And so their mourning, for all its poignancy, is saddled with evasive sentimentality. In Bowling Alone , Robert Putnam, for a time one of our foremost political sociologists and philosopher-king of the Clinton White House, seeks to rescue anxiety about the loss of community from just this kind of sentimentality. Putnam strains for the hardheaded. The consequence of declining civitas, he says, is not the intangible loneliness of anomie. Like physical capital in economic theory, social capital is an asset.
Crime goes down, workplace morale goes up, Rolodexes get fat.
But for all its shrewdness, Putnam's stance is no less evasive than my parents'. Lurking beneath his social science are two questionable assumptions. Whether people eat out or act up, shout at the ball game or in the streets, they are doing things together, and that's what counts. Because there is virtually no distinction between politics, entertainment, and hanging out, the same causes must explain how often people vote, go to a meeting of the Kiwanis Club, or visit their next-door neighbors. Second, those causes are cultural and individual rather than institutional and political.