Just I and me
They are still out there. Moose Lodge #whatever, or the Elks, relics of a 19th century, white- male America that survive somehow in the 21st. Like Mother’s Day that way, another quaint 19th century tradition that holds on in a time when Americans in increasing numbers harbor suspicions about one another and mutual mistrust is more persistent than inflation.
Ian Ward writes at Politico:
“National divorce” — a term that frames America’s current political crises as symptoms of a deeper social breakup — is suddenly a well-worn phrase. Over a quarter of Americans believe that it might soon be necessary to take up arms against their government. It would be a shocking number if not for the violent assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Ward explores the national mood with Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam (“Bowling Alone,” 2000). Putnam examined the meaning behind the decline of civic organizations like the Moose and the Elks. Social capital in decline.
Putnam told the Denver Post in 2000:
“Virtually every measure of social interaction is down, big time, over the last 25 years.” The most vivid illustration of the trend, Putnam suggests, may be the decrease in league bowling, which has plummeted more than 40 percent since 1980, even though the total number of bowlers in the United States has risen 10 percent – hence the notion of “Bowling Alone.” But regular surveys of consumer behavior, he says, chronicle similar declines in numerous other indicators of social engagement, from church attendance to charitable giving to membership in what he jokingly calls “the animal clubs” (Lions, Elks, Moose, Eagles, etc.).
Even the tradition of having people over for dinner has fallen by 40 percent, he reports.
Putnam believes what’s needed to restore social trust in our griftopian age of Trumpism (“fuck your feelings”), QAnon, and insurrection is a renewed sense of morality:
“I know this sounds really mushy — and I didn’t always believe this — but the data and the history have convinced us that the leading indicator [for societal change] is a sense of morality,” says Putnam when I call him at his home in Cambridge, Mass. “We need a moral reawakening of America. That’s upstream from political choices.”
In Putnam’s mind, that fact is — believe it or not — an enduring source of hope. Although the empirical measurements of social and political trust are continuing to decline, Putnam says, he finds hope in the arguments of young political activists like David Hogg and Greta Thunberg, whose visions of political change are premised on a broader moral transformation of society.
Social capital bottomed out at the end of the 19th century, Putnam argues. What followed in the transition from the Gilded Age to the Progressive Era was an upswing in trust lasting “from the first decade or so of the 20th century until the 1960s.” We may not see another turn of that cycle, but “the 20th century proves that it’s possible to reverse these declines.”
Contra conventional wisdom, Putnam’s research indicates that economics is not the driver of policies “and everything else.”
To me, the astonishing fact was that the leading indicator was actually cultural and moral factors. The first thing that changed was that ordinary Americans became convinced — some through religion, others not — that they had a moral duty to worry about other people, and their morality changed from an “I” morality to a “we” morality. Conversely, the first thing that turned in the other direction [in the 1960s] was actually our sense of moral obligation orders. We went from a “we” society to an “I” society.
Follow that through for a minute, because that’s a very different causal story. This is a narrative in which first of all, people change their hearts. I know this sounds really mushy — and I didn’t always believe this — but the data and the history have convinced us that the leading indicator is a sense of morality. We need a moral reawakening of America. That’s upstream from political choices. It’s only when people begin to think, “Oh, I have an obligation to other people,” that they begin to support parties and policies that actually do close the economic gap.
Trumpism and its grievances are, as I’ve written, “an extension of that unholy amalgam of Jesus Christ, Ayn Rand, and Horatio Alger that passes for Christianity for a lot of Americans, with an unhealthy dose of white nationalism now added to the mix.” It’s not testosterone poisoning as much as an overdose of Americans’ Marlboro-Man, libertarian individualism. Every man for himself run amuck. There’s no we in doomsday-prepper arming for civil war America, just I and me.
It’s the Hoggs and the Thunbergs who give Putnam hope.
“That youth moralizing movement has had a real effect on real policies.” I’m hopeful that he’s right.