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Javier E

'The Interview': Robert Putnam Knows Why You're Lonely - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...robert-putnam-interview.html

interview putnam loneliness anomie US history culture crisis politics

shared by Javier E on 28 Jul 24 - No Cached
  • I think we’re in a really important turning point in American history. What I wrote in “Bowling Alone” is even more relevant now. Because what we’ve seen over the last 25 years is a deepening and intensifying of that trend. We’ve become more socially isolated, and we can see it in every facet in our lives.
  • Social isolation leads to lots of bad things. It’s bad for your health, but it’s really bad for the country, because people who are isolated, and especially young men who are isolated, are vulnerable to the appeals of some false community. I can cite chapter and verse on this: Eager recruits to the Nazi Party in the 1930s were lonely young German men, and it’s not an accident that the people who are attracted today to white nationalist groups are lonely young white men.
  • You distinguish between two types of social capital, right? There’s bonding social capital and there’s bridging social capital.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Ties that link you to people like yourself are called bonding social capital. So, my ties to other elderly, male, white, Jewish professors — that’s my bonding social capital. And bridging social capital is your ties to people unlike yourself. So my ties to people of a different generation or a different gender or a different religion or a different politic or whatever, that’s my bridging social capital
  • in a diverse society like ours, we need a lot of bridging social capital
  • bonding social capital can be very useful, but it can also be extremely dangerous. So far, so good, except that bridging social capital is harder to build than bonding social capital. That’s the challenge, as I see it, of America today.
  • We want community, and yet there’s something that takes us away from community. Why?
  • The first answer is we’re busy. And you might think therefore busy people are going to be more online and less face to face.
  • the fact is busy people are more connected with the rest of the world. If you’re asking, “Why do we have people no longer connecting face to face,” it absolutely is not because we’re too busy.
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