Keep up with everything happening in The Commons by signing up for our Philanthropy Today newsletter and joining our Commons LinkedIn group.
Robert Putnam — whom the New York Times dubbed the “poet laureate of civil society” — diagnosed America’s failing civic health a quarter century ago. So it stands to reason that he has a remedy.
In Bowling Alone, Putnam’s landmark 2000 book, the Harvard social scientist documented plummeting social engagement, increasing isolation, and growing divides — all dangerous trends. “People divorced from community, occupation, and association are first and foremost among the supporters of extremism” he wrote.
Since then, Putnam has criss-crossed the country, exploring what civic revival might look like. “I have talked to at least a half million people,” he says. In 2020, he wrote a follow-up with Shaylyn Romney Garrett, The Upswing, which argued that civic repairs can be found in Progressive Era reforms of the early 1900s, another period of inequality and division.
To share what he has learned, we paired Putnam with Citizen University CEO Eric Liu, who studied with the scholar as a graduate student. Liu, in fact, was assigned to read draft chapters of Bowling Alone. Today, Liu, a former speechwriter in the Clinton White House, is a top leader in the movement to rebuild America’s civic strength.
Here’s a short excerpt from their conversation, edited for clarity and brevity. You can also listen to the full conversation.
Eric Liu: If you look at the ecosystem today, one quarter-century after you wrote Bowling Alone, does it look sicker or healthier than it was in the late ’90s?
Robert Putnam: Much sicker. We’ve done the research. Those declining lines of group membership and trust, family connections, etc. — have they gone up or down? Eric, it’s almost a straight line. Nothing has happened despite my efforts. In a sense, I feel like I’m a failure because I’ve been trying for 25 years to get people to listen, to join, to trust, and so on.
Liu: In The Upswing, you describe how during the Progressive Era, we did change the direction of the country. It swung from “I” to “we,” and associational life rebounded and bloomed. You suggest it could happen again.
Putnam: America in the late 1800s was in a predicament very much like the one we are in now — very high inequality, very high political polarization, very high social isolation, and very high self-centeredness.
Then, in a short period of time, roughly speaking from 1900 to 1920, we turned it around. I don’t mean America became a marvelous place overnight; we ignored — then and now — issues of race. But we changed the direction, which is what we want to do now.
What happened was called the “social gospel.” It was initially a religious movement. I’m not deeply religious, but I can look at history and see that the social gospel advocates said, “Look at the Sermon on the Mount; it’s not about glorifying rich people. It’s harder for a rich person to get into heaven than for a camel to pass through an eye of a needle.” Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount said worry about the least [of us]. That social gospel changed the attention of some evangelical Protestants towards focusing on society and not just salvation, and it spread very rapidly.
I’m not saying that the other symptoms are not worth worrying about. Inequality — we’ve got to worry about that. Polarization — we’ve got to worry about that. But what was upstream the last time we fixed things was the sense that we are all in this together, and we all have a stake in everybody’s success — a very simple, moral principle.
Liu: What would you counsel the world of philanthropy?
Putnam: First, young people. Young people are better at leading revolutions. Old people are better at knowing that we need revolutions.
Kids have never lived in a period in which things were getting better. Old people have the advantage of knowing that it doesn’t have to be this way, but they are not the people who know what to do next.
Speaking to the philanthropists: This doesn’t mean making sure that you’ve got a young person on your board. That is not it. It means taking young people seriously, not as wallpaper. All their answers are not right, but they are more likely to have the right answers than older people. Listen to them.
Second, local. The last time we did this and turned it around, it was not people at Harvard or people, frankly, in the elite places of America. The innovations of the Progressive Era that were really important happened in fly-over counties and in small towns. It was not a top-down movement. It was a bottom-up movement. It was not mainly a political movement.
Liu: You’ve made a persuasive case that your grandkids are coming of age in an America that is far more dystopian than even what we might imagine today. Could you give me the persuasive case for the opposite?
Putnam: I’m optimistic. In the last five years or so, you can see sparks of increasing engagement by young people. For example, the rate of election participation in recent national elections was higher than the youth engagement had ever been since — wait for it — 1910, the last time we were coming out of this thing. That’s what it looks like.
I’m on the board of the American Exchange Project, a group focused on giving high school seniors one week living in the shoes of another group of high school kids who live very differently. They take kids from Wellesley, Mass., and they spend a week hanging out with some kids down in the bayous of south Texas — they’re different politically, different racially, different economically. Then the kids from South Texas come up and go to Red Sox games.
It’s amazing what that does. It’s only a week, but it opens their eyes to a completely different socioeconomic group. Astonishingly, in a short period of time, it creates a sense of connection with people who are different from them in every possible way.
That is what it will look like when we turn things around. It will look like young people who have developed close personal relationships with people who live differently from them, in different places from them, who worship different gods or don’t even worship at all in a formal religious sense. That’s why I’m optimistic.
The Commons is financed in part with philanthropic support from the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, Einhorn Collaborative, and JPB Foundation. None of our supporters have any control over or input into story selection, reporting, or editing, and they do not review articles before publication. See more about the Chronicle, the grants, how our foundation-supported journalism works, and our gift-acceptance policy.
