A Reply to Rick re the iPod Nation

As someone who feels about his iPod sort of the way NRA types feel about their guns, I may not be unbiased, but I'm going to take up Rick's recent challenge anyway.

Rick pays Andrew Sullivan the compliment of taking seriously Sullivan's essay iPod World: The End of Society?, in which the latter wrote:

Americans are beginning to narrowcast their own lives. You get your news from your favorite blogs, the ones that won't challenge your own view of the world. You tune into a paid satellite radio service that also aims directly at a small market - for New Age fanatics, or liberal talk, or Christian rock. Television is all cable. Culure is all subculture. Your cell-phones can receive email feeds of your favorite blogger's latest thoughts - seconds after he has posted them - or sports scores for your own team, or stock quotes of just your portfolio. Technology has given us finally a universe entirely for ourselves - where the serendipity of meeting a new stranger, or hearing a piece of music we would never choose for ourselves, or an opinion that might actually force us to change our mind about something are all effectively banished. Atomization by little white boxes and cell-phones. Society without the social. Others who are chosen - not met at random.

Human beings have never lived like this. Yes, we have always had homes or retreats or places where we went to relax or unwind or shut the world out. But we didn't walk around the world like hermit crabs with our isolation surgically attached. Music in particular was once the preserve of the living room or the concert hall. It was sometimes solitary but it was primarily a shared experience, something that brought people together, gave them the comfort of knowing that others too understood the pleasure of that Brahms symphony or that Beatles album.

Now where have we seen this before? Ah ha! Isn't Sullivan just recycling Robert Putnam Bowling Alone thesis? With a techno-geek spin?

You'll recall that Putnam's 1995 essay and 2000 book claimed that social capital was in decline due to a loss of community. Observing that people supposedly were bowling alone more often, Putnam opined: "The broader social significance ... lies in the social interaction and even occasionally civic conversations over beer and pizza that solo bowlers forgo." Sounds a lot like Sullivan's complaint about the iPod, doesn't it?

The problem is that it is all bunk. Shortly after Putnam's 1995 essay appeared, Robert Samuelson viciously fisked it for Newsweek. More recently, Marginal Revolution guest blogger Fabio Rojas pointed out research that directly undermines Putnam's titular claim:

Tim Hallett, a colleague of [Rojas'], his dissertation advisor Gary Alan Fine and graduate student Mike Sauder decided to see if people really bowled alone. They recently published a summary of their findings in the magazine Society. Fine, Hallett and Sauder write: "As occasional bowlers – although not in leagues – we asked a simple question: Do Americans really bowl alone, and what, if anything, does it mean?"

To answer that question, they went bowling and observed over 800 bowlers at six Chicago area bowling alleys. What did they find? Less than 1% of the people seen bowling actually bowled alone. In interviews, only 13% said they had bowled alone during the past year. What about those loners? Were the solo bowlers introverted and anti-social? To the contrary, 12 out of 22 interviewees who admitted to bowling alone did so to practice so they could do well in bowling leagues. In other words, bowling alone correlates with being in a bowling league.

In short, Putnam was wrong. So, in my judgment, is Sullivan. The evidence simply doesn't support the claim that were are retreating into a world, to quote Sullivan, of "Society without the social."

But suppose they're right? So what? Putnam's thesis has been seized upon by left communitarians to justify a whole slew of "It Takes a Village"-style government initiatives designed to promote community and solidarity. They thus bring to mind Richard Epstein’s observation that socialists no longer advocate direct government ownership of production. Instead, they operate on two different levels: "At a personal level, [modern socialism] speaks to the alienation of the individual, stressing the need for caring and sharing and the politics of meaning. At a regulatory level, it seeks to identify specific sectors in which there is a market failure and then to subject them to various forms of government regulation."

Yet, as I explained in my article Community and Statism: A Conservative Contractarian Critique of Progressive Corporate Law Scholarship, if America is becoming a low social capital society, it is precisely because of the sort of statism the left communitarians propose to foist upon us. Indeed, it can be argued that the decline in social capital (if there is one) began when the rich set of mediating institutions famously praised by Tocqueville was caught, like the Romans at Cannae, between the nanny state on one side and judicial hijacking of the state’s monopoly on the use of coercive force to advance a hyper-legalistic cult of the autonomous individual on the other.

We may fear the faceless bureaucrat, but he does not inspire us to community. Social capital thus cannot be created by state action. But while the state cannot make its citizens invest in social capital, it can destroy the intermediary institutions that do inculcate virtue. To quote Epstein, again: "Communities can be destroyed from without; but they cannot be created from without; they must be built from within."

So my answer to Rick is: Don't take Sullivan too seriously. Which, come to think of it, is probably a pretty good rule of thumb!

(X-posted to my main blog.)