Bowling Alone

"Bowling Alone is really important. What Putnam gave us with this book was the idea of social capital. When I was head of the Commission for Racial Equality [now merged into the Equality and Human Rights Commission] I always put it that the two great challenges that face humankind are how we live with the planet and how we live together. Those two collide because climate change is moving vast populations across continents. It means that this year, if you are in Pakistan or some parts of India or various African countries, several hundred thousand people might show up on your doorstep. You don’t just have to find them food and water, you have to find a way of allowing them to exist without being constantly at odds with the people who have been there for centuries. If we think we have problems with immigration in Europe, try being Sudan, Uganda or Kenya. We’ve now got about 200 million people who live outside the country of their birth and that is about double what it was 30 years ago. That number will continue to multiply. So the great challenge is probably not climate change, it is what to do about the fact that more people can move further and faster across the globe than ever before in human history. And people don’t just show up and everybody loves them, it doesn’t work like that. In the half a million interviews compiled for the study in Bowling Alone , they found that people in American society are less connected, they do fewer things together, they don’t sign petitions. Where they used to go bowling in leagues they now go bowling alone or with their immediate family. These large movements of people I’m talking about are happening in a context where this fragmentation of society Putnam describes is becoming even more severe because of technology making people more alienated from each other. So it becomes even more difficult to deal with the unsettling effects of people on the move: if there is no longer very much that resembles a community, how do you even begin to try to adapt that community to take in new arrivals? Why do the BNP, for example, think Barking is going to be a big breakthrough opportunity for them in the coming General Election? Well, it is a Bob Putnam answer: there has been a rapid movement of people into the area, not just black immigrants but also people from the East End. There have been job losses in nearby Dagenham [in the car industry]. So the area is already unsettled. The marginal impact of a relatively small number of African immigrants has then been dramatised, but this is a community that is already disintegrating. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Bob Putnam has done another book more recently called Better Together , in which he explores the relationship between lost social capital, trust and ethnicity, and he explores how to rebuild community life. He takes the view that there are two types of social capital: bonding and bridging capital. Put simply, bonding capital is all the things that tie you to people who are like you in religion, or race or social group. That can be very strong but the stronger that is, the weaker the bridging capital that links you or ties you to the people who are not like you. In European and North American societies, this is a great danger – look at the Balkans, where the more Serbian you became, the more you were alienated from your Muslim neighbours. There is an argument that a great big institution that we all pay into and share, like the NHS, is an example of bridging capital, but in fact it is more about local institutions, like schools. Which is why the issue of who goes to what schools is so important. If parents are tending to put an ethnic or racial or faith factor into the choice of school, then that potentially means a diminution of bridging capital. But you can rebuild it – for example we encourage twinning of schools, which turns out to have been very successful, and we are trying summer schools for teenagers as well."