Robert Putnam

speaker

197 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard Jan 2025 last heard Feb 2025

Robert Putnam’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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The Bulwark Daily · Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations · 12 Feb 2025 podcast

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.

But most important for these purposes, it's fun.

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.

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?

Because that's when the boy problem, and more generally the isolated... youth problem began to appear.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Kind. All those are sounding pretty good. Obedience sounds a little 19th century-ish. Grave sounds a little –

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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