Bowling Alone - the collapse and revival of American community
Robert D. Putnam Simon & Schuster 2000

We will not hide our massive disappointment. Yet one more Ivy League blockbuster with steel-capped pretensions to intellectual and moral superiority that just cannot cut ice. An inebriation of data; an avalanche of examples; a crescendo of small-print, references, charts, tables, graphs; and a chilling poverty of analysis. Yes, it's all here and it's that bad.

Run with us, dear reader. Scream with us if you want. We will understand. But we cannot spare you any horrors. Bowling Alone is just plain diabolically bad. And so you must be prepared to confront all the shrill little demons that sheer mental torpor can put on to your page in the disguise of apparently obvious truths.

Let's not bowl alone. Let's just think alone instead. Come, if you will, to the opening of Chapter 16, page 287.

"By virtually every conceivable measure, social capital has eroded steadily and sometimes dramatically over the past two generations. The quantitative evidence is overwhelming, yet most Americans did not need to see charts and graphs to know that something bad has been happening in their communities and in their country. Americans have had a growing sense at some visceral level of disintegrating social bonds".

Note the tone of colossal self-confidence. Note the invitation not to argue with any of the research - indeed the invitation not even to bother with research. Note the swerving of the appeal away from people's brains and into their guts. Come on, America. You know I am right. No need to study facts. I have tons of facts if you want them. But just go with your instincts and agree with me.

The author, let us recall, is a Professor at Harvard University! The mental manipulation, explicit in this tone of wilful and conspiratorial anti-intellectualism, is a disgrace to his calling. Throughout this grotesquely long book, he regularly nudges proper discourse into the shadows of gut-feel, tabloid sentimentality, national neurosis.

Yet one more merchant of an elusively indefinable but strangely omnipresent malaise, Putnam dishonours his audience by either trying to press them into agreement under a hail of data-pellets or by inflating - and, in a way, praising - any feeling of loss or bereavement, whether justified or not, that the American social order may now contain. Towards the end of Bowling Alone (p. 402), Putnam says to us : "At the outset of our enquiry, I noted that most Americans today feel vaguely and uncomfortably disconnected". Not only is this not actually proven in the analysis, but also Putnam seems to know perfectly well that so much of his thesis cannot be actually measured (certainly not by the techniques he uses). And so he just slips back into we-all-know-there-is something-wrong-don't-we-folks mode. We were appalled.

Bowling Alone is by now a famous and successful book, well-received so we understand in policy-making circles in the US and Europe. The subject matter is the apparent decline in social capital in America, a decline so steep that an entire nation has been left both with weakened institutions and with a much enfeebled capacity to handle social problems. The author's aim is to prove that the decline is measurably genuine, to locate the true sources of the decline and to prescribe how the decline can be reversed for the good of all in a mix of public and private initiatives, stretching across the generation ahead.

The culprits are, according to Putnam, variously : time-pressures in two-income families; suburbanisation and sprawl; television watching; and finally something called "generational change" (sic). Across the analysis, the willingness of Americans to join in group activity - in their neighbourhoods, in their workplaces, in their democracy at large - is put under the social research microscope. Wherever one looks, bonds are weakening, solidarity is in disrepair, community is less and less. The result is "this sense of civic malaise" which all "ordinary Americans" have to come to know. This is the argument. This is how we, the Americans, have come to be bowling alone.

But right from the very start, one feels very uncomfortable with all this.

One of the first examples given is the falling membership of a local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. But what could be more natural in a society that has long felt the benign impact of the civil rights movement than a decline in civil rights activism? Is this really a very telling example of some kind of failure? It could be just as persuasively read as an index of progress, no?

Later, the fall in union membership is also noted and deprecated. "By the end of the twentieth century…... this once central element in the social life of working Americans had virtually vanished. The solidarity of union halls is now mostly a fading memory of ageing men". But what is so odd about the de-syndicalisation of a society in which incomes have risen, jobs have been plentiful, corporate management has become arguably more enlightened? Unions, like the NAACP, are simply needed less as forms of personal insurance for families and communities. Clubs, like unions, serve a transactional purpose within any social order - especially one where individuals do not feel strong on their own. But surely the very notion of transactional activity is dynamic : as social conditions change/improve, as families grow (in this sense) stronger through income and asset growth, as entertainment options multiply (especially in the home), as homes become nicer places to be, so the appetite for membership must shift accordingly. No?

And wait for this. Putnam wonders out loud at one point if too much government is responsible for civic disengagement. Broadly, he concludes not but adds :-

"….some government policies have almost certainly had the effect of destroying social capital. For example, the so-called slum clearance policies of the 1950's and 1960's replaced physical capital but destroyed social capital by disrupting community ties…...".

Sorry? Are we hearing this right? So the slums were home to the kind of positive community culture that the whole of America has now lost? The slums? The slums? This is liberal intellectualism spinning very badly out of control. What Putnam's argument becomes is a defence of any form of group bonding or solidarity? No matter what the circumstances, no matter what the objective purpose or value of the group activity. Just as he goes all wistful over the slums, so he finds something to praise in virtually any organisation from the Zionist Organisation of America to the Southern Appalachian Dulcimer Association (sic).

Even the sad decline in the membership of the Women's Christian Temperance Union (founded 1900) gets an honourable mention. Does all this sound right to you? What could be more natural that less collectivism in the way we live now? Why should clubs - like brands, companies, tv programmes - not be expected to fade if their offer no longer connects with the audience's ambitions, hopes, requirements?

And sometimes Professor Putnam himself, as we imply above, seems suddenly unsure of himself in the middle of all this. Strangely telling remarks sometimes shoot across the page like escaped tarantulas from the den of better, unspoken truths.

In chapter 9, he is reflecting on whether new modern social movements have maybe taken up the slack created by the evaporation of old forms of membership. Note the emphatic but firmly unpersuasive phrasing :-

"…I know of no evidence that actual participation in grassroots movements has grown in the past few decades to offset the massive declines in more conventional forms of social and political participation".

Mmm…. Now, back in chapter 5 (all about human connections in the workplace), Putnam puts his full authority once more behind his own ersatz ignorance :-

"… I know of no evidence whatever that socialising in the workplace, however common, has actually increased in the last several decades. Indeed, of all the domains of social and community connectedness surveyed in this book, systematic long-term evidence on workplace-based connections has proven most difficult to find".

Does the Professor, whose notes and appendices at the back of his book run to over 100 pages, really think that the phrase "I know of no evidence…" is good enough for his reader?

In this same chapter, he actually slips in the line : "…in this particular area, we lack definitive evidence one way or the other". And in the chapter on "Reciprocity, Honesty and Trust" - mega-themes surely for the bowling-alone theory - he has to conclude : "It is not easy to sort out what's going on here (sic)". And, the most monstrous cheek of all, he confesses in the chapter entitled "Informal social connections" that - cop this - "Strictly speaking, only poetic license authorizes my description of non-league bowling as 'bowling alone". Sorry???

Just in case you think we are being cruelly selective, we have to tell you that there are plenty of phrases and references like the above which stumble into the presentation like so many over-refreshed gatecrashers. Little disclaimers, little apologies, little defence mechanisms. Yeugh!

If you want to make the claim that your ideas should influence policy - as Putnam clearly does - you have a profound responsibility to your reader. This responsibility is not fully met, in our view, in Bowling Alone. To amass vats of data and to pour them over the reader like lumpy porridge is just not good enough. Putnam makes a good inventory here of the all the cultural clutter still to be found in America's closet. But that is just not the same as proving that there has been serious loss of human value within that society over the past fifty years. Maybe there has been such a loss. But, after reading this book, let us say that we "know of no evidence".