BETTER TOGETHER: Restoring the American Community

Author : Robert Putnam

In his national best-seller Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam decried the collapse of America’s social institutions. But while traveling to promote the book, one question came up at every appearance: what can we do to end the atrophy of America’s civic vitality. What can bring us together again?

Seeking an answer to this question, Putnam, a professor of public policy at Harvard, with the assistance of coauthor Lewis Feldstein, who has a long and distinguished career in civic activism, visited places across the country where individuals and groups are engaged in unusual forms of social activism and civic renewal. These are people who are renewing their communities and investing in new forms of “social capital.” Better Together describes a dozen innovative organizations from east to west and north to south that are re-weaving the social fabric of our country, and brings the hopeful news that our civic institutions are taking new forms to adapt to new times and new needs.

Examples:
* A mentoring and reading program in Philadelphia that brings together retirees and elementary school children to the benefit of both – the children get help reading and the retirees have a richer, more purposeful life
* A group of sixth-grade activists in a small Wisconsin town who managed to persuade local authorities to improve safety at a railroad crossing and in doing so learned a valuable lesson in civic activism
* A neighborhood in Boston that has been revitalized by a civic association that overcame ethnic differences and now plays an ongoing role in the neighborhood
* A community effort in the impoverished Rio Grande Valley, one of the poorest regions in the U.S., that brought such basic services as electricity, roads, and health care to the mostly Spanish-speaking residents
* A successful small business initiative in Tupelo, Mississippi, that began sixty years ago with the purchase of a prize bull
* Chicago public libraries that have broadened their mission and have become true community centers
* Two huge and rapidly growing churches in Los Angeles that are making people feel connected to other church members and their community
* The city of Portland, Oregon, where the anti-war movement of the sixties actually changed the institutions so that now there is a remarkably high level of civic engagement in government and politics (more so than in other cities, even other cities on the west coast).

All across America such organizations are starting up and thriving, giving hope that the message of Bowling Alone has reached people and that our civic institutions are improving and adapting to the changing world around us. And the timing of Better Together could not be more perfect -- in the wake of 9/11 the subjects of civic spirit, community renewal, and social capital have been high on everyone’s agenda as Americans ask again what makes us uniquely American and what values do we want to pass on to the next generations.

Book Review:

Has America's civic life lost the vitality it once had? Over the past decade there has been an explosion of essays, books, reports, and academic projects on this topic that has resulted in, for the social sciences, a surprisingly definitive answer: Yes. Americans today are less likely to vote, be involved in civic groups, participate in public affairs, or even spend time with neighbors than in past generations (particularly the "Greatest Generation," which fought in World War II). Having spent much of the 1990s documenting this decline, academics, policymakers, and political commentators have shifted to a stickier question: What might it take to reverse this trend and bring more Americans together as active participants in their own communities?

While Robert D. Putnam, a professor at Harvard University, and New Hampshire Charitable Foundation President Lewis M. Feldstein were putting the finishing touches on their new book, Better Together: Restoring the American Community, some Internet-savvy youth were busy providing an answer of their own: flash mobs.

Communicating through email, flash mob organizers helped bring together hundreds of people to briefly interact in a public space -- and just as quickly depart. The first such flash mob was held in June in New York City; 200 people amassed for 10 minutes on the ninth floor of Macy's department store to discuss the merits of the store's carpets. Soon afterward, flash mobs appeared in other cities. In San Francisco, for example, hundreds gathered for a game of duck-duck-goose on the Golden Gate Bridge. As one participant described the gathering: "We have protests in San Francisco all the time. The whole point of this is that there is no point."

In their own ridiculous way, these flash mobs drive home a critical point: In the search for a revival of America's civic life, what people do in the public sphere is as important as the fact that they are doing it together.

Readers will not find stories of flash mobs playing duck-duck-goose in Putnam and Feldstein's Better Together, but they will find a surprisingly eclectic mix of organizations that the authors present as examples of an overall effort to create "new forms of community, adapted to the conditions and needs of our time."

Each of the book's 12 chapters is devoted to the story of a different exercise in community building. In Los Angeles, an evangelical Christian mega-church turns its crowd of 45,000 visitors into a congregation of committed members through the organization of hundreds of small study groups focused on encouraging social interaction. In Boston, organizers succeed in unionizing Harvard's research assistants through the use of one-on-one conversations and the patient development of personal relationships. In Portsmouth, N.H., a two-year effort seeks to lower the social barriers between shipyard workers and the community's artists through an interpretive dance festival that integrates the various actions of building a ship -- and the shipbuilders themselves -- into the performances.

As a guide for using community-building techniques to improve one's organization or civic project, this book serves its purpose well -- it offers readers a dozen well-researched and well-written examples of how to encourage the formation of productive social ties. However, read in the larger context of the effort to restore the vitality of American civic life, the book falls a bit short.

Like the flash mobs of 2003, Putnam and Feldstein's overriding focus on novel ways to generate social connections ends up making the creation of these social ties an end in itself. Indeed, the authors seem to lose sight of an essential point about the Greatest Generation, which they and others have identified as the high-water mark for civic engagement -- that the strong sense of community held by that generation was created by working together as citizens to accomplish great things.

That insight raises some key questions for public officials and policymakers. Rather than Putnam and Feldstein's self-conscious strategy for investing in greater levels of social connectedness, why not work toward increasing the involvement of citizens in the key public challenges their country and their communities face, knowing that a revitalized civic spirit could be the happy byproduct of such an effort?

This approach would point toward a set of civic projects overlooked by Putnam and Feldstein in Better Together. With U.S. Armed Forces stretched thin in Afghanistan and Iraq, America's national leadership could take advantage of the military's new 18-month enlistment program to bring a new generation of citizen soldiers into service to share the burden of self-defense. With international terrorists determined to put America's communities on the front lines, national, state, and local authorities could scale up the fledgling AmeriCorps homeland security efforts to bring community members together in emergency preparedness education programs, Citizen Emergency Response Teams (CERT), police and fire department support projects, and disaster emergency planning. Finally, as policymakers confront other public challenges, such as the coming wave of baby boomer retirements, they could look first to civic programs that expand the opportunities for citizens themselves to work together to solve critical public problems.

In his 1995 article, "Bowling Alone," and the 2000 book of the same name, Putnam played a crucial role in lifting the veil on the huge social and political problem of declining civic engagement. However, in the shift from documenting the decline to highlighting ways to reverse this trend, Putnam and Feldstein's Better Together serves mostly as a cautionary tale for how much more difficult the latter can be. By ignoring the most compelling reasons Americans have to work together as citizens in favor of more deliberative community building strategies, they end up defining down the civic agenda they profess to support. That weakens the case for a public policy focused on the civic health of the nation.

Marc Magee is the director of the Center for Civic Enterprise at the Progressive Policy Institute.