New York Times columnist David Brooks moderates a discussion on the history and possible future of social cohesion and depolarization with panelists: Robert Putnam, Danielle Allen, Eric Klinenberg, and Shaylyn Romney Garrett.
Panelists:
Moderator:
Narrator: From the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, this is Human Centered. The ethic of a democratic society, our ties to one another, In fact, the collective American project seems perilously fragile these days. How do we form or reform social connections that promote cohesion and a sense of common purpose and identity? Today on Human Centered, we're bringing you another episode in the CASBS series, Social Science for a World in Crisis. This episode of the series, which webcast originally on September 25th, 2020, is titled Can We Rebuild Social Cohesion in the United States? and it features panelists Danielle Allen, the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University, where she's also the director of the Edmund J. Safra Center for Ethics; Shaylyn Romney Garrett, co-author of the new book The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How It Can Do It Again; Eric Klinenberg, two-time former CASBS fellow in 2008 and 2016 and the Helen Gould Shepard Professor of Social Science at New York University; and Robert Putnam, the Peter and Isabel Malkin Research Professor and Public Policy Emeritus at Harvard University and another two-time CASBS fellow in 1974 and 1988. Moderating the conversation is David Brooks, New York Times columnist and the founder and chair of Weave: The Social Fabric Project at the Aspen Institute. Brooks engages the panel in a discussion on the current state of our social fabric and social infrastructure both in precarious states well before the Trump administration, the COVID pandemic, and 2020's racial justice movements, all of which have underscored and amplified feelings of social upheaval. Given the weaknesses and vulnerabilities in our political and civic life, how do we inspire and grow a culture of commitment that can weave together resilient, empowered communities? Now join Human Centered as we listen in on the panel asking, can we rebuild social cohesion in the United States?
David Brooks: Hi, this is David Brooks. I am a New York Times columnist. I am the chair of something called Weave: The Social Fabric Project. And I'm a fan of the 4 panelists we're about to hear from for a little over an hour. We are meeting at a moment when we're at a national crisis. A lot of people think the country's falling apart, on the verge of some sort of political crisis. But I think we all sense that there's a crisis underneath the crisis, a crisis of the social order. And that's really going to be our subject today. This is the 8th episode of CASBS's webcast series, Social Science in a World in Crisis. And we have a couple co-sponsors for this episode, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a very fine organization, the Edmund J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, about which you may hear in a second, and the aforementioned Weave the Social Fabric project. You probably know our panelists, but just to give you their fancy titles: Danielle Allen is the James Bryan Conant University Professor at Harvard University and Director of the Safra Center for Ethics. Shaylyn Romney Garrett is co-author with Bob Putnam of the new book, and very important book, Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again. And before that, Shaylyn was my colleague at Weave. Among many other things, she ran a nonprofit in Jordan. We'll hear from Shaylyn in a minute. Robert Putnam is the Peter and Isabel Malkin Research Professor of Public Policy Emeritus at Harvard. He was a CASBS fellow in 1974 and 1975 and 1988 and 1989. And finally, Eric Kleinenberg is Helen Gould Shepard Professor of Social Science at New York University and director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at NYU. He was also a CASBS fellow, and him in 2007 to 2008, and then again 2016, 2017. This seems to be a boomerang kind of fellowship they give you here. So we are going to start with some opening comments. Then we're going to have a conversation about the world in all its aspects. Interspersed in that conversation, I will be asking my own question, but I'll also be asking your questions. And so we invite you to send those in and they will appear through a mediator in the chat and then I will relay them. So we're now going to start with the leading sociologist of his generation, at least on this panel, Robert Putnam.
Robert Putnam: Thanks, David. I should say immediately that although I'm sometimes mistaken for a sociologist and have been playing one on television for the last 25 years, actually by trade I'm a political scientist. And it's good to be with all of— with such a distinguished panel and also good friends. I want to start with where we are now and how we got here. America at the moment is in one of the most distressing, universally distressing periods in our history, and that is true in many different ways. It's— we are currently in probably arguably the most unequal time in our national history. The distribution of income and wealth and health and so on has almost never been as unequal as it is today. And then in a different domain, we're very polarized today and we're about as polarized as we have ever been in our entire national history. The only slight contender is in the years around 1865, '66, we were slightly more divided politically than we are now. But what that means is it took the Civil War as the only thing that we're close to in terms of the level of division and polarization today. We're also very socially isolated and socially disconnected. We are much less connected with our family and friends and communities probably than we've been ever in our history, although the data on social connection is necessarily a little weaker. And finally, we are probably more culturally focused on the self and less focused on our shared values than we have ever been in our history. And so the question is, how did we get here? And what we have— what we report in this most recent book is that Over the course of the, roughly speaking, the 70 years between the Gilded Age at the beginning of the 19th century— at the beginning of the 20th century, roughly 1890-1900, when we were so divided— in the following 60 to 70 years we became steadily more successful on all of those dimensions. We became steadily more equal in the distribution of income and the distribution of wealth and health. Steadily more connected in terms of our connections with our family and our friends and our neighbors and our civic institutions, steadily more— had a greater sense of our shared values and a greater sense that we're all in this together and a lesser sense that we're all on our own. And then suddenly around 1965 all those trends, all of those trends turned in the opposite direction. And so since about roughly speaking 1965, the middle '60s, we've become steadily less equal, more unequal, more unequal in health and income. And I'm talking— I will be talking actually also about distribution of income by race, but now I'm talking about distribution of income in general in America. The gap between rich and poor in America has steadily grown rapidly over the last half century. So we're less equal than we were before. We're much less— we're much more polarized than we were before. At the peak of this period in the middle '60s, there was a lot of shared cooperation across party lines and that has obviously disappeared. We're now conscious every day of how polarized we are politically. The same thing is true of our connections with one another. We steadily have fewer connections with our family, with our friends, with our neighbors, with our communities. And finally, we're steadily less likely to share a sense that we're all in this together. In short, at the beginning of this period in the 1890s, 1900s, roughly 1890s, 1900s, America was very much an "I" society and we became steadily over the next 70 years steadily more a "we" society. But then over the last 50 years, all of those trends have been reversed and we've moved steadily toward a more I society. In short, as I see it, America now is at the end of a century-long, more than 125-year cycle from I to we to I.
Danielle Allen: Thanks so much, David, for the terrific launch, and this is an important conversation. I'm going to key off Bob's remarks, not only because they're at the start, but because he's been such an important contributor to conversations about social cohesion over so many years. I think he and I agree on one thing, maybe more, but one thing, there are things we disagree on. The thing that we agree on is that this country did have a "we" moment in the late 1950s and 1960s. The thing we disagree on is whether or not from 1900 to 1960s, we can describe that as a period of steady progress. From Ida B. Wells. And then I think we probably disagree a little bit about the nature of the work that we have to do now. So let me just speak to each of those two points. It's certainly true that prosperity increased for the country generally, and that that increase also flowed to African Americans in the first half of the 20th century. But the social solidarity that was achieved in the beginning of the 20th century was very directly the product of rebuilding of a very strong line between white and black. So we all know the story of Reconstruction, the end of the Reconstruction era. Insofar as the country began to launch a project of solidarity in the early 20th century, it was really launched on the basis of a notion that there'd be a sort of strong concept of assimilation, the assimilation of ethnic European migrants into a pre-existing white culture and a much firmer black-white lines. So violence against African Americans increased in that first part of the 20th century. Woodrow Wilson famously segregated in very many ways from the federal level of the government. The 1924 Immigration Act didn't simply protect African Americans from jobs that Europeans might get, as is mentioned in the book, but also actually excluded Asian Americans. And I think we can't therefore tell a story of steady progress from I to we in the first half of the 20th century. What we can tell is the story of a contest where absolutely African Americans built for themselves. They secured education, they entered the law, they chose to fight and to contest the distribution of the prosperity that was growing, and that brought benefits to the African American community and eventually the civil rights movement. And indeed, the story of the change African Americans experienced over the course of the century is not a surprise. That is, in the sense that it's narrated in the book as a surprise that there was sort of growth for African Americans up through the '70s and then a decline. Any African American family that that has generations that extend across this century already knows that story. So when we think about social cohesion, we have to ask, why is that a surprise for some? Because it's not a surprise to others. It is the story of my family. There is no surprise in it whatsoever. So somehow, yes, we achieved a we moment. We achieved that we moment through contest, actually, and through the efforts of African Americans as allies working together to build advocacy and so forth. And then we have struggled as a society since then. I believe we struggle because we have been a fully inclusive electorate committed to universal suffrage only since the middle of the 20th century. Only in the middle of the 20th century did Native Americans fully acquire the right to vote. And I think we haven't faced honestly enough that what we have done for ourselves has taken on a big challenge to be a fully inclusive electorate committed to universal suffrage. This is a noble aspiration. I believe we can do it, but that means we need an intentionality around social cohesion and new conditions. We can't just look back to a historical model and think that will give us the answers. It won't. We really need new answers for new demographic conditions and for new aspirational commitments.
David Brooks: Okay, let's go to Eric next. Eric, you and I had a phone conversation maybe 3, 4 months ago where you made a comment that has been ringing in my ears at that moment, that it was a moment where you could tell a story where we would unify and a moment you could also tell the story where we would completely come apart. I think maybe the latter has happened, but let's hear from you.
Eric Klineberg: You know, I'm sure you all get the calls that I get occasionally asking for you know, some kind of quick characterization of the moment and a prediction about what's going to happen. And I'm taking it that the rest of you are a lot wiser than I am, because I sometimes answer those calls. And just around the time we spoke, David, Politico had called me to say, you know, what comes after the pandemic? And I was foolish enough to say at the time, I don't see how we get through this without rekindling some understanding of what it means to be part of a collective. I don't see how we experience a pandemic and get through it without coming to see once again the extent to which our fate is linked to the fate of our neighbors, that if we fail to invest in each other and in our collective well-being, we can't escape the harm that that generates. And so I glibly said, you know, the way to survive this is to capture that we feeling, you know, regardless of when exactly we think it started. I have to say now, especially this week, I feel about as cynical as I possibly could be about whether we can rebuild that we feeling. And I guess the feeling is I'm not sure we're going to get through this. And it horrifies me to say that, David, because as you know, I've spent the better part of the last several years going around the country and making the case that there— it's time for us to stop simply complaining about how bad things are and for us to generate a positive program for how we rebuild and to think seriously, not just critically, but also productively in a way that I learned to do when I spent my 2 years at the Center for Advanced Study for Behavioral Science at Stanford about making things. And I'm a firm believer in doing that. But I remain stuck on this feeling. If you told me right now that in 2 years we would be in a new dark age, that we would see our democratic institutions eviscerated, that we would see civil society suppressed, that we would see the kind of divisions that Bob laid out for us exacerbated, I could see that story and I would buy it. But also, if you told me that in 2 years we would have begun a process that we would come to think of as a Great Reset, that we would have embarked on something radically inclusive and democratic, something like a Green New Deal, I would also buy that vision. And in fact, I still to this day believe that that is within our reach. What I know right now is the answer to the question we have before us today, can we rebuild something like social cohesion? Depends massively on what happens in the next 6 weeks of our lives. And it's a strange feeling, I want to say, to be in the midst of a moment where you feel like everything is on the line and everything is up for grabs. It's a time for all of us, I think, to be thinking about practical action. You know, what are we doing to ensure that we have real inclusion, that we have a democratic process because I think if our worst nightmares about what will happen in this election come true, the possibility for social cohesion becomes very remote. I will say one more thing before I pass it on. And that is that I'm a sociologist, and I'm very interested in questions about culture and values and belief. But I also have come to think that we don't get through this with a cultural program that unifies us. There's no charismatic leader who has— rhetoric that's going to bring us together. What I wrote about in this last book about social infrastructure, and what I still believe, is that the path forward is a materialist one. We actually are— to build something more like the social, we're going to have to start building things together in the way that we did during the New Deal. That means infrastructure, it means hard infrastructure, it means social infrastructure, it means jobs, and it means bringing people together in physical places where, you know, there is some material benefit to cooperating. And it's for that reason, I think, the debate about what happens in a stimulus bill right now is so significant. And really, what comes next after this election, you know, matters so much. But I do hope we can hit this theme a little bit. There is a cultural view of how we come together based on a shared vision. And there's also one that's about redistributing goods. And what I am so grateful for the activists of this country to bring to the forefront in these last few months is the extent to which the problem of our time is not simply a problem of race, but also a problem of economic injustice and unequal opportunities that's organized around racial lines, but that goes down to our core. And everything is on the table for us to consider. I'm looking forward to this hour.
David Brooks: Hey, Shaylyn, you not only have co-wrote this book, which is filled with data and graphs, but you and I have traveled around the country visiting people on the ground, and you're someone who has direct encounters with people and places that are central to your vocation. So maybe, how does it look from where you're sitting? And tell us where you're sitting.
Shaylyn Romney Garrett: So I'm sitting in southern Utah, right near Zion National Park, which is a beautiful part of the country to be in, and a really dark time in our nation's history. And I'm really grateful to be included in this. And I'm honored, of course, to be included on a panel such as this. And, you know, I want to speak a little bit to what both Danielle and Eric brought up, which is that, you know, the lesson of the book that Bob and I have spent the last couple of years writing is not necessarily that we need to look back at some sort of golden age in American history and say, oh, well, that was when we had it all right and we need to recreate that. Quite the contrary. It's about looking back to a time that was remarkably similar to the time we find ourselves in today. And asking ourselves the question of how we got out of that mess then and how we might do it again. Now what Danielle brings up, which is absolutely correct, that during this period that we are calling the upswing, the first two-thirds of the 20th century, things were not, you know, the we that was created was not inclusive. Not only was it not inclusive, it was violent. It was violently exclusive. And it's absolutely correct that whatever trajectory we were on in getting toward a we, that the circle of moral concern of that trajectory was not nearly wide enough. And so in that sense, I think that we can look back to that period of history to gain some lessons about the very real and very measurable progress that the progressives were able to make. But the other lessons that we learn is from their failings, right? And from their failure to make the upswing fully inclusive. And so I think there's a lot of work to be done to, as you say, achieve something that in the course of American history has not yet been achieved, and frankly, in the course of human history has not yet been achieved, which is to create a mass multicultural democracy that works. So we are not blind to what those challenges are. But I also think that it's really important to be able to look back in history and say, we've been in a mess very similar to the one that we are in today, and we got out of it once before. Now the way we got out of it knit into some of the, the, the solutions that we built to get out of it had knit into them structural racism, which is absolutely a fact that needs to be called out. And absolutely in any sort of upswing that we would hope to set ourselves on now, we have to remedy that fact. And it's my hope that we can. And I do take my inspiration, as Erin mentioned, as, as Eric mentioned, from the activists of today who are calling for that, and also calling for that in the context of a moral awakening. I mean, I think when we look back at the progressives, one of the things that they got right was that this— whether or not we were going to set ourselves onto an upswing was about something like our primary conceptions. Is America fundamentally a place in which competition a war of the we's is what democracy is about, or is it a place where vast collaboration and cooperation can and should occur? And so I think that that's one critical lesson from history, was the way in which they were able— the progressives were able to form a cultural narrative that questioned, um, some of those more competitive and more zero-sum ideas about how America and democracy can work. And also we saw a huge, um, vast foment of citizen innovation. And I think, you know, Eric mentioned the federal programs that were redistributed, that came around during the New Deal. But we have to remember that— and when we look at the data which we present in this book, the upswing began well before the New Deal. Sometimes we look at the New Deal as sort of the starting point of when America got it together in the 20th century. But it turns out that those trends were clearly discernible decades before the New Deal happened. What was happening then was not necessarily sort of the New Deal was the culmination in that sense of a vast citizen foment calling for change. That is what we're seeing today. I hope that that means that we can see vast federal programs that, that come on the heels of that as well. Now what's different about today than the time that we were in at the turn of the last century is that we weren't really— we didn't really have a president that was moving us down the road toward autocracy. And that is a real way in which things are a lot more serious now than they were then. So, you know, I'm with Eric. I'm struggling to find my hope. I still have it. And that hope is largely centered on young people today. And I don't know, I think that we'll see. But I'm excited to see what the other panelists have to say about what should and must be on the agenda for America going forward.
David Brooks: Maybe I'll start with Danielle. You heard Eric. How scared are you? And how do you define you could describe this just as a political turmoil. We have Donald Trump. Donald Trump is the problem. I hear that from friends. You could describe it culturally. You could describe it as decay of institutions. How scared are you? And what's the core of your— if you are scared, what's the core of your scaredness?
Danielle Allen: I'm not scared, to be honest. So that doesn't mean I don't think that we're facing great challenges. Without any question, we are. But I mean, at this point, folks have heard me say a lot, my basic orientation to this is failure is not an option. So sort of scared is just kind of off the radar for me as a potential moral emotion in this moment. The question is rather, how do we gather our forces and what's the job ahead of us? And for me, then the important thing is the definition of the job. And that's, I think, to some extent why I'm challenging the value of the historical reach. I do see the value, of course, yeah, I'm a historian, I love history, I'm always reaching back to 1776. Okay, so I do recognize that there can be value in that. But I do think in this instance, It's not the right thing for us. And the reason is because, for reasons I cannot get my head around, we're having a very, very hard time shifting our framework from a question of, as was in the title of this seminar, how do we rebuild social cohesion, to the question of how do we build, for the first time, inclusive social cohesion. That is, we have to be constituutors, not reconstitutors. And from my point of view, until we can actually put our heads in the space of constituutors, fresh builders will not solve our problems. And so that's sort of why I do kind of keep coming back round to wanting to sort of point out that, I mean, at the end of the day, the progressive solution was just too deeply entangled with the end of Reconstruction, the construction of Jim Crow. And so, in— actually, I think honestly, in contrast to the 18th century moments where I think there was actually a clearer split between people who had already embraced abolition and were seeking to do rebuilding, or sort of building a free self-government based on principles that made sense for them from an abolitionist frame. I don't see the same degree of split in the progressive era. Maybe I'm wrong about that. That'd be a failure on my part. If so, I would love to see the racially inclusive version of progressivism that actually was impactful at that point in time. But if we can't actually point to that, then I honestly don't think we should be using the package they have as a learning example. We again have to be constituators. We have to ask ourselves, starting from where we are, given our aspirations, given what we know about this country, all of the good is in it, all of its capacities, how do we build from what we have?
Robert Putnam: Thanks, David and Danielle. I'd like to comment briefly on two related but different questions that have been posed. One is issues of race. And I'll try to be brief about that, although, of course, it deserves a lot of discussion, a lot more than we can do here. And then I want to turn a little bit to my own mood because what I will say is my mood actually about optimism or pessimism has changed quite dramatically in the last week because I think the completely un— well, not completely unpredictable but the exogenous fact of the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg has actually transformed things a lot and I think put us on a very different path than we were a week ago. So I'm on the side of those who think it's been— for me personally, the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the reaction of the Republicans and Donald Trump to that and their actions actually I think have foreclosed or have drastically changed the likelihood in my view that we'll emerge in any good place anytime soon. Let me go to the issue of race for a minute because in some respects Danielle and I agree surprisingly. Danielle says Black folks have known all along that they were— that Black folks had made lots of progress in the period— we could disagree about exactly when— but roughly in the period from 1920 or 1930 to 1970. Blacks knew that all along and that's completely true. But whites did not know it. And whites are essentially ignorant of what happened in that period between the latter part of the upswing, the latter part of the we moving toward we period. And that's largely because there was such a segregation in that period, not just socially but also culturally between the world of Blacks and the world of whites. Blacks knew about that period largely in their own lives, as you say, Danielle, in your life and in the life of almost all Black people, they know in their own history. About Michelle Obama's book is entirely about the Great Migration and the effects of the Great Migration on the conditions of Black people. What the Great Migration did, this movement of millions, millions of Blacks from really awful, virtually slave surf-like conditions in the Deep South, up the Mississippi River along those train tracks to Chicago and to Milwaukee and to Detroit and then also to, you know, to not Boston so much but New York and out to Seattle and so on. That movement of Black people at once moved them from a place of inequality to another place of inequality, but the place of— the degree of inequality in the places they were going to was much less than it had been where they— so even though when Michelle Obama's grandfather or the grand— you know, the folks who were moving up the river— I mean, moving up to the north in the Great Migration, they were moving to places where they were not equal to whites in those places, but they were a lot better off than Blacks had been where they had come from. And therefore— and that's not the only part of the story of what happened between 1920 and 1970, but it's a large part of what happened. And so maybe there's a criticism, a fair criticism on your part that that part of our book is written to elicit, to educate white readers We didn't think we needed to educate Black readers about that period because they all knew it, exactly as you say. Go ahead, you want to jump in?
Danielle Allen: Well, just to jump in on that, I mean, this is in some sense an arcane point, right, from academics arguing about how we narrate our history, but I do actually think there are some issues about the future of social cohesion here in the sense that I think this is a good example of one of our greatest challenges, which is each of us comes from a standpoint from, you know, we're used to audiences that in the first instance are our own family and our own community and extends out from there. And the challenge we all have is how to narrate our history so that we actually are somehow able to channel multiple perspectives simultaneously and write to all. So it's just a small point of like, it shouldn't be narrated as a surprise, or if it's narrated as a surprise, it should be narrated as some people will be surprised, though others have always known. Right? So—
Robert Putnam: And that's what we say. You're quoting us.
Danielle Allen: We say— Okay, I didn't— I apologize. In that case, I missed that.
Eric Klineberg: I want to jump in just because I think for the sake of all of us who are part of the conversation and watching, let's wait till we get a chance to read your book, which we're eager to do. But there's a question at hand, which is how we start thinking about the future of social cohesion. And I want to make sure we talk about it. And I think to kind of clarify a point I tried to make earlier a little abstractly, it seems to me like what we need to even begin that process is some kind of shared project. I actually don't worry about social cohesion at the micro level. I don't buy the idea that there's more isolation than there's ever been in America, or there's more loneliness in America. I think the evidence for that is actually pretty weak. I see a lot of people spending time connecting with people in their group. But that leads to— that's polarization, or that's social polarization. That's something a little bit different. What I don't think we have is a shared project. And the puzzling thing about this moment is that we now face these shared concerns that transcend all kinds of divisions. So the, the fact is we remain mired in a, in a lethal pandemic that our state and our society has been uniquely incapable of managing. We have a shared project of dealing with a health crisis, and that's the kind of thing that societies in the past have been able to pivot and reorganize around. We have a shared project that's looming of dealing with the climate crisis, which cannot be denied. And this event is being hosted in California at an institution that's close to historic fires. And every part of the world is experiencing its version of that fire today. There's the— it's inescapable that we have to deal with this. And of course, we have a shared economic crisis that touches everyone, even affluent people in California and in New York City and in Cambridge will find that the places where they live are degraded if there's a fiscal crisis in the city and the state and the public education institutions can't work and the parks fall apart and the libraries are closed. So I just want to lay out, and I'll stop, that I think that a conversation about building cohesion that's materialist has to think about how we build projects that help us get through the crises we experience at home, at our dinner table. And I think there are many issues here that transcend some of the divisions we've been discussing so far.
David Brooks: I want to challenge you on one thing and then go to Shaylyn. You said earlier that there was no cultural solution, but my argument would be, why did we fail to handle the pandemic well? It's because we didn't have a culture of social solidarity. Tocqueville had this concept, the social body, when people can act together. Then the country can turn as one. But we lack the cultural preconditions for that, I would say. So I would say culture still has to come first.
Eric Klineberg: I mean, very quickly here, you can't divorce these things altogether. And clearly, we don't have that solidarity. But boy, strong political leadership that respected science and public health guidelines, I think, could have done tremendous work. I mean, you'd have a hard time arguing that what made the Chinese response to the pandemic more successful than ours is the solidarity that the Chinese people felt. Together. I think there's a role for the state, and that goes back to what Shaylyn was saying about the New Deal and how there was a turnaround before that. We have no institution that has comparable resources to the state that can activate a project and integrate people in work and redistribution like the state. And we have a tremendously powerful state, which is now in the hands of people who are intent on dividing and advancing their partisan power in a way that I think is shocking even to people who were really cynical before this past week.
David Brooks: Shaylyn, when we were working together at Weave, I think we had the presupposition— I'm not as confident in— that social capital and social solidarity was going to be built from the ground up by local weavers. Is that still your sense? Or how do you react to the conversation you're just hearing?
Shaylyn Romney Garrett: You know, I hear what Eric is saying. But what's different between America and China is that we don't want our social solidarity to be imposed from the top down, right? We want it. We need it. We need it from a democratic perspective to be bubbling up from below. So the question, you know, to what David mentions is how, how do we do that? I mean, how, how do we— going back to Tocqueville, how do we convince people to move away from self-interest to what Tocqueville called self-interest rightly understood? Self-interest rightly understood is the idea that when I put the needs of others before my own, or when I put the collective above my own needs, it actually serves my own needs, right? And that is a, that's a cultural belief, that's a moral mindset. And I do think that, um, what I found most inspiring traveling around the country and looking at people who are doing this rebuilding is that they all share the sense that not only do we need to do service provision, or not only do we need to create innovative programs that redistribute wealth or, or other things like that, we need to create programs that challenge people's moral conceptions about what kind of a project they are a part of, not just physically, but what kind of a project they're a part of philosophically, right, in the United States. And I think, I, I think that we need the very best minds in America trying to understand what brings about a vast cultural shift. How can we do that? We spend a lot of time thinking about what programs we should build. We spend a lot of time thinking about what policies will affect all of these things. And I'm not arguing that that's not important, but I am arguing that do we put as much creativity and as much time and energy into asking ourselves the question how to bring about a shift in our primary conceptions in this nation? That's what inspires me, is the people who are doing that.
David Brooks: Danielle, one of the things I found— I found many things very useful about the book, but one was the, just this, the theory of change that was described starting in the 1870s and up to the 1930s, I guess, which was— forgive me, Bob and Sheila, if I'm getting this wrong— but it struck me useful to see that there was this cultural shift, the shift from social Darwinism to social gospel movement, then a civic renaissance, the rise of the boys and girls clubs, the boys and girls scouts, the environmental movement, the settlement house movement, et cetera, et cetera. And then the political manifestation. That struck me as a useful way to think about change. And I wonder, and especially as you emphasize our need to go forward, you've just chaired a commission I was honored to sit on, on civic change. And how do you think about this mesh of cultural change, civic change, and then political change? Do you think the political reforms you suggested, we all suggested in that report, can get the job done? And maybe if you could describe what some of them were.
Danielle Allen: Sure. I mean, so the important extension of the question about the relationship between cultural change and institutional change or structural change. I'll come back to the political reform suggestions in a moment, but I do think this is the core question. I do think the cultural piece is fundamental. So I would very much agree with Ceylan and Bob on that. And so, but what I was trying to point out is a piece of the cultural work that wasn't on the table at the end of the 19th century and is now. And I want to just try to name it very precisely. It's about our storytelling. Can we learn to tell stories where we get just in the basic habit of testing how to tell them from multiple perspectives simultaneously? And it's just a habit we don't all collectively have yet. I don't have it either. I mean, I'm not trying to point fingers. It's really, it's actually quite serious cultural work. And it's about our fiction writers and our films. And sometimes they're ahead of the rest of us in that regard. And so I do think that we need the world of civic associationalism. But what I'm trying to suggest is that we can't actually have a healthy version of that world unless we actually change how we are storytellers together about the world that we live in. So I'm actually trying to put an additional cultural project on the table. And indeed, David, that was one of our recommendations in the commission report, right, that one of the things we needed to do was to sponsor experiments all over the country in how we narrate our shared history. And how do we take any given sort of stretch of time and acknowledge that there are going to be very different perspectives on what the through line of the narrative is, and then how do you actually tell a story that integrates those different through lines that come from different perspectives. And so I have belabored the point, I recognize. I appreciate you all allowing me to do that, but it's because it's actually a part of the cultural work that didn't get named, I don't think, in that early 20th century moment, and that I believe is foundational to our ability to start reweaving now through activating civic associations, building organizations that help people bridge differences. You know, Better Angels is a wonderful example of such an entity, the Civic Lex program in Lexington, Kentucky. We need that whole raft of civil society associations, absolutely grounded on a new approach to storytelling, I believe.
Eric Klineberg: Could I just say quickly, to put a pin on this point, I think Danielle explained this so clearly. It's not that my view is that culture doesn't matter, that you don't get— that solidarity doesn't matter. It's that you build it through shared action. That sometimes when we talk about culture, we talk about it as if we're waiting for the right idea to hit. For the right narrative to get articulated in the right way, the right organizing sentiment. I think probably what all of us agree is that the cultural change has to be related to some experiential change that's part of the things that we do. And making things, finding common places, common projects is essential to that, which is why it's so important for Danielle to name those organizations. I know that's something that Bob and Shaylyn have done in their work as well. So it's not that I think we disagree, is that I think that sometimes in these conversations, we get quickly to questions about values and morality and decency without thinking about the ways in which they're connected to the ways we've organized our lives. If you live in a segregated society that's organized around inequality and allows for a gilded class to run away from the rest of us, it's going to be very hard to fix the cultural narrative.
Shaylyn Romney Garrett: And I would just quickly agree completely with Eric. I mean, as a returned Peace Corps volunteer, right, like, I think one of the biggest one of the greatest things that could help America right now is a national service program, giving people experiences in building as part of a shared national project. So thank you for emphasizing that. I agree.
David Brooks: I would phrase it differently. I'll post this to Bob. When you— I've been doing a lot of work recently, some of you know, on trust and social distrust. And when you're in this world, you're surrounded by feedback loops that trustworthy behavior leads to trust, which leads to more trustworthy behavior. Untrustworthy behavior also leads to feedback loops. And so when we think there's people who are distrustful, they can't work together, they learn the lesson that other people are not to be trusted, and you get a feedback loop. And you basically get a distrust doom loop. And I have sometimes— I tend to be optimistic about this country, but I have come to think that we're just in a distrust doom loop. And we can't agree on whether a vaccine is safe. We can't agree on whether there's a secret conspiracy to to put little things in our brains to track our movement. What is there to think that we're already not past some sort of point of no return? I don't mean total social chaos, but a lack of an ability to act as a nation. It doesn't seem evident to me that we have that capacity, that we've crossed some boundary. Bob, do you have a more upbeat response?
Robert Putnam: The great curse of a group like this is that all of us can cite all of many books, and I'm about to do that again. I did a book a couple of years ago, well actually 25 years ago, on Italy in which that— the problem of a good equilibrium, that is a loop that in which trust reinforces trustworthiness, enforces trust and so on, was found largely in the south of Italy. And a virtuous cycle was found in the north of Italy, in the north-central part of Italy, in which trust begat trustworthiness begat trust begat trustworthiness. And I once was having dinner, actually as it happened in the middle of an earthquake, with a leader from one of the southern regions. He believed everything I said. He said, Bob, I believe everything you say, but I can't allow myself to believe that because if what you say is true, I was— my fate in trying to make this a better place here in Basilicata was sealed a thousand years ago. So I, as an actor, I just can't allow myself to believe that these are permanent equilibria. And in fact, what I think the history of Italy shows is that it is possible to get out of these ruts, these, these, these do loops, these reinforcing do loops, but the longer it goes on, the harder it is to get out of them. So it requires, like, say, you push way up if you'd started early enough, it wouldn't have been so hard to move out of that loop. But if you start, you know, after 1,000 years, you got to push really hard to get out of the do loop. And, you know, in fact, the current Pope, Pope Francis, among other things, is trying really hard to get the south of Italy out of that do loop. But it's taking the— even he, the Pope, is finding a hard time to get out of that rut and get into a different rut.
Eric Klineberg: I mean, imagine a society that got hit very badly by a pandemic that affected millions of people, that killed hundreds of thousands, that lost millions of jobs, that saw their cities eviscerated, that saw industries fall apart. And imagine that society having come close to its nader, finding a collective solution that involved using its capacity for scientific innovation and for distribution that involved shoring up the institutions that it had built up to make sure that the vaccination campaign or the treatment campaign or the rebuilding campaign was relatively fair and equal. And imagine that society using its shared wealth to lift up people who were suffering most and to honor the sacrifices and the suffering of those who had been hardest hit. And in the process, you know, made a deal that this would not just be a recovery for people who had the right skin color or lived in the right zip codes or states, but it would be a process for everyone. And so, for me, the way we get out, you know, the way we get through it and get out of that cycle of doom that David just described is by rising to the challenge of the very moment that we all know that we're in. And so, if everything in history conspires against us in this very moment, if it feels as if everything is all about to fall apart, as it does, it's also fairly clear how we get through it to the other side, I think. And it does not seem to me impossible to get to the other side. In fact, it seems like there's a conceivable route there. And that is why I want to emphasize the significance of this moment. And a hard thing for us to do as scholars who are used to taking the long view and waiting for the data to come in, is to figure out what it means to rise to a moment like the one we're in right now. And it is a profoundly exhilarating and exciting and completely terrifying thing to be in this moment.
David Brooks: Okay, well, I read— came across a quote today from Secretary of State Seward, Secretary under Lincoln, who said, "America has always just enough virtue to get through its crisis, but usually with none to spare." That made me feel heartened. I want to turn to Danielle with a really pivoting off that invite you to look for— help us look forward into what needs to be done as Eric described, but also with a question from the audience, which is how do we preserve a we with the diversity we have, have always had, but acknowledging the diversity we have? I mean, frankly, I was reading this book and maybe I shouldn't say this to it'll distract us, but I'm gonna say it anyway. I was trying to think, how would Steve Bannon read Bob and Shaylyn's book? And he might say, well, we restricted immigration in 1925, things— we got— came together as a country, then we opened up immigration in 1965, everything fell apart. And I think Bob and Shaylyn answer that, but it is— it is— the diversity question is a challenge. So how do you— how do you tell the story of diversity and unity?
Danielle Allen: Well, let me— I'm actually gonna go to the first half of your question first, David, which is how do we get out of this? And I think I think we are all struggling to figure out how to reactivate a sense of the public good that we can all commit to. And to some extent, it makes sense. We've spent 20 years asking ourselves how we can privatize our way to solutions to things. So it makes sense that our muscles for asking how can we treat something as a public good have atrophied. So I've been working really hard for the last 6 months on trying to convince everybody, all levels— mayors, governors, senators, congresspeople, and so forth— that investment in testing and contact tracing is a public good that we all need for the broad public good of disease suppression. And I was on a meeting with mayors this morning, where I had the chance of sort of hearing some survey data and so forth. The most striking thing to me about this was that when you're trying to convince people that they really ought to go get a test if they've had an exposure and so forth, people are not actually very responsive to the national public good argument, the sort of we all need to suppress the virus argument. They are responsive, however, to incremental gains in their communities. So imagine a college campus, I won't name the particular campus, it had a real problem, sort of issue of outbreaks, and it sort of moved away from a kind of binary big picture concept of the good to sort of smaller incremental things that the community wanted. For example, if we can all do these things, we can have a football game next week. Right? So that's like a very local concrete version of the public good in that community. And so it was sort of a little bit of a breakthrough moment, sort of recognizing recognition that in order to rebuild a big picture of the public good, we actually need a whole lot of little pictures of the public good that get knit together so that, you know, every community wants its football game, it wants this, it wants that, that adds up to collectively we have to suppress COVID-19. So then the hard question is, if you really accept that notion that you have to build from that kind of community level up, how do you avoid fragmentation and division? Because we have a very segregated society and you risk that some people's conceptions of the public good become the overall dominant ones and exclude others. So that is where I think at the end of the day, it really is incumbent on communities and organizations themselves to try to pull diversity and inclusion inside them. Now we have to look to bring diversity inside every organization if we're going to find those local kinds of public goods that can add up to a national inclusive public good.
David Brooks: Shaylyn, can I throw the last half of my question to you? Why is the me-we-me curve not just a story about ethnic cohesion, basically, of mid-century America?
Shaylyn Romney Garrett: Yeah, um, well, I think the way that I think about this is, is, is again, just because there was a success in the mid— in the, in the sort of We Decades does not mean that it was the highest summit to which we could have ever possibly reached, right? I, I think that, um, I mean, it sounds a bit Pollyanna-ish, but can we take the good with the bad? Can we take the good from what those We Decades were but also learn the lesson of what they weren't, right? And, and I think that is actually what Danielle is calling for. And, and learning the lesson of what they weren't is that they weren't inclusive. And, and so I agree with the idea of how do we— we have to begin to bring that diversity and inclusion into all of our institutions. But I also think it goes back to bringing it into our, you know, what Eric mentioned, the kitchen table, right? I mean, it's about bringing those those conversations into our personal lives. And, you know, as you and I traveled around the country and met all these weavers, some of the most inspiring stories were of people who just said, I'm not really going to focus even necessarily on the problems in my city. I'm going to focus on the problems on my street, the problems in my neighborhood, the problems in my extended family, of the struggles that we're having, you know, around having shared conversations and feeling that we're part of the same shared project. And so, um, I— that doesn't really answer your question very well, David, but it does speak to, I think, where a starting point can be for, um, building a new kind of cohesion. It has to begin in our institutions, but it also has to begin in our daily lives and the people who are doing that by facilitating conversation, just conversation. I mean, just relationship between people who are unlike each other. Has outsized consequences. And when you look at something like the settlement house movement— I mean, not to go again back to the progressives, but when you do look at something like that, you know, it wasn't cross-racial, but it was cross-class conversation that was happening that wasn't happening before. And, and that really drove a lot of the, a lot of the institutional change that happened after that. So imagine the power of recreating progressive era that wasn't racist. Imagine the power of that. And I think that that's really what we're talking about.
David Brooks: Yeah. Bob, as a sociologically-minded political scientist, I want to throw a question from the floor to you. And it says on a more optimistic note that we're not really as— that our perceptions of our political differences are greater than our actual political differences. And there was a report that came out maybe a year ago, the More in Common report, that pointed to a 60% what they called the exhausted majority. As you look at the— and in the book, there's a lot of talk about polarization. When you look at the country, do you see a country that's hopelessly divided, or do you, as some do, or do you believe in the exhausted majority? And can that exhausted majority, if it exists, be a mobilized force?
Robert Putnam: Well, David, as you know, and no doubt the questioner knows, there's actually a very large academic literature on that point. That is to say, is it real or is it just— is the polarization real and affect ordinary Americans or is it just a figment of the imagination of fevered journalists looking for something to write about? And there are two sides, as in every academic debate, there are two sides in that debate. I see the ways in which the polarization among people has been exacerbated by media and by leadership, but actually as I read it it's mostly real actually and moreover it's getting more and more real. That is to say, the fact that people didn't, you know, they don't agree with somebody else about, you know, abortion or whatever, that may be to some extent the result of a lot of leadership and media coverage of the issue of abortion. But let's take a different matter which admittedly comes a little later in the causal process there's a huge fraction of Americans who now say they would not want their child to marry someone of a different party. Roughly speaking, in the '60s if you ask people how do you feel about your child marrying someone who is a— who is of a different race, well, roughly speaking, 75% of Americans said they would prefer that their child not marry someone of a different race. And if you ask the same question then about party, roughly 10% or 5% of Americans said they worried about their son or daughter marrying a Democrat or a Republican. Those numbers are now reversed. It's an enormous change. Way more people now say they would be worried about their son or daughter marrying someone of a different party than would be worried about marrying someone from a different race. And that reflects not an imposition from the top down, that represents people themselves deciding in their own lives that this is personal and that what's now called effective— affective polarization seems to me by now the dominant force actually and not just a figment of the imagination of some, you know, some scriptwriter in Fox News or CNBC or whatever.
David Brooks: Eric, is that your view as well?
Eric Klineberg: It's hard to discount the problem of polarization at a moment like this and I think, you know, specifically about the kind of alternative media ecosystems that we've built and the ease with which people can construct their own facts, you know, which makes it very difficult to think about your options in an election or the choice of, you know, whether you believe the science and are going to take the vaccine. I mean, there's a depth to our ideological divisions that worries me very much. I guess where I depart from Bob is only that I see a lot of room for maneuver and flexibility in this. And I do think that what we do to get through this situation is going to determine quite a lot about whether we can get on the same page. And so it really does feel like there is an available pathway in which we're able to resurrect some sense of a common purpose that's based on a shared understanding of what's good for us. And again, I return to these areas of health and of work because they seem so essential to me. I was really puzzled by the notion that I seem to observe in the early stages of the pandemics of the pandemic that a good faction of the American population didn't really mind if a lot of older people died, for instance. That seems just like a preposterous cultural idea that there was a population that was willing to sacrifice itself for the common good. And so it seems to me like, you know, the extremism that we find in media— and David, you know this, you know, and have lived inside of it more than any of us here— does have a way of distorting, you know, our impression of what's going on in the country. But I think it also does, you know, it moves us on an issue. You know, it matters in that moment. It is like the extreme expertise that comes to us on Fox TV does have the capacity to shape our ideas about what we're living through at the moment. But I'm going to stick with my view that I think I think a lot of this polarization could be changed with a collective project that delivered real benefits. And I think we are ripe for that kind of experience. I don't— like, let me be clear. I don't think we get it if Trump wins this election. I don't think we get it if Trump wins the election in a highly contested way. I think then we set ourselves back and become more polarized than ever. And I think that there's a very wide avenue that we could travel on that would allow that to happen. But it seems to me like that's not where the American people are right now. And that if we are able to run a smooth democratic process and actually have an election outcome that we can agree on and that the Republican enablers of Trump will back, you know, will support eventually, there really is a way of of turning around what feels like an impossible division right now. There will be a faction that will contest it. There will be a faction that will threaten violence and claim that whatever next government we have is illegitimate. I think that is inevitable right now. But I think that is something that we can get through and past, and that is not significant enough to turn this country, to tear this country apart. Provided that the mainstream of the Republican Party goes along with it. And the real cultural curiosity I have, David, I'd love to ask for your anthropological observation, is of kind of what has happened to that party's leadership that allows it to sacrifice so many of what had once been its principles for the sake of this one person. It's something, it's totally, I find it totally puzzling.
David Brooks: Their electorate more as much as the person. They know they'd lose. Let me throw a question at Daniel. One area where I agree with that, Eric is that we need a common project. I think I may disagree with Eric in thinking that the pandemic is that common project. I think that we had that chance 6 months ago and we blew it. But somehow it feels like racial justice is that common project. It can't be an accident that we're having this moment of crisis, this rolling moment of crisis at a time where we're entering a phase where there'll be no majority group and that we're entering a phase of hyperdiversity. And so if, A, do you think that could be— is it useful to think of it as a project? And if it is and racial disparity is somehow the core problem streaming through our history, how would you address it?
Danielle Allen: Well, to give away my hand, my center runs an initiative called Justice, Health, and Democracy. So we think of these as three completely intersecting themes. And I don't actually think the pandemic moment is over, to be honest. And I actually do think it connects to the racial justice at this moment. And there are a number of reasons why, but I'll just point to one for the time being. One of our failures for the pandemic has been that we have an insufficiently robust public health infrastructure. One of our failings in criminal justice is that we have treated many things that are health issues as issues of criminalization. And so the insufficiently robust public health infrastructure is as much of a problem in the domain of criminal justice Administration of Justice as it is for the pandemic. So in some sense, the solution to both problems are very tightly linked to each other. You could, you could sum them up in a small way with just this example of a proposal in, I believe, Houston, which is that alongside the sort of 911 first responder system, we ought to set up a second humanitarian first responder system, which is the call you make when you think it's a mental health crisis, for instance. It's the call you make when you think a person is just homeless. It's the call you make when you think a person is having a substance use crisis of some kind. And if we could separate those problems in our society and address them with tools of health, tools of social work, and so forth, I think we'd actually have the beginning of a solution to the problem of the administration of justice and policing also.
Shaylyn Romney Garrett: Yeah.
David Brooks: One of the things— one does get a sense that because we in the media are not good at talking about this, and maybe I'll start with Shaylyn on this, is that we underestimate the effect of the psychological stress of this year. And so Americans are most unhappy as they've been since Gallup started measuring this. I saw a stat that 30% of young people had contemplated suicide in the last 30 days. The amount of mental depression rates have just skyrocketed after Floyd's death. African-American depression rates shot up from like 30% had felt depressed to like 41%. I mean, it was We've just been through just this emotional pressure cooker. And when I look at the fear and the hysteria, it can't be unconnected to that. I don't know.
Robert Putnam: I—
David Brooks: Shaylyn, I know you're wise on these things. And I don't know how you process it, how you think about the emotional health of an entire society. But it feels like we're in some intensely pressurized period where it's just been one wave after another.
Shaylyn Romney Garrett: Yeah, absolutely. So a couple of things. I mean, I think it is a really interesting and I think a really fantastic idea to think about having a hotline, right, that the sort of government-run hotline that you would call into if you were in a mental health crisis. But the first thought that comes to my mind in response to that, however, is like, why isn't that hotline my neighbor? You know, why— you know, we have a— we have sort of a safety net built in for these types of things that has completely fallen apart. And I think that, that the stresses are definitely coming from outside of ourselves, but at the same time, like, there is an inbuilt, um, wellspring of support and mental health that itself has fallen apart, right? And so to an extent, reclaiming our mental health is, is partly about reclaiming the places we look to in our lives to find support, right? And thinking about— and, you know, honestly, I believe that the way that we reclaim support is by providing support to others. And so in terms of a shared project in the wake of all of this stress, you know, one thing that's been really meaningful to me is the way that my church community has doubled down on emphasizing the need to take care of one another, right? And I know that that's not a solution that necessarily bridges severe lines of fracture in this country because we live in a highly segregated society. We're segregated by neighborhood, you know, more so than we've ever been before. I understand that. But at the same time, when it comes, you know, I think that there are more solutions at our fingertips and right outside of our doors than we think. And that that's also a starting point, as well as a public policy starting point. And I think, you know, when we can have complementary bottom-up and top-down strategies, that's when we're going to see real change. And, and I guess I would add one other thing, you know, I think Garrett Graff, who recently wrote this book about the 9/11 babies, there was a piece that he wrote in Politico summarizing his findings. And what he found was that remarkably, even though these young people who were born on 9/11 grew up in a really— grew up from the day they were born in the nation that we are describing, they never knew a nation that had a great we, they never knew a nation, you know, that was not polarized, and yet they are extremely hopeful. And I think when you look at the psychological research around the emotion of hope, what we know from the work of people like Shane Lopez, for example, is that, you know, hope has two key components. The first is a belief, an abiding belief that the world will get better. And the second is the belief that you play an active role in bringing that about. And I think that young people today, against all odds, have those two beliefs and they have hope. And I think that a sense of agency is incredibly important in maintaining a sense of hope. And I think that, you know, those of us who are a little bit older can look to our young people for an example of where to find that hope. The hope, again, back to what Eric is saying, the hope is in action, right? It's in actually doing something.
Danielle Allen: Doing something.
Shaylyn Romney Garrett: Because in that doing something, we reclaim our ability to, rather than drift with the course of history, master that history and take it in a different direction.
David Brooks: Bob Shalen's mention of our church and the support of community in the church ties into a number of questions we've got. And these are about the decline of religion. And I saw some statistics recently that we've, we've been seeing an increase in nuns and on increased secularism, I guess, but it's radically accelerated quite recently. And I want you to try to talk about the decline of church attendance as it fits into the curve and as it fits into our current crisis. And I ask you to talk about it in two terms: first, as a loss of a cohesive mainline Protestantism moral community, and second, just as there's raw participation the church as a sociological enterprise, as a source of community. How big is the decline of religion in this story?
Robert Putnam: Oh, it's very big. And there are several things that I need to add to that, David. First of all, I'm not a theologian and I have actually never even pretended to play one on television. I'm interested in churches as social and community institutions, not as theological, not just as bodies of faith. Of course those are connected, I don't misunderstand that. But the first thing for people to understand who've not— especially for secular people to understand is that as communities, as just communities, as social organizations, churches and church attendance are very positive even far outside the area of their own sphere of action, but far outside religion. That is, people who have a lot of church friends, that is they go to church and they have friends from church suppers and so on, are much more generous than secular people, much more generous to secular causes. That is, people who are involved in church communities are more likely to give to the March of Dimes or to volunteer for Little League than secular people are. So the secular part of churchgoing, that is the community part of churchgoing, is very powerful and ought to be of interest even to people who are themselves not churchgoing. That's the first important point to say. Secondly, the part of churchgoing that has declined most rapidly, that is the chart, the places where you see the sharpest decline are exactly in the community facets of churchgoing and not in the theological facets of churchgoing. So people, many people still say they're, well, I believe in God, blah blah blah, but actually they don't show up at church. And that means that the decline of the rise of the nones, as you call them, is tantamount to saying we're losing the aspect of religion in America that is the most valuable. That is, it's the part of the church that is was most likely to provide these external benefits to the secular community as well as to the clerical community. I would say it's happening about as rapidly as any social change I have studied, and for my sins I've studied a ton of different social changes over the— I mean social change over the last 50 years, and my last 50 years has been spent entirely on social change. I don't— I can't think of a social change— well maybe the exception to that is changes in attitudes toward homosexuality, that change very rapidly. But it's those two, far more rapid than any other social change, and they have the same effect. They're strongly generational, that is each generation is way less believing in religion or way less intolerant of different forms of sexuality. And they have this— so it's a big deal, it's happening very rapidly. It's happening very rapidly because it's driven by the just inevitable onset of these generational changes. And I think it's essentially impossible to reverse, at least over— I mean, when I say impossible to reverse, I mean over the next century or two, it's going to be very hard to reverse that trend because it's so built into our own individual lives.
David Brooks: Eric, is it your view that the decline of some of the older community hubs like churches have been replaced by newer forms of association?
Eric Klineberg: Well, I think the question is, what are the new forms of association, right? So the debate for Bob's big book from decades ago was, you know, if not the bowling league, you know, how are we spending time together? And I think the debate, you know, increasingly is, if it's, you know, if it's not in church on Sunday, is there some set of civil activities, civic activities, you know, some other form of engagement where we're harnessing the energy that, you know, Shalen was discussing, especially for younger generations. And so I think it would be glib and naive to say, you know, that some of the goodwill that came from a religious association has just simply been transferred into a new set of organizations that are, you know, organized around our civic betterment. It's not that simple. But it's not also a story of people skipping church just to go to brunch and get on Twitter. I mean, I think there are all kinds of dynamic forms of social organization that we see that are feeding things like the youth climate movement, like the Black Lives Matter protests. And I think, you know, I don't think any one of us here, with possible exception of Danielle, is really in a position to kind of report on this. Empirically. I know Danielle has been looking at it. But I think we really need to take seriously, you know, young people's experiences in this new set of civic challenges. And then, and one quick thing on that, and I appreciate kind of Shaylyn's comment about the resilience and strength of young people today. But one thing I do think needs some more attention is the question of kind of what the consequences of this experience these last several months has been for young Americans. The rates of depression and anxiety and suicide for people between 18 and 30 are going up, as far as I understand it. Their outlook about their future in the job market, you know, is bleak. Many are carrying enormous amounts of student debt. And I think, you know, we all saw a lot of images of kind of younger adults who were out at spring break going to parties while most of the country cowered down. But my sense is the overwhelming majority of American young people really sacrificed themselves and stayed in and stayed physically distant for the good of the collective. And I guess, you know, one of the questions that leaves for us moving forward is what kind of social debt we owe to them, you know, and how to think about creating a future for young people who I think have every reason to feel cynical today. And so it feels to me like if, if we're looking for productive ways to channel some of that energy that's not coming out in churches on Sunday morning, you know, maybe we could get organized to think about how you create a more viable pathway to a future for, for young Americans today who, just as in the Vietnam War, have every reason to be cynical about the project that our generation has started for them.
David Brooks: Okay, maybe the last question should be for Danielle on this generational dynamic. Do you see it among your students? Harvard may not be the most representative sample of American society, but what's, what's your take on that?
Danielle Allen: I'm lucky to do a lot of work in K-12 civic education as well, and in fact have a grade 8 curriculum in 13 districts in Massachusetts. So in that regard, I get a good snapshot of kinds of young people. And I think that for me, the analogy to use is in fact to Vietnam, that not simply because of the pandemic, but actually to a larger degree because of climate, young people consider themselves to be facing an existential threat and consider older generations to be non-responsive to that. And I do think that, you know, thinking about what young people's reactions were to the possibility of being drafted, going to Vietnam, is a good way to understand the emotional register of their current situation.
David Brooks: Okay, I'm gonna bring us to a close. I think There's been moments in the last hour and 15 minutes where I've been uplifted, some of the challenges and the prospect of common projects. I find myself sharing some of the sense of anxiety and despair that's also been expressed. I just look at— Bob and I have talked about social trust, and social trust really has cratered, and especially among the young. I think it's in a very idealistic and positive generation, but it's not a generation that has high faith in other people's trustworthiness. And to me, sometimes in moments of despair, I think we're going to survive as a country, but we're not going to be one country. I spent a lot of time in Houston, and Houston is a very— the most diverse city in the country, but it's not really a common coherent city. It's a lot of little metropolises who, to their credit, look upon each other with goodwill. And so it's not the worst place in the world, but it's that cohesion that we imagine as a country, I'm not sure we're going to get that back in our lifetimes. And that's the pessimism side of me. The optimistic side of me, and I've talked to some people about this, is a book that a former colleague of Bob and Danielle wrote. Samuel Huntington wrote a book, The Politics of Disharmony, and he wrote it in 1981. And he said every 60 years or so, America goes through a moment of credo passion, a moment when we feel we're not living up to our creed and our ideals. And we go through a convulsion. And these moments tend to involve a lot of indignation, a distrust of established power. A new moral generation arrives on the scene, a new sense, a new mode of communication, outsider groups coming into insider groups. And he said this happened in the 1770s, in the 1830s with Jackson, in the 1890s with the progressive movement in the 1960s. And he writes in 1981, somewhere around the second or third generation of the 21st century, we'll probably have another. And lo and behold, here we are. And the good news of that is that you pull out of them. People figure it out. And I hope for that. And if we do, I think it's frankly because a lot of the work that all you have done. Danielle, you've been active on so many fronts, it's hard to keep track. And this book, The Upswing, is going to be an important book. It's been central to how I've seen where we are right now. And I think it's going to prove that way to a lot of people. And Eric, you've prevented me from totally sucking on the gas pipe and giving up hope. So this has been an all-star panel. And I want to thank— our host at CASBS. I think I have some final things to read off here. The co-sponsors, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Edmund J. Safra Center for Ethics, Daniel Center, Weave: The Social Fabric Project, the most important organization in America right now. And heads up, the details about the next episode of CASBS's series, Social Science and World in Crisis, will be coming on your screen in just a few seconds. So hold off pushing that leave button and see what's next. Thank you all so much.
Narrator: That was Danielle Allen, Shaylyn Romney Garrett, Eric Kleinenberg, Robert Putnam, and David Brooks discussing can we rebuild social cohesion in the United States. You can learn more about this event and others in the Social Science for a World in Crisis series by visiting the CASBS website at casbs.stanford.edu, or you can always find us on Twitter. We're @CASBSStanford. We've got more CASBS Live events coming to the Human Centered feed, and of course, more original interviews exploring the work of fellows here at CASBS. So be sure you're subscribed. You won't want to miss these. Until next time, from everyone at CASBS and the Human Centered team, thanks for listening.