Robert Putnam
Appearances
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
I'm doing great. And as you did, please call me Bob. Nobody who knows me calls me Robert. So it's useful if I get a call on my cell phone and they say, Robert, I just hang up because they can't possibly know me. So Bob it is.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
Yes, I'm glad you said that. I didn't. But yes, I agree with you.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
First of all, our connections with other people, all sorts of connections, connections with our friends and our family and with the community and with bowling leagues and so on. have basically been, all of them, trust in other people, all of them have been going down roughly since the mid-1960s. Way before, iPhones were invented way before.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
So the basic trend can't be caused by these things we carry around. A question is whether social media, I'm going to simplify it to social media, can make up for the fact that we're no longer bowling together. Are they better than bowling leagues? Or worse than bowling leagues, if I can put it that way.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
And at the beginning, around in the first decade or so of this century, many people claimed that social media were going to... You know, they were going to be great. Better than sliced bread. They were going to bring world peace and so on. The data didn't show that. And gradually, the data began to question whether social media were...
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
as good as, or maybe even worse than, face-to-face connections. And that was the way the scientific evidence was tending. It may be nice to be on Facebook, but it's not making up for the declines in real face-to-face connections. Then in 2020, we had COVID, and we had a big global experiment in which we couldn't be face-to-face, but we still could Zoom. And that gave us a nice test.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
Well, how about it? Is zooming with grandma better than hugging grandma or not? And I can tell you when that verdict became universal, namely November 25th, 2020, and people all over the country said, no, I'm sorry, hugging grandma was much better than this.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
In any event. Allow me, I want to go just a little bit further because describing this as an either-or choice, either we can meet face-to-face or we can meet virtually, is false. And I want to use here the metaphor of an alloy, A-L-L-O-Y. An alloy is a mixture of two separate elements, that is, you know, copper and tin. And if you put copper and tin together and stir them up and heat it and so on,
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
I never can remember whether it's bronze or brass, but you get something different from either the tin or the copper. Now, most of our connections, most of our networks today in the real world are simultaneously virtual and real. My wife and I see each other all the time. We live in the same place. But I often send her a text message or even an email saying, saying, come in here.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
Come in here means moving to the next room. I want to show you something. And that just captures the fact that my connections with my wife are mostly face-to-face, but also virtual. And that's true universally of everybody. I bet you don't know anybody face-to-face that you don't communicate with via email or text or social media and vice versa.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
So that means we need to think about what kind of alloys we have because an alloy in principle could be better than either of the two. We could use, let's say, Facebook to encourage people to connect really face-to-face with each other. And about 10 years ago, Mark Zuckerberg came up with the idea of actually what he called communities.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
And bizarrely, he quoted, but without quotation marks, bowling alone. He said there's been a big decline, would you believe it, in going to PTA meetings and so on. And I've got the solution to that, he said. But it turned out it didn't have that effect.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
And Facebook's own internal research shows that although they could do it, they know how to create this alloy that would be the best of both worlds. They don't do it. And you want to have two guesses as to why they don't do it? I was talking to actually one of the chief engineers there. And researchers at Facebook, they invited me out there to talk about social capital and Facebook.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
And they know how to do it. Two guesses why they don't do it. Because it would generate less conflict.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
And less conflict would mean less addiction to Facebook. And we could have an alloy that is the best of both worlds. If we have to choose, we should choose face-to-face. But we shouldn't have to choose except it's not a technological matter. It's an economic matter. Does that make sense?
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
Both of those, it turns out, are very complicated questions. I mean, they're clear questions, good questions, but it's not so easy to answer them. Probably, and this is what I really believe to be the answer. Actually, everything I'm telling you is going to be what I really believe the answer doesn't mean it's true. I would hope so.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
There's probably a survival advantage, at least for humans, in being around other human beings. Loners. Back in the day, and by back in the day, I mean really back in our evolution, loners were much more likely to be picked off by predators. I think that's utterly clear that that's true. Probably doesn't even need much argumentation.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
There is now some really early, early prehistoric work that suggests that that's true, evidentially says that's true. But that probably means that those of our ancestors who had a taste for predators, connecting with other people, and probably what that means is they had developed in such a way that they got high on endorphins, they ended up having more offspring.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
And that's probably why we're biologically tuned to prefer being around other people. But now that's only half of your question. The other half is, well, so why are we now suddenly changing our minds? It's very unlikely that our basic, genetic makeup has changed. In fact, it's essentially certain it hasn't changed over the period we're talking about.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
Our biology doesn't determine exactly how we behave. That's determined in part by our social environment, our social and physical environment. So if physically we're in settings that make it easy to connect with other people, and there are examples of this in the article by Derek Thompson. He quotes Eric Kleinenberg about the importance of public libraries.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
Once upon a time, we did have public libraries, but in general, public libraries are no longer serving the purpose of connecting people as they once did. And that makes it harder even for people who would like to connect. So it requires social coordination. Does this make sense? I'm generalizing from the single example of physical space to all of the other things.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
If the undeniable attractions of not having to worry about other people outweigh The kick of endorphins we demonstrably get when we're around other people, well, it's not that our biology has changed, but it's that the social or technological setting has changed.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
environmental factors, all the social institutions around us make it less easy. And there's another factor today, if we want to get into this, I don't know how far you want to get into politics, but- I want to go into politics next, so let's do it.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
Well, even at Thanksgiving, there are people that are in my Thanksgiving that I basically, I love them, but they have really crazy political ideals. And so we tend to shy away from those talks, and therefore political polarization, which is to some extent, and we can get into this, the consequence of social disconnection is also then it reinforces social isolation.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
By the way, I basically agree with Derek Thompson's account, but there are a few things in his account that I disagree with, and maybe it would be useful to get to that at some point.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
Well, I think it's a great piece. Of course it's a great piece, and I basically agree with almost everything. One part that doesn't seem to me to fit the evidence, he claims that our close ties are as strong as ever. And then there's this intermediate village, he calls it, where this slacking of ties is going on. Yeah. And then out in the more distant arena, it's low under any circumstances.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
I think he's wrong about the intimate ties. And the best evidence that I know of, including some recent evidence that has just come out in the last couple of weeks, say that family ties, close intimate ties, have been slackening. First of all, over this period, many fewer people are getting married, which is one kind of intimate tie. Secondly, few people are having fewer children. And why is that?
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
Because people are having sex less. That's the most intimate kind of contact, I mean, of social contact you can imagine. And especially among younger people, that also is declining. So I just think it's wrong. It's a little bit romantic in multiple senses of the word romantic to think that Well, we don't know our neighbors as well, but we really do love and cherish our most intimate ties.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
And actually, many different kinds of evidence suggest that's not true. Now, of course, we're not going to be able to weigh my evidence against Derek's evidence here, but I wanted to single that out. And if I'm right, I think that's even more true. Devastating, actually.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
Can I interrupt for just one second? That's factually false. Bowling is the most interclass, interracial sport in America. Blacks bowl more than whites. Not much, but they do. Is that true? Come on. I'm a fat guy here.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
Upper class people bowl less than working class people.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
Forgive me for self-citation here, but when you talk to an academic, that's what you're going to hear. I wrote a whole book about that fact, that there's a growing gap between rich kids and poor kids, rich adults and poor adults, that and all the ways you talked about. Marriage rates are steady or actually rising among college-educated Americans, plummeting among non-college-educated Americans.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
Class is a big dividing line here on all these trends. And moreover, it's becoming a bigger dividing line than race. So the gap between college-educated blacks, let's say, and non-college-educated blacks is growing. And that showed up in the last election. This is fundamentally why...
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
I don't know if it's fair to say Trump—well, I guess it is fair to say Trump made gains among some blacks, but which blacks? Non-college-educated blacks. The same place he's been making gains among whites and Latinos. And so I think this has big implications for the strategy, the proper strategy for the Democratic Party. That's a separate question. What should we do about it?
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
And as I say, this has been clear for at least this growing class gap has been clear for at least 20 years because that's when I, I mean, 10 years ago is when I wrote about it. So it's, so let's see what we've summarized, what we've said. It is an asocial 21st century. That's right. But that's even true for family ties.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
And it's especially true for the have-nots and even more true for men, young men. So this is, I'm not saying that there isn't a bigger problem. There is, but when you drill down and say, where is this problem worst? It's among have-nots, young have-nots, young male have-nots.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
Okay, I want to begin with a little bit of history. I promise this will turn out to be relevant. I trust you. At the turn of the last, from the 19th to the 20th centuries, around 1900, there was what people then called the boy problem. What was the boy problem? It was that young men were unusually isolated and
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
Now, the backstory is because they basically, or their parents had been living in little villages, whether the villages were in Iowa or in southern Italy, but they were now living in the big city in Chicago or the lower east side of Manhattan, and it wasn't as easy to make friends there. Girls are just generally better at making friends than boys. That's a fact, a sociological fact that they are.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
And so these young men... were causing mayhem on the streets of Chicago or New York or really any of the big cities in America around 1900. And it was so bad that it was called, quote, the boy problem, unquote. And then they fixed it. So now the question is, how did they fix it? And this relates to a second principle that I have for building social capital.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
Building social capital can't be like saying, eat your spinach, people. It's got to be fun. I mean, okay, we may want to have character formation or something, but it's got to be fun or else people are not going to do it. That's why, by the way, I used... Bowling leagues is one of my stark metaphors because actually, I don't know if you've bowled, bowling is actually fun.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
And competitive bowling, it's friendly competition, but it is, you get a high when you get a strike, when you knock down all the pins with one ball.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
But most important for these purposes, it's fun.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
So now, back to the boy problem. We want to have something that's going to make fun for the kids. but it's also gonna bring them together in productive ways. And we did that. And wait for it, the Boy Scouts were invented in America. I'm doing this for memory, so if you're fact checking, I'm off by a year or two.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
But between 1905 and 1910, virtually all of the major youth serving organizations in America were invented, the Boy Scouts. and the Girl Scouts, and Campfire Girls, and Boys Clubs with a capital B, capital C, and Big Brother, Big Sister, and on and on. I mean, and they were all invented in five years. Quite remarkable. Why then?
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
Because that's when the boy problem, and more generally the isolated... youth problem began to appear.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
I don't think that's up. I may be misinterpreted, but I'm really careful about my facts. By the way, and 4-H was actually created by the government. Most people don't know that people sometimes say government is going to spoil everything. 4-H was invented by the Department of Agriculture. Keep looking in your Wikipedia. I see it. It's right here. Okay. Back to the Boy Scouts.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
I'm not talking about the Boy Scouts today. It's got a lot of problems, et cetera, but I'm talking about the Boy Scouts in 19—whatever it was, 1910, roughly speaking. Sure. The Boy Scouts is fun. Fundamentally, it's fun. I don't know whether you've ever been in the Boy Scouts.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
I was very active in the Boy Scouts when I was really little, so I'm now describing things that happened about 75 years ago. Yeah.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
Okay, well, stick with me for a moment. It was fun. You know, I learned bird identification. I became a lifelong birder because of that. We went camping and hiking. That was super fun. But also, there was character formation. Your viewers have to look at me. I now have my three fingers raised.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
And I'm saying a scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent. And I missed one. Trustworthy, loyal. There's one right in there that I missed. But I got 11 out of 12. And that's remembering back, you know, 75 years. Now step back from that anecdote. What was that? That was about character formation.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
It was about our obligations to other people. I mean, most of those are quite – we would like to have kids have those values today, wouldn't we? I mean, trustworthy, helpful, friendly, courteous.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
Kind. All those are sounding pretty good. Obedience sounds a little 19th century-ish. Grave sounds a little –
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
Clean? Yeah, that's not so bad. Reverent? I mean, what the scouts were as a response to the boy problem was to combine fun and character formation. Now, stick with me for a moment. You asked me, we began this conversation saying, okay, we got the boy problem. What do we do about it? I am not saying that today the scouts are the solution to that problem.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
And I don't think people my age are actually going to be good at guessing what will work in the middle years of the 21st century. Old guys like me can sometimes be helpful in saying that there is a problem because I personally remember when we weren't so isolated as we are now. But it's my grandchildren who are now mostly in their 20s.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
and maybe even my great-grandchildren, let's hope they come along sometime, they're the ones who are going to have the mindset tuned for the middle and late 21st century. So what I can say to them, and I do say to them, because I've got seven nice grandchildren, you didn't cause this problem. But history has bequeathed you the responsibility for fixing it. It's not impossible.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
Indeed, I can give you some guidelines about how we fixed it the last time. And the last time, among other things, we focused on young people. We focused on young men. We focused on isolation. And we came up with, would you believe, the Scouts. Now, the Scouts may not seem right to my grandchildren or great-grandchildren.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
But I'm trying to say to them, you've got to come up with something like that. And maybe, almost certainly, it will involve the internet, but it won't be just internet-based. It'll be something that brings young people together, having fun, but also learning to respect one another. I'm sorry, that's my sermon for the day. I don't know if that makes sense, but... No, it's good.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
of course, you'd expect an author to defend his work. Of course. But I think that the upswing, which let's just say, let's say quickly for readers who have not yet had the pleasure of reading the upswing, it's in a way like Bowling Alone, except it steps back in two senses. It doesn't just look at social connections. It also looks at political polarization.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
It also looks at inequality, and it looks at cultural change, the degree to which we were either in any given year, a we society or an I society. Bowling alone basically looked at the previous 25 years. This looks at the previous 125 years. So it goes way back.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
And the advantage of doing that, those two changes, widening the scope of what you're looking at and lengthening the time over which you're looking at it, reveals that there was a time About 125 years ago, at the beginning of the 20th century, when we faced essentially the same problem as we have today. What's today's problem? We're very unequal. We're very polarized. We're very self-centered.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
We're very socially isolated. What was the problem in America around 1900? We were very polarized politically. We were very unequal. We were very self-centered, and we were very socially isolated. I'm not taking any time here to document those facts. That's why the book is 325 pages long. By the way, that book was written jointly with Shailene Romney Garrett.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
Got to make sure that she gets full credit. And the advantage of looking at that period is that we can see that the people in America in 1900— faced exactly the same problems that we did today. What are our problems today? We've got this crazy polarization. So did they. We've got this unbelievable level of inequality. So did they.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
We've got this great social isolation that is basically the theme of this podcast. So did they. And we're very self-centered. We're very narcissistic. And so were they. But they got out of it. Because if you look at the...
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
whole period of the 20th to 21st centuries, the last 125 years, what you see is the first half of that period, roughly speaking from 1910 to roughly speaking 1965, roughly speaking, things were going in a good direction. And They were going in the direction that we would like. America was becoming steadily more cooperative politically.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
There was a lot of conversation across party and cooperation across party lines. Indeed, most major reforms of that period were passed by majorities of both parties. The New Deal was passed by majorities of both Democrats and Republicans. The Great Society, Lyndon Johnson's, was passed, the majority of it, by both parties together.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
Ronald Reagan's deals, you know, the Reaganomics was passed by majorities of, well, not quite a majority of Democrats, but it was passed by definitely bipartisan majorities. It wasn't just Republicans. It wasn't just far right. It was the Democrats too. So what I'm trying to say was in that
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
you know, roughly speaking from the 1900 till about 1965, and even a little later than that, America, wait for this, when I was in high school in the 1950s, everybody thought the most equal country, people now would think maybe the most equal country in the world was socialist Sweden. Almost right. America, when I was in high school, was tied with Sweden as the most equal country in the world.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
Think about it. We are used to America having a huge gap between rich and poor, but when I was in high school, the gap between rich and poor in capitalist America was about the same as the gap between rich and poor in socialist Sweden, and both of them were way ahead of anybody else. We're no longer there.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
What I'm trying to say was the first half of the 20th century, roughly speaking, 1910 to 1960, 65, we were moving in the right direction. Less polarization, less inequality, less social isolation, less me, me, me. And that's why I think we need to look at that
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
The period in American history, which is most like the one we're in now, deep polarization, deep inequality, deep self-centeredness, deep social isolation. I don't know if I've mentioned all four of them, but they got out of it. And that means we could too. If we learn lessons from that period.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
I don't know that I have any useful things to say about that. But I do want to say one thing, deriving from the book that you were dismissing.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
Was the title of the book How We Can Come Together in 2020? No, it was How We Can Come Together Again. I didn't – careful. You can predict things as long as you don't predict the exact date in which it's going to happen. That's – I think Yogi said that too. This is what I want to say.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
One of the things we learned in that book – and I'm going to shock your listeners if they think I'm a – you know, a pretty secular, straight guy. I mean, I am straight, but pretty secular, factual guy.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
When you look at all those variables that I looked at, hundreds of variables we looked at, you know, how unequal and how self-centered or not we were, the leading indicator, the thing that had to change first was actually moral. If we had more time here, I'd go through the details. There was a very specific period in American history
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
history in the late 19th century, in which people re-evaluated their moral obligations. I am not talking sex at all. I'm talking the very simple thing, do we have obligations to—are we a we? Do we have obligations to other people? And that involved, initially, evangelical Protestants saying— Look at the damn Sermon on the Mount.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
They probably didn't say damn, but Christianity, they said, is not about helping the rich and dismissing the poor. Every sentence in the Sermon on the Mount, which I could not reproduce here but could come close, is about the place of Christians—this is evangelicals—the place of Christians is beside the poor.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
And that same thing, that was evangelicals, but pretty soon it became all Protestants and pretty soon it spread to Catholics and Jews and pretty soon to the whole darn country. And that's the thing that was the first thing that was required.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
Before you started making, creating unions or, you know, having new ways of connecting the Boy Scouts and all that, before all of that, people in that era didn't. became convinced, not everybody of course, but there was a switch, you can see it in the data, a switch in which people began to think there are other people in the world more important than me. I have obligations to other people.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
Now, you did not think you were going to get an evangelical preacher on this podcast. I didn't.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
But that's where I would like to end up because we can talk – I'd love to talk about the details of how we could tweak phones or how we could re-institute unions or how we could narrow the gap between rich people and poor people or even how we could change the administration because we're in a pickle now if you hadn't noticed. But upstream from all of that is –
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
we and especially our young people, because it was young people then and it's young people now, need to begin thinking that we have obligations to other people. That sounds so simple, but it's really hard. But that's my admonition for America and especially for my grandchildren. This is not me just preaching to other people. And I'm proud of my grandchildren.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
They listen to their grandmother, who's, you know, even better social capitalist than I am. They listen to me sometimes. They listen to their parents, who are also really nice. But it's going against the core values that they are currently imbibing. I repeat, this is not about sex. It's about just simple, do we have obligations to other people?
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
So, I'm sorry, Tim, you didn't ask me to come on as a lecture preacher.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
By the way, this pope is exactly the pope we need, because that's exactly what he's doing. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to get into Catholicism.
The Bulwark Podcast
Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations
Thanks an awful lot, Tim. I really, it's been a lot of fun for me too.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
Let me see if I can explain it this way. If you see people regularly and you're good friends, I don't mean intimate friends, but you have a good friendship, much less a deeper friendship, what tends to evolve is a norm of reciprocity. That is, I'll do this for you now.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
without expecting something back immediately from you, because down the road, we'll see each other at choir practice, and you'll do something for me. I'll do this for you now without expecting something back.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
And indeed, if everybody in the community is connected, I'll do something for somebody who I don't actually know, because if other people see that I'm cheating him, they won't play games with me. So in other words, everybody learns that the people in this town are nice to each other. Wouldn't you love to live in a place where people were nice to each other?
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
And moreover, and this is the main point of Bowling Alone, we learned when we carried those ideas back to the United States, that that has changed over time. There have been periods in American history when we did have connections with other people. I grew up in a small town in Ohio. in the late 1950s, and nobody locked their door.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
And when I tell my children and grandchildren that, they think Grandpa's lying. But no, in that period, and it wasn't about race. There were black kids. I played football. There's a picture on the cover of Bowling Alone of me and my bowling league. When I was in junior high school, and there are three white guys, I'm the tall, skinny one in the middle, and there are two black guys.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
And so this was not about race. I mean, it wasn't bounded. This trust and reciprocity was not bounded then there by race. I'm not saying race was not a problem. Of course it was. But I mean, in terms of this, in a small town in the 1950s, people left their door unlocked. And that's because of what I and my jargon call social capital.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
So all I'm saying is not that every single person in America has lost trust or has become untrustworthy, but on average, and we've now shown this to be true all over America, people are less connected and therefore less trustworthy than they used to be. There are differences across America. And the places that are still relatively high in social connection are somewhat more trustworthy.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
I'm sorry, I'm going to tell you more social science than you want to know. People do an interesting study. They drop letters on the street with money in them. Sealed, but with money in them and addressed. And then they ask, in any given town or a neighborhood, how many of those letters are actually put in the mailbox so the owner can get their money back?
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
There are cities in America where your odds of getting your money back, if you drop it in an envelope, drop it on the street, are zero. And there are places, this is hard to believe, there are places in America where if you drop an envelope with money in it, you're 80% likely to get the money back.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
Actually, he would say, Bob, I've been over this. There's a really funny New York Times interview in which the New York Times interview was trying to say, I'm New York Times reporter, pretty well connected. I know Robert Putnam. And Barack just says, no, it's Bob.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
There's been virtually no decline in bowling itself. But it used to be that people bowled in teams, in leagues. And there has been a complete collapse of team bowling, of league bowling. And when I told a friend of mine that, he said, oh, you mean we're bowling alone? And I thought, that's a good title for a book. If ever I write a book about this, it turns out to be a good title.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
But what is the difference? What is the experiential difference? Yes. Christiana, have you ever bowled alone?
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
So actually, I know where every bowling alley in London is because whenever I've gone over there, I'm selling... selling books, every journalist thought their clever idea would be to interview me in a bowling alley. So I can take you to every bowling alley in central London. In bowling, in bowling in a league, there are five people on a team and two teams are playing against each other.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
And how well you do depends on how well the team does, not how well you individually do. And at any given time, two people are up at the lane throwing the ball down. But the other eight people are sitting in a semicircle at the back of the alleys.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
And they're mostly talking, you know, and they're talking about what was on TV last night or they're talking about occasionally they're talking about, you know, the local schools or, you know, whether there should a bond issue should be passed to cover the costs of the new sewer system or whatever. Right. And now I'm going to suddenly change that description.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
Occasionally, they're having a conversation about public civic life. That's highfalutin for saying they just got into a discussion with people they know well. Remember, these are people they see every week. And they know how to interpret what the people say. They're not total strangers. because they ball in a league and with other members of the team, but they're also real human beings.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
And so the reason I decided to use that as a metaphor is that does say, here are people who know each other. If you're in a team, they know each other. And they're not doing politics, but occasionally it helps with the politics. Does that make sense? I mean, occasionally they're able to have a conversation that's a kind of a responsible conversation.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
It's not just two guys yelling at each other or two gals yelling at each other. It's two people who are going to have to get along because the next week they're going to be back in the same bowling alley. And so it seemed to me a useful way of describing how bowling in a league, in a team... it's not just fun. I mean, it's important to emphasize this. I really wish I'd done emphasize this more.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
Social capital can't just be eat your spinach. It's got to be fun too. I mean, it's, it's, it's so, and that's why I use the example of bowling leagues. It's not saying, Oh, go to a good government meeting. Well, good mother, good government meeting. It's got to be fun. And bowling is fun, but it's also a little bit like a good government meeting.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
Is that I may be exaggerating here, but that's, that's where the idea of bowling is. A Bowling Together came and then the opposite of that was we are just less opportunity for encountering people that we know well to talk occasionally about public affairs.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
Remarkably, I've got good data on how people spend every hour of their day going back to the 1960s. Would you believe that's 60-year time trend? Wow. And it's very interesting. Invite me back for another two hours and I'll talk about how our lives have changed. For example, back in the day, in the 60s, we slept, the average American slept 7.5 hours a day.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
And that average is exactly 7.5 hours today. There's been no change on average. Some people speak more. That's impressive, though, still. But here's the complicated part, actually. We're spending less time at work than we used to. Less time at work. No ways. So less time at work. So what do we do with our extra time? All of it is spent in front of screens.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
There's been a steady, steady long-term rise in the amount of time we spend in front of screens. And the most recent data, you might think, well, okay, it used to be screens like television and now it's screens like, you know.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
Yeah, yeah, no, but it isn't. We're actually spending more time watching TV than we used to. And we're adding to that. I now don't. Quote me exactly, because I've got the data. I just don't have it in front of me at this moment. I didn't know you were going to ask me this question. We've added, since the advent of social media, another two hours a day. Two hours a day.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
And yet we're spending less time in the presence of other people. I mean, the data are just the worst you could imagine. We've got more free time. We do have more free time. Wow. And we've spent more than all of that free time. In front of a screen. Damn.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
But of course, I want people to watch this podcast. This is a different kind.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
Christiana, you ask lots of really good questions and they're all complicated. And I'm going to try.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
about 20 years ago, well, maybe not quite that, 15 years ago, maybe, I was trying to run a seminar. I was running a seminar of people. And the idea was to bring people from very, very diverse backgrounds together Once every three months for a couple of years to try to figure out how to solve the problem of social isolation in America and its political consequences. It's not just loneliness.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
Did you say Robert? No, it's Bob, please.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
I mean, if I get a call, a phone call, and the person says, Robert, I just hang up right away. If they know me, it's a nice screener I use as answering the phone. Okay, Bob, Bob. Okay, I want to say a couple of things about social media and virtual connections, and how they compare to real face-to-face connections, what some people call IRL, in real life.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
When social media first came out, everybody thought it was you know, unbelievably great. World peace was going to break out. We would all have, and we would all be friends with each other because we were all connecting across. That always at that time seemed a little strange to me, but the academic work about that's true was always fascinating.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
more skeptical than the people who are making money by getting us onto their websites. Yeah, of course. But the real question at that point, if I can put it this way, was, is Facebook better or worse than bowling leagues? I'm using that as a synonym, I mean, just as labels for those two things.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
And then he at one point said, well, OK, maybe Putnam is right, but we're going to create a new kind of Facebook that's going to be even super dandier. And it's going to be wonderful, even better than bowling leagues. But the academic research, I repeat, was always skeptical about that. But then came a terrible natural experiment, COVID. But now I promised you I was going to get more complicated.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
But I can tell that Christiane likes to deal with complications, so I'm going to... I have so far been phrasing this problem as if the choice we had was between either face-to-face or social media, right? Yes. But actually, that's not true. Almost all of our networks today are simultaneously face-to-face and internet-based.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
My wife, Rosemary... and I do see each other a lot every day. That is, there is a face-to-face relationship there, but she has a different office than mine. And astonishingly, much of the time I sent her an email or sent her a text and she responds, it's not, we have one set of relationships that are face-to-face and a different set of relationships that are internet-based. They're the same.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
And I want to use a metaphor here, if I can. In chemistry, we have the idea of an alloy is a mixture of two different base chemicals. like tin and copper, and you stir it and heat it and so on, and you get something that is neither tin or copper, but I never can remember, bronze or brass or something like that. Right. And brass is different from either the tin or the copper. Okay, so far so good?
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
Now what I'm saying is all of our networks today are alloys. So the question really is... How can we get an alloy that has the benefits of both? That is to say, could we find a way to create a network that has the advantages that the internet has of not depending upon space, but that has the advantages of face-to-faceness, namely you can actually get together and cooperate with somebody.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
Do we know how to do that? And the answer is we sure do. We know how to, for example, there are networks that are that are internet-based for neighborhoods. And it's easy to contact the other people. Just whenever you get the idea, you want to borrow a rake or something, you just send out an email. But then they're also in the neighborhood. So I could go and get the- You go get the rake in person.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
It's also affects, as you said, and we're going to come back to that, the chances of democracy surviving. We had a big multidimensional matrix. We want to make sure we had enough men and women and blacks and Asians and Latinos and whites. whites and old and young and rich and poor and business and labor, et cetera. You can imagine this multidimensional scheme.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
So it's not a technical problem. So why don't we have lots of these things? It sounds like we're wonderful to have this, right? And it turns out the real answer is these big companies. They know how to do it. They know, and I know this because I've talked personally, they invited me, Bob Putnam, out to wherever it was in Silicon Valley to talk about social capital. Amazing.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
And we had a wonderful conversation. They clearly knew what I meant, and they knew the difference between face-to-face and connected, and they knew how to use, they conveyed the idea that they knew how to... Oh, they knew how to use their tools to get people to connect in person. Yes, but why don't they do that? Answer...
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
When it's much better for their business line if people fight than if they cooperate.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
And we got it all filled, but we had one box that we had not yet filled for a young black community organizer. And my son, who had been at Harvard Law School, said, you know, you ought to check out this really bright guy I know who I play basketball with. Because it turns out my son, this is going to make you believe in the conspiracy theory of American life.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
Yeah. And there's wonderful data on that. If you were worried about crime in your neighborhood and you had one of two strategies, you could have a lot more cops on the beat, pay cops more and, you know, arm them and so on. Or you could know one another's first name. The second is the more important crime-fighting strategy.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
That is, it's more effective to have eyes on the street from your neighbors, just as you're saying. And what I'm talking about is big, huge studies that have done this experimentally.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
Yeah, well, at any rate, I don't want to interrupt this conversation Except that I hope we have a chance to go back to Bowling Alone and explain and say why it explains Trump.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
Right. Remember, bowling alone said 25 years ago that we had been for 25 years. At that point, had been... It'd been 25 years we've been going downhill in terms of our social connections. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
My son happened to be on the Harvard Law Review with Barack. And they played basketball together. Wow. He said, well, he's a community organizer out in Chicago. I said, bingo, that sort of fits the right matrix. So we got this guy here. He's one of the youngest people in the group. And he's very ambitious. It's clear he's very ambitious. But he's also cute. He's a little bit like the mascot.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
That's right. And that had been happening for 25 years. Now, 25 years later, we've gone back and done the same study, and it turns out nothing has changed. It's still going downhill. Despite all of my pleading and talking with people, it's going downhill, which now means for 50 years we've been going downhill. Wow. Donald Trump did not cause that. And this is the main thing I want to say here.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
Donald Trump is not the cause of our problems. He's the symptom of our problems. American democracy had these problems long before Trump appeared on the scene. And most importantly, we will have those same problems leading to faltering democracy when he's no longer on the scene. Donald Trump exploited this. And I mean that, so this is Bob Putnam saying, you know, Donald Trump,
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
exploited what I had discovered. That's not just me. Steve Bannon has said, I could show you the quote. Well, we were trying to figure out how we could get Donald Trump elected. And then we read this book by this crazy guy, Putnam, about bowling alone.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
Yeah. He's quoting, you can find, I mean, later on.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
They said, effectively, as I said in the book, but I wasn't doing it, You have all these isolated people. They're ripe for having a kind of populist come to power and say, you're all unhappy and isolated. Trust me, I'm the one. Does that sound familiar? Does that sound like he's the guy?
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
Well, that's what Bowling Alone said, and I didn't act on it. Maybe I should have. Maybe I could have been president. You could have been president. President Bob Putnam. Yeah. And J.D. Vance has said something very similar to this. There's lots of empirical evidence. I won't bore you with all the data.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
There's lots of data that's saying the strongest predictor, actually, of support for Donald Trump, of places that support Donald Trump and people that support Donald Trump is social isolation. Now we're not just talking hypothetically, oh, it'd be nice to have more people joining clubs. We're saying the pickle that we're in as a country is precisely due to the fact that we're
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
I'm not trying to say we ought to reconstruct bowling leagues, but it's got to be something that brings us face to face. Is that making sense, Trevor?
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
Like a mascot in this group. And so, you know, like in a summer camp, people develop nicknames. And our nickname for him was the governor because we thought, what a joke. This guy's ambitious and he thinks he's going to eventually become governor of Illinois. This is a guy who five years later is the president of the United States. So you weren't wrong. Governor was a joke.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
Or is that even necessary? Well, yes, I think it is necessary. There are different kinds of social capital, different kinds of networks. And one important distinction is between what I call bridging social capital, that is ties that link you to people unlike yourself. And bonding social capital. Bonding social capital are the ties that link you to people just like yourself.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
So my bonding social capital are my friends with other elderly, white, male, Jewish professors. That's my bonding social capital. And my bridging social capital are my ties to people of a different generation. I have a little bit of bridging that I rely on heavily across generations because I've got my grandchildren.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
There was something else that's important about him. Yes. You know he's very smart, but he's also, at least he can be very... quiet. So, and this is a group of big eagles. And so the first, you know, we gather on Friday night, Friday night and all day, much of Saturday up until lunch, everybody else was doing what we called station identification.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
And I'm not saying, this is important, bridging good, bonding bad, because if you get sick, the people who bring you chicken soup are likely to reflect your bonding social capital. That's a little bit what Christiana was earlier saying, the people who would really take care of her, who would bring her chicken soup or the equivalent would be Bonding social capital.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
I'm saying bonding social capital is not necessarily bad, but bridging social capital is crucial for a modern, diverse society like ours. Bridging across racial, across age, across gender, across party and so on. So far, so good. Right, right, right. But bridging is harder to build than bonding social capital. My grandmother knew that.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
My grandmother said to me, Bobby, birds of a feather flock together. Right. She didn't think I'd understand. What she meant was, Bobby, bridging social capital is harder to build than bonding social capital. But she didn't think I'd understand that, which is why she used the avian metaphor about birds. But that's the basic point. So here's the challenge.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
Much of Trump's support, it draws from different kinds of demographic groups, of course, but it's bonded heavily on politics and not bridging at all. And so now I'm back at the question, why isn't Putnam saying he wants lots of Ku Klux Klan? And the answer is, I don't want lots of Ku Klux Klan because it's bonding and I want a lot of more bridging. Does that make sense to what I'm saying?
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
That is, they were telling us how important they were and why their views were the most important. And Obama kept silent during all of that. And then after lunch, he'd say, you know, I've been listening to this. I've been listening, especially to Susan and to Josh, and they think they disagree. But I think underneath Susan and Josh agree. And they did.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
So this is, sorry, you didn't invite me on here to cite all my books, but I'm going to cite yet another book.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
Okay, I want to talk about The Growing Gap Between Rich Folks and Poor Folks in America. And the book was called Our Kids. The book was focused on a whole series of charts and graphs that showed the gap between rich kids and poor kids growing. And I'll say more about what I meant by that. But in particular, by rich, I didn't mean literally having lots of money. The book is based on
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
The upper third of American society, which is basically college-educated folks.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
And the lower two-thirds of America, which is basically people who didn't graduate from four years of college. And what that book showed is a growing gap also among their parents. Those two groups are increasingly... They don't marry one another. It used to be that there were people would marry across these class lines, but they don't now.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
They used to be that they would live in the same neighborhood, but they were increasingly living in not racially segregated, but class segregated homes. And what I'm trying to say is that class lens... was when I wrote the book, at least as important as the racial lens. And it's becoming, relatively speaking, the class lens is becoming more important
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
Relative to the racial lens, the plight facing working class whites is the same as the plight facing working class blacks. That's what Bernie Sanders noticed. He was talking about everybody. It's down, not at the bottom, meaning the poorest of the poor, but the lower two thirds of the country. Right. And.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
I think that the Democratic Party, this may be controversial, I think the Democratic Party has got to start focusing more on those class differences and less exclusively on the racial or other identity issues. Now, it sounds like I'm saying let's forget about black folks, and I'm not saying that.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
I'm saying let's really focus on working class black folks because they're the ones who are falling further and further behind.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
And everybody around the table was open-mouthed. How did he see that? We've been all sitting through the same conversation. And the whole conversation was polarized in many different ways. But he saw a way in which he could frame an issue in ways that would be productive for the whole group going forward. Oh, wow. He's able to see through... All this, you know, all the fighting.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
Yes. And there's certainly... Much more likely to be socially isolated. I mean, they've got at least two strikes against them. Well, maybe three. A, they're more socially isolated. Okay. And B, they're poorer financially. And C, they have got less education. So all those folks are... in a pickle. And what that means is it's important to just understand the math. This is simple, simple arithmetic.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
We could have a clean system here in which we had all the colleges that could be educated people, you know, vote for the Democrats and all the non-colleges educated people vote for the Republicans. What's wrong with that? Well, there are a lot more of them than of us. We, the Democrats, if we're going to retain power democratically,
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
We've got to begin appealing, not ignoring race, I'm not saying that, but appealing more to the class-based interests. I want to try to end with three to-dos.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
I'm going to try to keep it simple. Not because you guys couldn't understand something more complicated, but because I think we've got to understand in very simple terms. One, go young. It's much more important that we focus on young people, regardless of where they are right now, because they are the future. And I'm now talking as an historian, looking back, not just over the last...
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
you know, 5, 10, 20, 50 years. I'm looking over the last 125 years. In my last book, which was called The Upswing, I looked over the whole of American history over the last 125 years. And big changes are not the creation of old guys like me. Old guys like me, sometimes we've been around so long that we understand that it doesn't have to be the way it is today.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
But we're not the people who have the ideas that will... work to build social capital and save America in the, I don't know, 2050s or something. I'm going to be long gone. So first thing is go young and inspire the young people to come up with the new bowling leagues. It's not going to be bowling leagues.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
It's going to be something else, but almost surely will involve something of high tech, but it will involve real personal relations with other people.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
Go local. all the times that there've been major social revolutions, they bubbled up from the bottom. And at local levels, people can more easily cooperate across party and other lines because somebody's got to fix the sewers. And so you don't have to have an ideological discussion about how important is, is the environment. Everybody knows that the sewer has got to be fixed.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
If we're going to be able to survive in this town or the schools, you know, you can have a national debate about, I don't know, some issue in education, but somebody's got to fix our schools right here. And so sometimes left-wingers are in favor of national solutions.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
And for race, we did have to go national because there were whole regions of the country which were, if we went local, we would have stayed segregated forever. So I'm not saying always go local, but if you want to have a major revolution, and this is exactly what MLK did, right? He didn't start with his march on Washington. He started in Montgomery.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
What do you think is the most important social reform in the history of America? I'm going to tell you in just a second. The high school. When was the high school invented? The high school was invented in 1910. God did not invent the high school. It was invented in 1910. And where was the high school? By high school, I mean a secondary school, a public high school that everybody could go to.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
We'd had private schools, of course, like Eaton or whatever. But I'm talking about public high schools. First place in the world. was in 1910 in flyover country in America. It was not invented in Massachusetts or in Chicago or in LA or what it was invented in small towns in the middle of America. And it went, viral.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
And within 20 years, every city in America, every city and town in America had a high public high school. That's viral. 20 years it went from- That's amazing. So what I'm trying to say is the really good ideas, policy ideas, the next time- They spread. And thirdly, and I want to come back now to this issue of religion, go morality. Stick with me.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
I'm an academic, but I'm about to start preaching at you, both of I apologize for that. When we look at long run changes, long run changes in political polarization, in economic inequality, in connections and so on, the leading indicator, it turns out that people in any given period and place actually think they have obligations to other people. We need to have a moral reawakening in America.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
I'm talking about simple golden rule. Read the Sermon on the Mount. I mean, any religion says worry at least as much about other people as you do about yourself. Religion should be a we phenomenon, not an I phenomenon. So if I had a magic wand... I don't, but maybe somebody listening will have a magic wand.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
I try to make the magic wand make young people, remember young, in localities across America think that they have obligations to other people. Is that making sense? I mean, that sounds like, and my basic message is, if we want to fix America, and I desperately want to fix America, it's probably not going to come in my lifetime, but I want to have it come at least in my grandchildren's lifetime.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
And we got to get about it now. And that requires mobilizing large numbers of people. large numbers of young people at the local level thinking about their obligations to other people and not just about themselves. Sorry, that's the message.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
So you guys are going to, you're going to lead this revolution. Find me up. Let me know how I can join.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
Well, of course, there are reasons to worry about people being lonely. That's indeed the title of this film that's now out and about on Netflix and in theaters. That's Join or Die, yeah. Join or Die. Your chances of dying, well, your chances of dying are high, actually. Sorry to say that, but your chances of dying over the next year are cut in half by joining one group.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
And that is their real serious health effects. And this is controlling for everything you like. It is really social isolation that causes premature death, but it also undermines the foundation for democracy. And that's
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
Another part of the title, Join or Die, refers to the fact that Benjamin Franklin, at the time of the founding of the American Republic, said, unless we join together, our democracy is going to die. That is, it refers both to the personal effects, which are big, and to the collective effects. And the collective effects, by the way, are not just democracy. Our economy grows more slowly.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
Our society becomes more unequal. The political polarization is a big consequence. of the lack of social capital. And Bowling Alone, the book Bowling Alone, first published in about 2000, but most of it was written in the late 90s, said we've been going downhill for a long time in terms of our connections. All sorts of connections.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
We've been going to fewer club meetings, but we've been going on fewer picnics, and we trust other people less, and we're less connected to our friends and to community organizations, but also to our family. All those ways in which we connect, all of them turned out to be going down. when I wrote that book. And now, 25 years later, it turns out they've gone down even further.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
Well, first of all, bowling is big in America. You may not know this, but more Americans bowl than vote, for example.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
Well, I want to step back just a little bit. If you were a botanist and wanted to study plant growth, how a plant was influenced by its environment, you'd take genetically identical seeds, you'd plant them in different pots of soil, you'd water them differently, and then you'd measure and see which plants flourished and which faltered.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
And then you knew it'd be something that you did in the soil or how much you watered them. That's what Italians did in Italy in 1970. They created a new set of regional governments all across Italy from up in the Alps to down in Sicily. They all had the same powers and money. They looked the same on paper, but the environments into which they were implanted were very, very different.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
Some were very advanced economically. Some were very backward economically. Some were Catholic. Some were communist, et cetera. And so we, over for 20, 25 years, followed those regional governments. We could see that some of them were very successful, not only in terms of were they able to build daycare centers when they planned to, but also in terms of what did the people think.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
And so we could see there were some successful governments and some failures. And then the question is, well, what was in the soil? And we had a lot of different ideas. We thought maybe it was just economic wealth made the difference, or we thought maybe it was education that made a difference.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
But we didn't guess what it turned out to be, which was choral societies, singing groups, and football clubs and so on, by which I mean, in some places of Italy, people in the region connected with one another across various lines, singing together. So that's what we came to call social capital. We were talking about these bonds
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
that brought people in a given region or community together across lines. And in Northern Italy, especially North Central Italy around Bologna, for example, there was a lot of that kind of what I came to call social capital, that is these connections among people. And they had very effective, still do, very, very effective regional governments.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
But some places, especially in the South, they didn't. They didn't have those kinds of groups and they had terrible, corrupt, inefficient, never answered the phone even, regional governments. Now I'm coming back to what Christiana asked about. Did they just have no groups down there? No, they had very tiny little groups. Families.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
They looked after their own immediate family, but weren't involved in groups with people, you know, even on the other side of the street, much less on the other side of town. Now, what I'm trying to say is their we was strong, but very narrow.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
And what was characteristic up north was that they had much broader groups in which people from different families and different walks of life would come together to sing. Now, Christiana, I may not have persuaded you in what I've said now, but I've tried to convey the way I hear your objections.