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November 21, 2022 - January 7, 2023
“social, or generalized, trust can be viewed as a ‘standing decision’ to give most people—even those whom one does not know from direct experience—the benefit of the doubt.”
In short, people who trust others are all-round good citizens, and those more engaged in community life are both more trusting and more trustworthy.
In virtually all societies “have-nots” are less trusting than “haves,” probably because haves are treated by others with more honesty and respect.
People who feel themselves to be untrustworthy are less trusting of others.
If generalized reciprocity and honesty are important social lubricants, Americans today are experiencing more friction in our daily lives than our parents and grandparents did a generation ago.
excrescence.
Like the provider of artificial hormones that supplement the diminished supply coursing through the body, the lawyer contrives enforceability to supplement the failing supply of reciprocity, moral obligation, and fellow-feeling…. Lawyers contrive to provide “artificial trust.”… Because lawyers are producers and vendors of impersonal “cool” trust, they are the beneficiaries of the decline of its low-cost rival.
Almost imperceptibly, the treasure that we spend on getting it in writing has steadily expanded since 1970, as has the amount that we spend on getting lawyers to anticipate and manage our disputes. In some respects, this development may be one of the most revealing indicators of the fraying of our social fabric.
For better or worse, we rely increasingly—we are forced to rely increasingly—on formal institutions, and above all on the law, to accomplish what we used to accomplish through informal networks reinforced by generalized reciprocity—that is, through social capital.
cognoscenti,
Some small groups merely provide occasions for individuals to focus on themselves in the presence of others. The social contract binding members together asserts only the weakest of obligations. Come if you have time. Talk if you feel like it. Respect everyone’s opinion. Never criticize. Leave quietly if you become dissatisfied…. We can imagine that [these small groups] really substitute for families, neighborhoods, and broader community attachments that may demand lifelong commitments, when, in fact, they do not.
To go from 1 percent market penetration to 75 percent required nearly seven decades for the telephone; for Internet access the equivalent passage will require little more than seven years.
One truism, however, is this: The timing of the Internet explosion means that it cannot possibly be causally linked to the crumbling of social connectedness described in previous chapters. Voting, giving, trusting, meeting, visiting, and so on had all begun to decline while Bill Gates was still in grade school.
The Internet may be part of the solution to our civic problem, or it may exacerbate it, but the cyberrevolution was not the cause.
Community, communion, and communication are intimately as well as etymologically related.
Communication is a fundamental prerequisite for social and emotional connections.
Internet is a powerful tool for the transmission of information among physically distant people. The tougher question is whether that flow of information itself fosters social capital and genuine community.
four serious challenges to the hope that computer-mediated communication will breed new and improved communities.
The “digital divide”
The second challenge is technically more difficult to resolve. Computer-mediated communication transmits much less nonverbal information than face-to-face communication.
In other words, social capital may turn out to be a prerequisite for, rather than a consequence of, effective computer-mediated communication.
If entry and exit are too easy, commitment, trustworthiness, and reciprocity will not develop.
The third obstacle goes by the evocative label of “cyberbalkanization.”
Real-world interactions often force us to deal with diversity, whereas the virtual world may be more homogeneous, not in demographic terms, but in terms of interest and outlook.
As the new century opens, some of the most exciting work in the field of computer-mediated communication is addressing precisely these issues. In the final chapter of this book, I shall say a bit about some of those prospects. For the moment, I conclude that the Internet will not automatically offset the decline in more conventional forms of social capital, but that it has that potential. In fact, it is hard to imagine solving our contemporary civic dilemmas without computer-mediated communication.
We have invented new ways of expressing our demands that demand less of us.
allowing us to bond easily but to break our attachments with equivalent ease.”
In short, the emergence of two-career families over the last quarter of the twentieth century played a visible but quite modest role in the erosion of social capital and civic engagement.
To sum up: The available evidence suggests that busyness, economic distress, and the pressures associated with two-career families are a modest part of the explanation for declining social connectedness.
At the same time, the evidence also suggests that neither time pressures nor financial distress nor the movement of women into the paid labor force is the primary cause of civic disengagement over the last two decades.
Nevertheless, for people as for plants, frequent repotting disrupts root systems.
In fact, although commuting time is not quite as powerful an influence on civic involvement as education, it is more important than almost any other demographic factor.
Whatever our private preferences, however, metropolitan sprawl appears to have been a significant contributor to civic disengagement over the last three or four decades for at least three distinct reasons.
First, sprawl takes time.
Second, sprawl is associated with increasing social segregation,
Third, most subtly but probably most powerfully, sprawl disrupts community “boundedness.”
When no firm and lasting ties any longer unite men, it is impossible to obtain the cooperation of any great number of them unless you can persuade every man whose help is required that he serves his private interests by voluntarily uniting his efforts to those of all the others. That cannot be done habitually and conveniently without the help of a newspaper. Only a newspaper can put the same thought at the same time before a thousand readers…. So hardly any democratic association can carry on without a newspaper.3
the evidence makes quite clear that newspaper reading and good citizenship go together.
Television, it turns out, is bad for both individualized and collective civic engagement, but it is particularly toxic for activities that we do together.
Nothing—not low education, not full-time work, not long commutes in urban agglomerations, not poverty or financial distress—is more broadly associated with civic disengagement and social disconnection than is dependence on television for entertainment.30
Among equally religious people, those who report that TV is their primary form of entertainment attend church substantially less often.
SO FAR we have discovered that television watching and especially dependence upon television for entertainment are closely correlated with civic disengagement. Correlation, however, does not prove causation.
Television privatizes leisure time.
The apotheosis of these trends can be found, most improbably, at the Holiday Bowling Lanes in New London, Connecticut. Mounted above each lane is a giant television screen displaying the evening’s TV fare. Even on a full night of league play, team members are no longer in lively conversation with one another about the day’s events, public and private. Instead each stares silently at the screen while awaiting his or her turn. Even while bowling together, they are watching alone.
That was when television worked its way into the fabric of American life, when we grew accustomed to the idea of parallel realities—the one that we lived in, the other that we stepped into whenever we wanted a break from our living.
Although 96 percent of boomers were raised in a religious tradition, 58 percent abandoned that tradition, and only about one in three of the apostates have returned.
He traces the growth of depression among younger Americans to “rampant individualism,” coupled with “events that have weakened our commitment to the larger, traditional institutions of our society.”
Individualism need not lead to depression as long as we can fall back on large institutions—religion, country, family. When you fail to reach some of your personal goals, as we all must, you can turn to these larger institutions for hope…. But in a self standing alone without the buffer of larger beliefs, helplessness and failure can all too easily become hopelessness and despair.35
First, the American family structure has changed in several important and potentially relevant ways over the last several decades.
Only two types of organizational affiliations, however, are sufficiently strongly related to marital and parental status to make a real difference in the aggregate: church- and youth-related activities.
