people take part in, more Americans bowl than vote, for example. So it's a common game. And it's just about as frequent now as it used to be.

But what has changed is that mostly in the past people bowled in leagues, bowled in teams. And what has happened over the last 30 or 40 years is that league membership in bowling has declined by, now it's probably 50 or 60%. It's essentially, league bowling is almost disappearing.

A friend of mine who happened to be in the bowling alley business told me that I'd stumbled upon the crucial problem with their business model. Because it turns out that if you bowl in the league, you drink four times as much beer and you eat four times as many pretzels and the money in bowling is in bowling is in the beer and pretzels. It's not in the balls and shoes... more people coming through the door but their sales of beer and pretzels were going down...

Sociologists who study crime have taught us... the best predictor of a low crime rate in a neighborhood is not how many cops there are in the beat. But how many neighbors know one another’s first name. That is, it's the neighborhood networks that have the effect of deterring crime… we now know that social networks are valuable for our health.

Social isolation, which is growing in the UK and growing in Britain, loneliness and so on, has - social isolation has very powerful physical health effects. If you smoke, and belong to no groups, it's a close call as to which is a more dangerous behavior. That is, that's, that's how big the effect is, of being socialised'...

‘The mid 60s, that's when the data say the change occurred from a we society to an I society. For the first two thirds of the 20th century, from about 1900 to about 1965, 1970, America was moving in the opposite direction. America was becoming more connected. We were becoming more equal in distribution, the distribution of income was becoming more equal in that time. The gap between rich and poor was narrowing from about roughly 1900 to roughly 1965, 1970. Our belonging to organizations was growing. Our philanthropy per capita was growing, we were giving not just more money, but more money as a faction of our income. More, we were giving away more and more. We were depolarizing politically, we were more and more focused on the things that the community that and the things that we could contribute to the community.

And then as I say, in the mid 60s or early 70s, suddenly all those trends changed. And the Bowling Alone trend was one of the second half of that curve. It was the down curve for social capital. And the book our kids was focused on another strand, downturn strand, namely ,from with respect to equality.

But. Looking at the whole century allows me now to see that actually, there was a turning point back around 1900. Because in 1900, we were very much an I society too. We were very unequal. That was what we called in our, in American historiography is called the Gilded Age, this massive inequalities of great wealth, the Rockefellers and the Carnegies and so on. Great wealth and great poverty, a period of high immigration and that was causing turbulence in the society. A period in which, if we focused on we at all, it was very much a narrow we.

It was people who looked like us. And then in a relatively short period of time from roughly 1890 to 1910, we turned a corner culturally to begin to focus less on I and more on we and to have a wider and wider conception of we. At the beginning of that trend we meant we white guys basically but by the end it meant people of all races.

You can see over the, over the period from roughly 1930 to roughly 1970 that the the gaps which, the racial gaps in America in that period, I'm not talking, I'm talking before the Civil Rights Revolution, the gaps - economic and educational gaps and so on - between blacks and whites or between men and women were narrowing. Our we was not, was no longer a narrow we, it was a more encompassing we and then the rest then after 1965, as I say we turned in a different direction’"