Selling Our Souls To Individualism

When Alexis de Tocqueville sought to explain democracy in America 150 years ago, he pointed to the fact that “Americans are forever forming associations.” They get together, he said, for commercial, religious, moral and practical objectives or “to proclaim a truth.” Civic groups, he argued, are an essential element of a democratic culture.

But now, the phenomenon that de Tocqueville shrewdly saw - America as a nation of joiners - is withering away. So we learn from a fascinating article by Professor Robert D. Putnam of Harvard University in the new issue of the quarterly The American Prospect.

Surveys of average Americans over the last 30 years, the article says, show that participation in voluntary associations is down between 25 percent and 50 percent. That is so of groups as diverse as the PTA, the Elks, the League of Women Voters and the Red Cross.

“Americans today are significantly less engaged with their communities than was true a generation ago,” Putnam concludes. And with that has come a decline in what he calls “social trust”: belief in one another.

Putnam’s purpose is not just to note the decline but also to explain it.

A clue is that it is generational. Those born between 1925 and 1930 have been “exceptionally civic: voting more, joining more, reading newspapers more, trusting more.” (de Tocqueville, too, noted a link between civic participation and newspaper-reading.) But those born after World War II participate much less.

Why? Putnam’s answer is: television.

The average American spends 40 percent of his free time watching television - and those who watch a lot participate little. Television discourages “social trust and group membership,” Putnam writes. “Heavy readers (of newspapers) are avid joiners, whereas heavy viewers are more likely to be loners.” Surveys show that readers belong to 76 percent more civic groups than do watchers.

The time spent in front of the TV set is one reason why television may discourage the joining of groups and participating in the community. Another is the negative picture television usually gives of American society.

“Heavy watchers of TV are unusually skeptical about the benevolence of other people,” Putnam says - “overestimating crime rates, for example. … Heavy TV-watching may well increase pessimism about human nature.”

A final point goes beyond television. It is that the whole electronic revolution in communications, even while it enlarges our opportunities, has a profoundly fragmenting effect on society. In other words, we can sit alone at our computers and interact only through electronics. Technology, Putnam concludes, “may indeed be undermining our connections with one another and with our communities.”

To that provocative analysis I would add another point. The United States today is in the grip of free-market ideology carried to the extreme: a belief that society will thrive if nearly all decisions are left for individuals to make on economic grounds. That ideology no doubt thrives on the atomization described by Putnam - and feeds it.

But individual decision-making cannot give a society clean water or safe drugs, even though right-wing ideologues in Congress today like to pretend it can as they remove governmental safeguards. Nor can pure commercialism give a country a decent television service, as all other civilized societies understand.

The former director of the London School of Economics, Lord Dahrendorf, warned recently against “an economism run amok,” an attitude that disdains “non-economic motives - motives that lead people to do things because they are right or because people have a sense of duty, a commitment.”

Making the values of commerce the emperors of our souls, Dahrendorf said, leads to “the destruction of public spaces and the decline of the services that go with them, the weakening of health systems and public education, transportation and safety.”

When people in a society care only for themselves, when they are taught by demagogues to sneer at government and the communal good, it cannot be surprising that social bonds and social trust decline.

In that process, everyone will lose eventually. In a society in which fewer people vote or care or join - a society that has lost its sense of community - individualism will not bring contentment.