Alone, Suburban, & Sorted: Part 1, <i>"That they bowled together made all the difference."</i>

In this series we are going to be dipping into some sociological research asking how trends in America, from the 1950s to the present day, are affecting both the church and the larger American society. For my non-North American readers I think you'll still find interest in the conversation. At points where trends converge you'll find parallels in your own country. Where trends diverge you'll be able to speak of civic practices in your country that have either been lost in America or never acquired in the first place. That is, we can learn from you. Also, in many of these posts we'll be comparing the European pedestrian lifestyle with the American automotive lifestyle. We'll also be speaking about English pubs, French coffeehouses, and German beer gardens.

This series is going to follow the analyses and arguments presented in three books. These books are:

Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community

The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart

The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community

Each book examines trends in American life and comes up with a major diagnosis about what is happening in American culture. Specifically, Americans today are:

Alone.
Suburban.
Sorted.

Taking my cue from the book Hot, Flat and Crowded, this series is thus entitled Alone, Suburban & Sorted.

(One quick note. The descriptions "alone" and "sorted" are pretty accurate. I've struggled with the third term and have settled on "suburban." But that term is not quite as accurate as the other two. Obviously, we aren't all living in suburbs. However, the rise of the automotive suburb post-WW2 helps peg a trend concerning the loss of "third places" in America. More about "third places" as the series continues.)

In this post we are going to begin our reflections by focusing on alone, digging into Robert Putnam's much discussed book Bowling Alone.

Bowling Alone was published in 2000. Thus, it is badly in need of some updating. For example, although Putnam makes a nod late in the book about the advent of Internet "chat rooms," he failed to guess at the explosion of social computing and networking, all the blogs, Facebooking, and Twittering. It still is to be determined if online social networking creates a form of community and to what degree these online communities and connections mitigate the great losses of face-to-face interactions Americans have experienced over the last fifty years. On a different but related note, we have yet to determine if Barack Obama is truly a transitional figure. Putnam tracks growing civic and political disengagement in America, particularly among young people. However, the youth voter turnout during the 2008 election might have signaled a change in this long decent toward disenchantment and disengagement. Or it might not. Time will tell.

But with these disclaimers in mind, Putnam's book remains a powerful document in detailing the decline of social life in America. In the 1960s civic and community engagement was at an all time high in America. The future of participatory democracy and local activism (through churches or civic organizations) seemed bright. But then the bottom fell out. And over the last few decades civic cohesion, specifically at the local and neighborhood level, gradually disintegrated. We went from knowing and regularly interacting with our neighbors to virtual anonymity. We now live among strangers.

The title of Bowling Alone comes from analyses in Chapter 6 where Putnam analyzes changes in informal social connections among Americans. For example, the number of bowlers in American has increased by 10% from 1980 to 1993. But this rise is largely due to general population increases. There are more of us and many of us like to bowl.

However, during this same period league bowling in America has declined by more that 40%. This trend is just one of many documented in Bowling Alone showing how Americans have been retreating from locations and activities involving social mixing. Places where people from all over town mix and interact, practicing the civic virtues of welcome, inclusion, conversation, listening, debate, and accommodation. With fewer bowling leagues, and places like them, Americans have fewer locations and opportunities to practice these skills.

The trend that most caught my attention in Bowling Alone was the decline in card playing in America. Through the 40s, 50s and 60s card playing in America (getting together with friends for games of Bridge or Spades) was rapidly increasing. By the 70s 40% of Americans played cards at least once a month. But since the 80s, card playing has been rapidly declining.

(Incidentally, this is one of Putnam's analyses that I'd like to see revisited. With the advent of the World Poker Tour on ESPN poker is all the rage now. So I wonder if card playing is going back up. My take is that it has, but only among a select demographic: Men. Plus, many of the young guns on the WPT gain much of their experience playing online poker. Regardless, I'd like to see a fresh analysis of all this.)

The decline in card playing struck me as my parents tell stories of the hours and hours they played cards with friends when they were college students and as a young married couple. Movies were rare treat and people ate at home a lot. Thus, a great source of entertainment was having people over to play cards. When I was young I glimpsed this dying world. The card game that dominated by family was Nerts. Nerts, if you don't know, is the greatest group card game ever invented. It is a competitive solitaire-style game on amphetamines. Particularly if you play doubles. Then the action gets violent. As a child I witnessed epic Nerts battles. But these scenes have practically vanished from American homes.

But it's not really about card games. It's about welcoming people into your home. The cards were just an excuse and something to do while you talked. But this trend is also going down. In the 1970s Americans entertained people in their homes 14-15 times a year, a little over once a month. In the late 1990s that number had dropped to eight times a year, a decline of 45% in less than two decades.

One might ask, "So what?" Have these trends really had an affect on the quality and richness of our lives? Who cares if bowling leagues are declining? To frame his response, Putnam ends Chapter 1 of Bowling Along with this story:

Before October 29, 1997, John Lambert and Andy Boschma knew each other only through their local bowling league at the Ypsi-Arbor Lanes in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Lambert, a sixty-four-year-old retired employee of the University of Michigan hospital, had been on a kidney transplant waiting list for three years when Boschma, a thirty-three-year-old accountant, learned casually of Lambert's need and unexpectedly approached him to offer to donate one of his own kidneys.

"Andy saw something in me that other's didn't," said Lambert. "When we were in the hospital Andy said to me, 'John, I really like you and have a lot of respect for you. I wouldn't hesitate to do this all over again.' I got choked up." Boschma returned the feeling: "I obviously feel a kinship [with Lambert]. I cared about him before, but now I'm really rooting for him." This moving story speaks for itself, but the photograph that accompanied this report in the Ann Arbor News reveals that in addition to their differences in profession and generation, Boschma is white and Lambert is African American. That they bowled together made all the difference.

Next Post: Hollowed Out