‘The Interview’: Robert Putnam Knows Why You’re Lonely - The New York Times
Length: • 15 mins
Annotated by Matt Abrams
The Interview
The Interview
Credit: Philip Montgomery for The New York Times
More than two decades ago, Robert Putnam became something rare: a celebrity academic. In 2000, he published a groundbreaking book, “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community,” in which he demonstrated, with copious data, that America was transforming from a nation of joiners to a nation of loners — we were going to church less, joining clubs less and, he warned, losing trust in our fellow Americans and our institutions. But even before the book reached shelves, Putnam’s work attracted widespread attention, including from President Bill Clinton, who invited him to the White House. For a moment it seemed as if those in power might work toward reversing the trends Putnam warned about.
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We all know how the story unfolded from there. Putnam, who has spent most of his career as a political scientist at Harvard, is now 83. He has watched as the nation has become more divided, more lonely and less confident about the way forward. That’s why, when I heard about “Join or Die” — a new documentary about Putnam and his work — I knew I wanted to talk to him about where American community stands today.
Your work is all about connection, so I’m wondering first, can you describe your own social life? What clubs are you in? That’s a really embarrassing question. [Laughs] I write about and talk about the importance of connections, but my wife actually does it. She is actually the one who joins everything, who has been a tutor and a teacher and a terrific mother and an even better grandmother. In the long run, her work is going to have a longer half-life than mine, because those kids are going to be around long after people have forgotten anything about this Putnam.
Part of why I was interested in having this conversation with you is that when it comes to social connection, things feel bad right now. Do things feel bad to you too? I think we’re in a really important turning point in American history. What I wrote in “Bowling Alone” is even more relevant now. Because what we’ve seen over the last 25 years is a deepening and intensifying of that trend. We’ve become more socially isolated, and we can see it in every facet in our lives. We can see it in the surgeon general’s talk about loneliness. He’s been talking recently about the psychological state of being lonely. Social isolation leads to lots of bad things. It’s bad for your health, but it’s really bad for the country, because people who are isolated, and especially young men who are isolated, are vulnerable to the appeals of some false community. I can cite chapter and verse on this: Eager recruits to the Nazi Party in the 1930s were lonely young German men, and it’s not an accident that the people who are attracted today to white nationalist groups are lonely young white men. Loneliness. It’s bad for your health, but it’s also bad for the health of the people around you.
I want to understand a little bit about the terms that you use for how you describe this. You distinguish between two types of social capital, right? There’s bonding social capital and there’s bridging social capital. Ties that link you to people like yourself are called bonding social capital. So, my ties to other elderly, male, white, Jewish professors — that’s my bonding social capital. And bridging social capital is your ties to people unlike yourself. So my ties to people of a different generation or a different gender or a different religion or a different politic or whatever, that’s my bridging social capital. I’m not saying “bridging good, bonding bad,” because if you get sick, the people who bring you chicken soup are likely to reflect your bonding social capital. But I am saying that in a diverse society like ours, we need a lot of bridging social capital. And some forms of bonding social capital are really awful. The K.K.K. is pure social capital — bonding social capital can be very useful, but it can also be extremely dangerous. So far, so good, except that bridging social capital is harder to build than bonding social capital. That’s the challenge, as I see it, of America today.
We want community, and yet there’s something that takes us away from community. Why? There are two ways of answering that question. The first answer is we’re busy. And you might think therefore busy people are going to be more online and less face to face. But here’s what’s complicated about that theory. When we look to see who is a joiner and who is not a joiner — who connects in real life, bowling leagues or Kiwanis or women’s reading groups or whatever — and I compared that to how busy they were, the fact is busy people are more connected with the rest of the world. If you’re asking, “Why do we have people no longer connecting face to face,” it absolutely is not because we’re too busy.
So what is it? So I know you ask an academic a simple question and they answer with an encyclopedia, and the next thing that academics always do is cite their most recent book, so that’s what I’m going to do. My most recent book is called “The Upswing.” I wrote it jointly with a brilliant young woman named Shaylyn Romney Garrett. We looked at long-run trends in connectedness, trends in loneliness, that sort of thing, over the last 125 years. And the short version is, it’s an upside-down U curve. We were socially isolated and distrustful in the early 1900s, but then there was a turning point, and then we had a long upswing from roughly 1900 or 1910 till roughly 1965, and that was the peak of our social capital. People were more trusting then, they were more connected then, they were more likely to be married then, they were more likely to join clubs then, etc. And then for the next 50 years, that trend turned around. “Bowling Alone” looked at that single trend, but this new book not only extends the length of time but also looks at three other variables. First, political polarization.
OK. That trend in political depolarization follows the same pattern exactly that the trends in social connectedness follow: low in the beginning of the 20th century, high in the ’60s and then plunging to where we are now. So now we have a very politically polarized country, just as we did 125 years ago. The next dimension is inequality. America was very unequal in what was called the Gilded Age, in the 1890s and 1900s, but then that turned around, and the level of equality in America went up until the middle ’60s. In the middle ’60s, America was more equal economically than socialist Sweden! And then beginning in 1965, that turns around and we plunge and now we’re back down to where we were. We’re in a second Gilded Age. And the third variable that we look at is harder to discuss and measure, but it’s sort of culture. To what extent do we think that we’re all in this together, or it’s every man for himself, or every man or woman? And that has exactly the same trend. What caused that? I am trying to get to the issues of causation because it turns out to be morality, according to my reading of this evidence. What stands upstream of all these other trends is morality, a sense that we’re all in this together and that we have obligations to other people. Now, suddenly, I’m no longer the social scientist, I’m a preacher. I’m trying to say, we’re not going to fix polarization, inequality, social isolation until, first of all, we start feeling we have an obligation to care for other people. And that’s not easy, so don’t ask me how to do that.
I would imagine that people come to you a lot, asking for solutions about how to feel less lonely on an individual level. And the thesis of this new documentary about your life is: Join a club. How does having fun in a running club, for example, translate to democracy? How does that small germ of social connection in a club then translate to “I believe in this whole experiment?” My work, and this movie, is designed to show you how it is that joining a club — even a trivial pinochle club or whatever — does help democracy. That’s what my work is designed to show. It’s only by connecting with other people that we generalize from our experience. In the running club, you learn that you can trust other people, and learn in a way what you need to do to maintain that trust.
The idea is that you’re running with someone, you learn that you can care for people and people can care for you, even people that are different, and therefore, you’re more likely to then trust that government and institutions are actually working to help you, too? Yes, but I would say that the causal sequence is you begin with trusting other people, and the trusting in other people produces a government that’s trustworthy. The virtue here is not trust, it’s trustworthiness. That sounds like a silly difference, but trust without trustworthiness is just gullibility. I’m not an advocate of pure, blind trust. I’m an advocate of trustworthiness. I want other people to be trustworthy of my trust, and I want the government to be trustworthy.
Does it matter what kind of a club you join? Is there a tension between what might be more enjoyable for you and what might be better in terms of saving American democracy? That’s a tough question, and I’m not sure I have any answer to it. It’s got to be fun. I mean, building social capital is not like castor oil — “you’ve got to take it because it’s good for you, even though it feels awful.” It ought to be fun. I am famous as the advocate of bowling clubs, but you don’t bowl so you can build a better community, you bowl because it’s fun. And in the doing of the bowling, in a team, you’re hanging out with folks and sometimes you’re talking about the latest TV show, or occasionally you might talk about the garbage pickup in town. And that’s democracy. Doing democracy doesn’t just mean — of course it means voting or it means organizing. I’m a political scientist, so I’m not opposed to that. I’m just saying, Don’t think the way to save democracy is just to set out to save democracy.
This is top-of-mind because we’re in an election year, and this collective experience that we’re all having of feeling disconnected and alone and angry and upset has bigger ramifications than just my own feeling of that. Absolutely it does. I should say, even though I am a liberal Democrat, much of my work has actually been supportive of and supported by people on the other side of the aisle. So, I have a track record of not being partisan, but I am on the issue of Trump, because I think the MAGA movement is different. Partly because it doesn’t do bridging social capital. I mean, that’s part of my diagnosis.
It does bonding social capital. It basically tries to find people that are like themselves and exclude the other. And not only exclude the other but vilify the other and glorify the fact that it is bonding social capital. I mean, that captures the essence of the Trump movement, that they hate bridging social capital and they love their bonding social capital. They glorify that they alone have the truth.
So what is the causality here? Are we politically polarized because we are less connected, or are we less connected because we are politically polarized? Yes. By that I mean life is not all one-way cause and effect. It is a vicious circle that we’re caught in now. If you tried to fix one single strand, it wouldn’t be enough, because the other strands would work against that. I don’t have any simple solutions to that. Sorry, did you invite me here because you thought I was going to solve all of America’s problems? [Laughs]
I was hoping. I was told you were a sage! OK, last question. And then I have one for you.
OK. When I’m listening to you talk with this passion, I’m thinking about, in the documentary, you sitting at the table with President Clinton, and you must have felt at that moment as if your message was going to be received. You must have felt so hopeful at that point. Sure, and in fact, I felt even more that way about Barack Obama. I was incredibly hopeful about Barack Obama, not just because of who he was, but because I actually knew him well. Until he became president, he called me Bob and I called him Barack.
And yet, I hear you, and your passion is so great, and I’m moved by it, frankly. But here we are. Yeah. So, I don’t know. You shouldn’t think I’ve never asked myself that question. One way to put it is this: Twenty-five years ago, I essentially predicted everything that was going to happen. That’s a little exaggerated, but not much. And yet they happened. I’ve been a little bit of an Isaiah, preaching how awful things are. One person once said I was like an Old Testament prophet with charts. I’ve been working for most of my adult life to try to build a better, more productive, more equal, more connected community in America, and now I’m 83 and looking back, and it’s been a total failure. Should I be optimistic or pessimistic about the future? I don’t know that I’m optimistic or pessimistic. Honestly, looking at the polls today, I could be pretty pessimistic. But I am hopeful, because I can see how we could change it, and I’m doing my damnedest, including right this moment, to try to change the course of history. I’m sorry, that’s very self-important and I apologize for that, but I’m telling you honestly how I feel. I don’t mean to sound cynical, it’s just, What can I do? I tried my damnedest to sketch a way forward, but I’ve not been persuasive enough.
Well, maybe it’s just that one man can’t do it alone. We need community. [Laughs] You’re right!
What is your question? You started your journalism career at the end of the 20th century, just about the time that “Bowling Alone” was released. Suppose you didn’t know me at all and didn’t know the book, but you were trying to describe how you think American society has changed. What’s changed?
I came here in 2017 from having lived overseas, and the things that I had seen in other places that I had not seen here before, I started to see here. Families turning against each other, friendships broken, politics invading every part of people’s lives. And I think, as you say, to turn that around is a hard and herculean task. It’s interesting that we have very different careers and origins and so on, but — I have actually seen an America that was better. So I know it doesn’t have to be this way. It doesn’t mean I know how to get out of here. But America as a whole has been in good times. We have trusted one another. That’s what my books show. We’ve trusted one another, we’ve loved one another, we’ve been equal to one another. We even began to reach across racial lines — I mean, it’s not an accident that the civil rights movement comes at the peak of this upswing. So I know that we can do better, and I know that we’ve turned corners in the past.
We’ve come back from worse. There’s no question that you can turn a corner. But you asked me in my lifetime what I had seen, and I’m afraid the trajectory hasn’t been on an upswing. And I think that’s what your data shows too. Sure does.
It’s not just the vibes. [Laughs] I don’t do vibes. I do data.
Putnam spoke with me again the next day, from his home in New Hampshire.
I was thinking about our conversation, and what struck me is, to me, politics has changed since you started researching this. Our disagreements aren’t just intellectual anymore. They feel fundamental and existential to many people. And the remedies that are being proposed, like “join a club,” don’t seem practical because people don’t want to spend time with folks who seem to threaten their very way of life. There’s a debate among academics: Which comes first, the elite polarizing us or the mass public polarizing? And there’s two sides, there are debates about that, but there’s a strong argument in my view that this is top-down. The reason people feel the way they do, that they don’t want to hang out with people who differ from them, is because those are the messages they’re getting from their political leaders. There are people who want to join clubs and they really are happy in those groups and they’re not talking about politics. Most people in America don’t care about politics.
Even now? Even now. If you ask people, what are the things that you were worried about in your daily life? Politics is bottom of the list. Most people don’t wake up in the morning thinking, Oh, I wish I could stick it to those abortionists or whatever. Most people, they wake up thinking about their marriage or their kids or the local sports team or whatever. Then they turn on the news and the news is telling them that A) they should be concerned about public affairs, politics; and, B) people telling them what to think. The polarization that we’re talking about is mainly provoked from above, to some extent by media, but mostly by political leaders.
Let’s say you got to sit with the next president. What are the top policy solutions you would recommend to help remedy social isolation? About 125 years ago, what was called the “boy problem” was a big problem. It was a problem of boys who were getting in trouble and raising trouble for the country as a whole. And to address that problem, a burst of new associations directed at boys were invented. Big Brothers, and the organization called Boys Clubs, now called Boys and Girls Clubs, it started in 1906. And Boy Scouts. Now, what do I infer from that? This goes back to my understanding of why we would look at that period, the progressive era. Folks in that era were concerned about the same problem we are now. That is, loner males, boys especially, were getting in trouble and causing the country trouble. And nowadays it’s exactly those loner males, young loner males who are drawn to white nationalism and violence. So if I were talking to the president, either president, and said: How do we solve this problem of white nationalism and violence and terrorism in America? We have to begin early in life, and that means thinking of new ways — not the Boy Scouts or whatever. But what did the Boy Scouts and those other groups do that was so neat? They combined something that was fun — camping or whatever else Boy Scouts did — with moral indoctrination. “A Scout is trustworthy, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful” — I could do this once.
I love that you still remember most of it. All the boys in my generation remembered it, because you had to, it was a pledge. “A Scout is trustworthy, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent.” [Putnam only missed one: “loyal.”] Now some of that sounds, you know, “thrifty” sounds a little dated. But “trustworthy” isn’t, that’s not wrong. We need somebody as bright as the people who invented those institutions now for the 21st century to think about something that’s fun, that will actually be enjoyable for the kids but also throw in a dose of character education.
You’ve sounded frustrated with the lack of progress your work has led to. Why do you think it has been so hard to get people from reading your book and understanding your argument to actually doing something about it? I wish I knew the answer to that question. It’s a really tough problem, because it’s all entangled with a lot of the features of contemporary society. You can’t just fix one thing. And the fact that we’re divided as a country — or at least think we’re divided — makes it even harder to fix. For the last 25 years, more than two-thirds of my time has not been spent doing research or writing books. What have I been doing with my time? The answer is I, first of all, ran something called the Saguaro Seminar, which tried really hard to get smart people, both practitioners and intellectuals, together to figure out these problems. And of all things I’ve done, that’s probably the biggest failure. A lot of smart people in that group, and we still couldn’t crack the problem. That was my try, and it didn’t work. And then the other thing I’ve spent a ton of time on: I’ve traveled to every state and to hundreds of towns, big towns and little towns, all across America. Probably over those 25 years, hundreds of thousands of people I’ve personally spoken to. There are some groups, largely around community foundations across America, that actually are now, they would tell you, following my agenda for trying to fix their communities, who have spent a lot of their time over the last 20 years trying to do what I said they should do. Has that made a difference? I don’t know. I’d be hard pressed to make the case. But that’s, you know — believe me, I’m more aware than you are of my failures.
This interview has been edited and condensed from two conversations. Listen to and follow “The Interview” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Amazon Music or The New York Times Audio app.
Director of photography (video): Zackary Canepari