Getting Back to “We”
This week: a conversation with Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett about their new book, The Upswing, and the story of American community. Listen today at 2 pm, or anytime at our website.
In Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam diagnosed the decline of community in the U.S. Now, Putnam is back, with co-author Shaylyn Romney Garrett, and they have a more optimistically titled book: The Upswing, about how the U.S. has fluctuated between periods of 1) community and togetherness and 2) individualism and inequality.
We’ve gone from Mark Twain’s Gilded Age to the our own gilded era of Gates and Bezos, but in between there was a period, the co-authors tell us, when “We” triumphed over “I.” And we might shift yet again back to togetherness. But the co-authors say those shifts aren’t determined initially by economics. Shaylyn Romney Garrett tells us:
The shift that we document from an incredibly unequal society in the last Gilded Age toward a more equal society at mid-century in America was driven by, certainly accompanied, by underlying cultural shifts that asked people to question whether it was in line with the values we wanted America to be built upon to allow certain people to be so vastly more rewarded than others, or whether we wanted to share the pie. And I say “wanted” to share the pie because there’s nothing inevitable about these shifts. We make choices as a society about the values that we emphasize. And those choices radiate into everything. They radiate into economics. They radiate into politics. They radiate into our families.
So, for our upswing to happen, decisions need to be made. This puts the burden on our own moral capacity and social formations, rather than on the spirit of economics and history just pushing us along. Bob Putnam says, about the causes for the previous shifts between “we” and “I” in the US:
To the extent that you can, you know, read the tea leaves and squeeze the data and try to see, well, come on, tell me, which was the leading variable or the lagging variable: the only thing you can be sure of is economics lagged. This was not a story about economics causing everything else. This was a story about other things, cultural, sociological, political, that influenced economics, not the reverse.
There are key cultural and political figures who represent these swings from “we” to “I,” including some in one of the co-authors’ own family. Shaylyn Romney Garrett tells us:
I’m a Romney. That’s my maiden name. I’m from the same Romney line, from the same family line as George and Mitt Romney, they’re cousins of my grandfather and my father. So, you know, we don’t hang out at Thanksgiving, but we are from the same family. And when you look at George Romney [of American Motors, and a governor of Michigan], he was both a very successful businessman and a politician. He was considered, you know, a leader in America, mid-century . . . So what was the ethos that governed his behavior as a CEO? He repeatedly turned down bonuses because he didn’t want to encourage, as he put it, a culture of greed in his organization. He could have enriched himself. His company was trying to give him what they thought he deserved. And he said, you know what? Making that gap between me and the average worker so big as to be outrageous is really not good for society. So I’m not going to do that.
Then came the shift into our age:
Fast forward to Mitt Romney, George’s son—also: extremely successful businessmen, also a politician—repeatedly took millions upon millions of dollars in bonuses, thinking that that was perfectly fine because that’s how the economy works. And not only that, but then gets on a national stage and says there’s 47 percent of this country who are nothing but moochers and taking advantage. Makers and takers. And you’re one or the other. And that represents a fundamentally different type of man or woman, in terms of that person’s primary conceptions about who we are, whether we have an obligation to share and lift one another up, or whether we should just take as much as we can get and condemn everyone else around us.
Read: Marilynne Robinson
Marilynne Robinson is one of our great chroniclers of fictional individuals adrift in a world that still has some place for communal connection, and she has a new novel in her Gilead series, wherein that communal connection occurs often through religion. That novel is Jack, following the isolatoe Jack Boughton. From The Atlantic:
In the previous books, Robinson offered Jack to readers through the eyes of others. A strange and destructive child, he didn’t just vanish at inconvenient moments; he blew up mailboxes, stole things for the sake of stealing them, drank, skipped church, and was generally unbiddable. “There was an aloofness about him,” Glory recalls. “More thoroughgoing than modesty or reticence. It was feral, and fragile.” He is also, as a child and then as a man, intensely thoughtful, a voracious reader, gentle in his manner, oddly bewitching. He has been plagued from a very young age by a deep feeling of estrangement. For some reason no one can quite understand or articulate — himself least of all — he is set apart, unlike his family or neighbors.
Listen: Experimental Mountain Music
The musical experiments of the philosopher and Fluxus figure Henry Flynt have, as Pitchfork puts it, an “obsession with the demented drone behind mountain music.” It’s exciting and maybe transcendent music, exploratory and soothing and not soothing; there’s something encompassing here. Pitchfork again: “Whether you hear his strumming patterns as inept or outsider, goony or genius, Henry Flynt sucks in all aspects of time for his sound.”
Support Open Source on Patreon and Focus Your Attention
The best way to support Open Source is by becoming a subscriber on Patreon, where you’ll find an ever-growing library of conversations. This week you can hear Adam Colman talk to Kirstin Valdez Quade, whose short stories have appeared in the New Yorker and elsewhere, about the way short stories can do something better with our fragmented attention. To subscribe to Open Source on Patreon, just go to patreon.com/radioopensource.
This week’s ephemeral library
A discussion on voter suppression. Libby Watson on Ben Sasse and fraudulence. Masha Gessen on Russian poisoning. Beyond Climate Denial and Despair.
Stay on the Upswing everyone; have a good week.
The OS Good News Team
