“Bowling Alone” is one of those books that I have definitely pretended to have read.
Unlike the other books we’ve covered so far on the podcast, I was already a teenage news junkie when this one came out, so I fully participated in the Bowling Alone Discourse at the time. In fact, I was a student at the very college where the author taught when it was published, so Robert Putnam’s ideas and his critics were all around me.
With that vantage point, I was genuinely surprised by how few pages are occupied by the central metaphor about bowling and by how well I think Putnam’s arguments hold up in retrospect. In particular, controversial-at-the-time forecasts about things like an imminent collapse of American churchgoing and skepticism that the internet would provide a viable alternative to the social role of in-person interaction have been vindicated.
My Co-Host Jerusalem, who is a bit younger and coming to the book with a different context, is less impressed. She points out that the causal chains linking Putnam’s preferred kinds of organizations to good outcomes are a bit convoluted and unclear. And she situates his broad argument as part of a 21st-century backlash to liberalism and individualism that she believes is having pernicious effects in the present day.
We agree, I think, that there is a mismatch between the modest share of the text of the book that is dedicated to discussing television and the substantive role it plays in his story. By Putnam’s own account, roughly half the decline in social capital is caused by people watching more and more television over time and thus crowding out all other kinds of activities — a point that resonates in a world of ubiquitous streaming video. But he doesn’t spend that many pages on this point, and none of his proposed solutions confront it directly. Jerusalem also raises the possibility that it may be the video content itself that generates bad outcomes rather than the decline in social capital.
We get into all this and more — including more details about bowling — over the course of a rich and in-depth conversation. Watch or listen wherever you get your podcasts.
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