Bowling Alone revisited
I’m unfamiliar with the site and the author, but this article certainly is interesting. I’m curious what you all think of it. The title is “Bowling Alone: How Washington Has Helped Destroy American Civil Society and Family Life.”
I’m familiar with the original “bowling alone” thesis; the book was published in 2000. The article is written by someone else and is a much more recent piece, although I can’t find a date on it.
One of my sons is on a bowling league. He got a bunch of his friends to sign up. They all love it and have a great time every week!
When I need to do a long quote in a comment, since I type so slowly, I usually type the first sentence into a search engine and look for where someone else has already quoted it. The place I found the Arendt quote I used in the open thread also mentioned “Bowling Alone” a book I haven’t thought about in years and today it turns up twice in a few hours. I guess I’ll have to have another look at it.
geoffb:
Interesting synchronicity.
Another synchronicity is that I spent most, 45 years, of my working life as a large [68 lane] bowling center mechanic. I’m the guy that made sure people could enjoy themselves and not have to think about what went on to make it happen.
I witnessed the decline talked about in the book first hand.
I got through the intro and the first section, and plan to come back to the piece.
So Neo was searching for some .357 mag. ammo, and stumbled across this article?
At the end of the first section we have this,
Putnam lays the blame at the foot of technology. Television, and to a much greater extent, the Internet, …
The Bowling Alone book came out in 2000, but a very nice film was released in 1990, directed by Barry Levinson, called Avalon. It chronicles the demise of the family unit over several decades, through the influence of television.
I did a little bowling in my distant past, and while I’d never been on a league, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of, or witnessed, someone bowling alone. It strikes me as a couple notches descended from drinking alone. Which, by the way, is one of the points of bowling: Getting together with some pals, drinking beer, and bowling.
Putnam is a liberal social scientist (oxymoron, I know) at Haahvaahd. His more recent (2015) book Our Kids was a devastating description of what’s happened to the American Dream between the middle of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st century. I found it fascinating, which prompted me to go back are read Bowling Alone, which was also worth reading. Putnam seems to be an astute observer of the phenomena he describes, which makes the books essential reading for anyone seriously interested in what’s been going on. His description of the changes in his own home town in Our Kids has a very poignant feel. Of course, the most important take away for both books is that national (or even state) level government can do virtually nothing effective to reverse what ails our society: what matters is voluntary association and community which it builds, on many dimensions, including religious and social. Self-help among families, neighbors and within communities is crucial. The level of social trust in a society is crucial. The more homogeneous a society, the greater the likelihood of substantial social trust. The more multicultural a society is, the lower the social trust in the society. Reliance on formal government rather than local solutions lessens social trust. The really short answer to our societal decline is that it had roots in Wilsonian Progressivism, began in earnest with the New Deal welfare state and really kicked into high gear with the Great Society. Sounds simplistic. Perhaps a bit, but I don’t think it’s essentially unfair. I’d also recommend Amity Schlaes’ books on the New Deal (The Forgotten Man) and the Great Society (Great Society: A New History). The latter is especially important to understand the role of Walter Reuther and Big Labor in the growth of both ‘60s radicalism (SDS) and the Johnson Great Society.
It’s frustrating as one who lived through the ‘60s to have to point out that all of the really negative things the Republicans and others, including many religious leaders, warned would be the result of the implementation of the Welfare State have come to pass.
TommyJay, I don’t think he means people are literally bowling alone; they’re just going over occasionally with family or friends, not joining a league.
I agree with the comments in the article about the black middle class. Instead of being concentrated in black-only communities, they’re now dispersed out in society in general, like my neighborhood. This is good for them, and for society in general, but the low-income black population is now without that social cohesiveness and example provided by the old black-only neighborhoods.
Smaller families is also a factor…traditionally, kid friendships led to parental friendships, and vice versal.
Smaller families also are part of the fear of so many parents about schools reopening. It’s cold and callous but in the past families had 6,7,8 kids always knowing that there is a chance that some of the children would die very young. Now so many women wait until their thirties to have children and then have only one and they become hyper vigilant about threats real and perceived.
Smaller families is a thread that runs through many social issues of our time.
I’ve disliked bowling since my abusive bully of a father tried to force me to like it; but if ever I did try it again, I would definitely bowl alone. People suck.
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Kate, Your comment is completely reasonable, but both of Neo’s links state clearly that people are bowling alone. I didn’t see any coloring of that in the surrounding verbiage. I also overstated my point. I think I can recall seeing very good bowlers bowling by themselves so as to maintain their skills or just for pleasure.
The commentary on economics and charity or mutual aid caught my interest. While a considerable amount of manufacturing has been pushed out of the U.S. into other countries, the U.S. still retains a considerable amount. The problem is that the labor involved in that manufacturing has largely disappeared through automation or just labor saving machinery.
While I’m probably repeating an older comment, General Motors corp., pre-bankruptcy, was once referred to as a healthcare company that makes automobiles as a sideline. While discouraged under the Trump admin., Ford Motors is now building new plants in Mexico under the Biden admin. Because it is nice to have an auto factory where the main expenses pertain to building autos.
The mutual aid societies are a new concept for me. I always associated traditional charity with churches. In the early 70’s I read detailed discussions of the contrast between gov. welfare and traditional charity, not long after the Great Society was moving into a higher gear. The author here, Sam Jacobs, makes persuasive points that are similar to those I read in the past.
For example, I don’t think Democrat politicians these days have the slightest care about welfare monies going to undeserving people because those folks can become reliable members of the party’s voter base too. Maybe even more reliable than the deserving welfare recipients.
I used to travel a lot on business and quickly learned to always bring a book when dining alone. I also found seeking out art house movie theaters and seeing indie films was a nice way to pass a solitary evening.
Most bowling leagues formed around a group of people who had some other outside connection with each other. Many were people who worked everyday together and the league was a time to get together outside of work. Bowling alone doesn’t have to mean completely alone but doing it not as part of some larger group that has an outside social connection.
It is the larger social groups that have broken down. Even in a workplace if there is a constant turnover of people then it is harder to have good social connections as many of the others will be so new that they are still strangers.
This goes with That:
https://orthosphere.wordpress.com/2021/05/21/those-who-remember-and-forget-as-i-do-are-my-nation/
Provided without (much) further comment as the URL thing speaks for itself.
Quote is from one Ernest Renan who also wrote another book which was quite the cause celebre when it came out.
We’re all Solipsists… singly or in our nations. Just some of us know it and some of us don’t.
To comment on just one issue the author raises, the decline in church attendance is worrying. I’m not a person of faith, but watching the rise of the cult-like BLM and CRT during the pandemic, I can’t help wondering if lack of faith has made modern populations more susceptible to these empty ideologies.
It seemed clear to me that many of the peaceful protesters thought they were doing good just putting themselves “out there”, making their statement against racism. Maybe they just craved that feeling of goodness. As for those more intense, including the violent and destructive, I doubt we’ll ever know the extent to which the pandemic unbalanced people’s thinking. I think ideological craziness emerged due to people’s need for faith and social cohesion, influenced by the restriction and stress of the pandemic.
All of the author’s points are sobering, and so complex they don’t seem remotely fixable.
The Ammo site has an extensive library of on-line publications, in addition to selling ammo.
https://ammo.com/articles
Mutual aid societies, as the post states, are a very old institution.
Christian communities, at the very beginning and for many centuries afterwards, also served as full-service mutual aid organizations, in parallel with the ones extant in their non-Christian cities and states (there weren’t yet nations in the modern sense).
The cohesiveness of churches, cited at the beginning of the article, was not just because of shared religious dogma, but because they mutually aided their membership, as many still try to do.
(Note: the author mentions both Latter-day Saints and Mormons, apparently unaware that it’s the same Church. The aid structures are not as ubiquitous as in the 19th- and early 20th-century, but they are still larger than most denominations aside from the Catholics.)
Burial societies were very common in the past (you bought a pre-paid plan and then the morticians handled all the details after you passed (nobody ever died in polite conversation), ensuring that you wouldn’t be interred in the pauper’s cemetery section).
What I didn’t know is that the government deliberately throttled their reach as an anti-competitive maneuver to enforce the welfare policies that have destroyed the country.
Oligarchs Delenda Est.
https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/20/regime-vs-regime/
Codevilla, of course.
“Another synchronicity is that I spent most, 45 years, of my working life as a large [68 lane] bowling center mechanic.” – geoff b
There are always synchronicities with someone.
My younger sister took a bowling course to satisfy a HS PE requirement, and belonged to different leagues for many years thereafter.
AesopSon #2 is currently serving as lead architect for the retrofit of a vintage alley in Nevada.
“The more homogeneous a society, the greater the likelihood of substantial social trust. The more multicultural a society is, the lower the social trust in the society.” – Cato
It bears mentioning that “mulitracial” and “multicultural” are not necessarily the same thing. Skin color in America was well on the way to being irrelevant in the mainstream cultural context, until some of the interest groups realized they were going to lose power & money if that continued.
As homogeneity disintegrates, along with the Bowling Societies, we are heading for this scenario.
https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2021/05/defending-yourself-in-progressive-left_01359857213.html
Part 4 of a series. RTWT.
And start organizing your preferred Mutual Aid Society.
This is an almost perfect depiction of the tribalism that is the focus of B.R.Man’s post.
https://www.thenewneo.com/2021/05/21/the-wuhan-lab-origin-theory-of-covid-is-finally-getting-some-respect/#comment-2556230
The article seems to hit the mark.
Leftoxenomorphs need to destroy human society, and they are having remarkable success in doing so, in order to turn humans from the American Way of Being towards a kind of “The Matrix” like existence appropriate for “The Great Reset” with a “One World Government” under a “New World Order” a la “World Economic Forum” like in Klaus Schwab (World Economic Forum founder and CEO for life) notion of “You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy.”
What leftoxenomorphs have in store for humanity under the Davos devices should send a chill down the spine of any normal and decent human being and a strong will to violently resist and overthrow the leftoxenomorph enemy.
But considering the unqualified success of leftoxenomorphism and the basically zero resistance from the vast majority of non-leftoxenomorphs one should have to conclude that the battle is basically lost because we never even started to fight.
And, let’s face it, most young people can’t be bothered to get their noses out of their cell phones to even entertain these notions.
Cell phones are the most dangerous addictive drug ever offered to humanity and they are working wonders to stultify the masses even further.
I’ve seen, and not only once, young couples sitting facing each other at a table three feet wide and when one of them wants to say something to the other they send each other texts. It’s quite abnormal for our chatty species.
Leftoxenomorphs are rushing to the left of the left so fast that they have to consider your garden variety leftist some kind of fascist nazi white supremacist colonial patriarch rapist racist mu-soggy-knees, etc, etc, etc – phobe. And mean, too.
And the Overton window is being pushed to the left at a percentage of the speed of light that nobody ever predicted possible.
“Cell phones are the most dangerous addictive drug ever offered to humanity and they are working wonders to stultify the masses even further.”
When the telegraph was introduced, a journalist wrote that ‘with this invention, there is no ELSEWHERE…it is all here.’
If wired communication reduced the sense of Elsewhere, it seems that wireless digital communication is reducing the sense of the Here and Now.
David Foster, what has happened to ChicagoBoyz? Why do you now need Username and password to look at the site? And I quote:
The article starts off thinking about the contrast between civil society and centralized government control, but soon veers off into a sense that the “marketplace” has displaced civil society–while denying that this is a Marxist delusion.
To my way of thinking, a thriving marketplace is one of the best ways to keep government’s relentless centralization instinct in check. Wherever there is local freedom and independence, a natural human sociability will lend itself to civil gatherings and institutions.
“We’re all solipsists….”
Ohhhh, speak fer yerself….
Gringo:
I noticed that, too, at Chicago Boyz. I don’t know what it’s about.
Barry Meislin:
Don’t you know that Zaphod is so smart that he can speak for everyone since (as the Soliphist) no one else exists. Might be somewhat disconcerting for Zaphod the Soliphist to hear all those other voices in his head …. Something in the water in Hong Kong.
Gringo, Neo, all….Chicago Boyz was apparently hacked, with malware installed. Jonathan is now working on the problem. From what he said last night, it may take another day or so to get the site back up.
david foster:
Good luck with it.
I recall reading a review of the original “Bowling Alone” from ‘way back. One metric the author used was the decline in PTA membership. He did not address the increase in PTO membership. The reviewer said that many parents did not like the PTA’s top-down approach.
When one drops and an analog rises, has there been any kind of alarming change?
One reason I don’t read really partisan books is that they choose their metrics, if they don’t make them up, and you have no way of knowing what you’re missing.
Same thing happened with Frank, “What’s The Matter With Kansas?”
I don’t want to make out that my wife and I are joiners. The point is there is more than a sufficiency of groups to join. We used to say that, once the twins were born, we had more free time.
More than half a century ago, in Detroit, there was a bowling show on television on Saturday morning. I watched it a couple of times. The guy running it had been a prime-time rock jock on local radio until an unfortunate hot mic moment.
Point is, sponsors thought enough people were watching A BOWLING SHOW on Saturday mornings to justify their expense in increased sales of whatever it was.
Not to take a metaphor for the totality, bowling facilities were grossly overbuilt by thirty years ago and failing due to market saturation.
Where we live, there are three gyms of various types in a strip mall concentration about a quarter mile long. If one were to fail–presuming a non-Covid world–would that mean people were no longer interested in fitness?
I really, really don’t want to play golf, so I don’t follow these things. But I was required to be in a local, ancient, country club for a few minutes recently. What used to take a lot of money to get into was offering incentives. Lots more golf courses than there used to be. So is golf different from being in a country club? If so, what does that mean? Probably nothing.
My wife and I are in the local Presbyterian church. In addition to the numerous opportunities for joining service works–deacons, earth care, etc–we have the prayer chain. This lists mostly bad news, along with some events justifying praise. And there is a new app, Meal Train. Those in a tough spot ask for help and everything is laid out. Names, ages, diet issues, what they had last time, etc, and people sign up to provide the meal. So, even if you don’t know them originally, you meet them at delivery or when the casserole dishes and what not are returned/retrieved.
And when somebody needs something–Marge needs rides from assisted living to doctors’ appointments– it goes out on the church mailing list and somebody picks it up.
That said, the individual, naked and alone before the State, is a goal of some. So such groups must be destroyed. The point is not to turn the Boy Scouts into junior high. It’s to reduce the role of masculine leadership and examples available to boys. You couldn’t, in a million years, do with girls what you did with boys on campouts or whatever. I recall a riotous Friday evening. So the men stationed themselves at half mile intervals and we were required to run the square through a foot of snow. Saturday was quieter.
Using, iirc, old C rations, the men fried eggs in grease left over from vienna sausages. One kid, seeing the result, pulled his plate back from the offered eggs, which fell on the floor. He was required to clean up the mess and advised to wait until lunch. I suspect his father and mother may have had different opinions on the subject. Best would be if they didn’t, and agreed with the guys running the weekend.
But if girls were involved….
We, retired for twelve years, are still busy. We’re trying not to get busier. What’s retirement for, anyway?
When Alexis de Tocquville visited the US in 1831, he was very impressed with the American tendency to form voluntary associations for various purposes.
One reason he chose to emphasize this point in his book is that while he was writing it, in 1834, the French government passed a repressive law against voluntary associations to which he strenuously objected.
https://histphil.org/2015/07/13/alexis-de-tocqueville-on-associations-and-philanthropy/
Mrrr… I find this piece doing a lot of correlation while not providing ANY causation.
Just because two events occurred at similar timeframes, does not mean there is any connection whatsoever between them.
The “Mutual Aid” element of the discussion is, however, of interest. Few knew how things were handled before FDR initiated the first plumes of the Welfare State during The Depression, and REALLY once Johnson’s “Great Society” finished the job…
American Heritage did an excellent job some years back on the topic:
From Mutual Aid to Welfare State: How Fraternal Societies Fought Poverty and Taught Character
https://www.heritage.org/political-process/report/mutual-aid-welfare-state-how-fraternal-societies-fought-poverty-and-taught
So how about this?
Journey To Bethlehem is a process by which attendees become Jews going to be enrolled, according to Caesar. They pass the angels, shepherds, Roman soldiers. I, playing against type, am the head meanie in the tax collectors’s tent.
It’s local talent. Whatever you need–another compressor. Somebody to run a takeoff from the nearest power pole. Set blew down before dress reheasal, blast email and everybody shows up including three bruisers from the gym who heard about it.
Thirty three churches and over three hundred volunteers. We need to feed them each evening. Call Second Reformed, they have K-Eight school and a cafeteria. They say they’ll do it. So it’s taken care of, next question.
Half a dozen guys in a station. No theology. Did you get any deer? What do you shoot? Where do you get your ammo? Processing? Where’d you serve?
The Red Cross has a plan for disasters for churches and other buildings. The buildings are surveyed for capacity–space, restrooms, kitchens, etc. Then, if and when, the church gives the keys to the Red Cross who takes care of the business. After Katrina, there were so many refugees that the plan didn’t work. So the Red Cross asked the churches if they could handle it on their own. Pffft. Of course.
Lots of footage on Harvey rescue. Self-organized, but not many SJW soy boys in evidence.
Manhattan Boatlift is on youtube. At one point, the Coast Guard, seeing they need more help, broadcast for any willing to help to assemble off Governors Island. One guy said I’ve never seen more boats coming over the horizon.
We still have it. May we never lose it.
what matters is voluntary association and community which it builds, on many dimensions, including religious and social.
Haven’t read it, but, as I noted in a previous comment — this is correlation, which does not make for causation.
I would assert that the manner of kidplay changing has VASTLY more to do with this than the things suggested in your brief summary.
The fact that kids never EXPLORE any longer destroys community. It means that kids don’t walk around the neighborhood, meeting people they have no connection to other than locality, which means the parents don’t meet, which means there is no community formation. Sure parents meet each other via school activities and other non-school activities like a sports team, but that’s not the same thing… you could have THAT part before, you just ALSO had the option of neighborhood community activity.
And on many levels, that’s the important one, because it’s often the people near you you need to count on when bad things happen suddenly — not people you know — even well — who live 20 miles away.
AGAIN: Don’t conflate correlation with causation. The fact that x occurred simultaneously with y does not mean x caused y, y caused x, or even that x and y share a causal element.
“what matters is voluntary association and community which it builds, on many dimensions, including religious and social.”
No longer exists. You can go create an enriching eucivic association with your like-minded friends and associates and then any kind of racial antagonist or sexual deviant can show up and demand to join and you will be up against the full weight of FedGov. And to the extent that your organisation does succeed and provide a valuable service, the Enemies *will* show up at the gate and demand admittance.
Without true Freedom of Association (== the right to discriminate in any way with zero feel good exceptions against any potential members) there is no future in Civil Society.