Robert Putnam Practically Discovered Social Isolation: Here’s Why He Says It’s Time to ‘Join or Die’

When I was in college, I had the honor of taking a seminar with political scientist Robert Putnam. In the 1990s, Professor Putnam, or Bob, as he insists I call him, started talking about the collapse of America’s social structures. In his groundbreaking 2000 book Bowling onlyhe focused attention on institutional, technological, and social changes that reduced Americans’ social connectedness in the late 1960s and beyond. All this caused what he called the decline of “social capital.” Americans had less and less contact with each other. As a result, they were less active in civic and social institutions, had less trust in their government, and were much lonelier.

I was inspired by both Bob and his work. Throughout my university and medical school studies, I continued to follow his work, and that of others who contributed to his research – especially those who noted the link between social isolation and poor health. And when I became CEO of CareMore Health, I appointed a Chief Togetherness Officer and created the first clinical program at scale designed to alleviate loneliness among older adults. I helped set one up similar program bee SCANthe company I now lead, which serves seniors in several western states.

a new documentary has just been released in which Bob plays the lead role. It is called Join or die. The film delves into Bob’s theories and features interviews with people at the forefront of the movement to reduce social isolation – people like Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Senator Mike Lee.

I found the film as fascinating as Bob’s seminars. After hearing about it, I asked Bob to talk to me about his work and how healthcare leaders can contribute to the movement to increase connection among all Americans. Below are some highlights of our very intriguing conversation.

Your class introduced me to the idea that social isolation has a direct effect on health. If I’m right, you were one of the first people to see that connection. Is that correct?

Well, while I was at it Bowling only, my team researched a lot of things. At that point, the social context of healthcare has developed enormously, partly through your work, but also through the work of many other people. And there wasn’t a lot of empirical research into how social context influences our health.

I said: your chances of dying are high, but your chances of dying in the next year are halved if you join one group. And it turns out now, thanks to a lot of research over the last 25 years since I first started saying that, it’s clear that was true.

As I recall, not everyone agreed with your findings.

When Bowling only came out, the public response was quite nice, but the academic response was quite critical. It was captured in the headline of an op-ed that said: Bowling only in bed he is just completely wrong. And this and the sociologists as a tribe were very critical of the claims of Bowling only. Now, 25 years later, it turns out that I was more right than I knew.

You have called for a rebirth of social capital in America. How do we get there?

First of all, the film aims to explain in a very accessible way what social capital is and why it is so important, and secondly, to motivate people [people] to get out and do something about it. And now, what is that? The last third of the film is about four or six separate groups, very diverse groups, led and created by young people trying to build social capital.

Tell us about them.

One of them is a group of cyclists riding together – all black in Atlanta. And so you see this group cycling and connecting and so on. And then there’s a religious group that focuses on Michigan’s environment. And then there’s a group of Uber drivers in Chicago trying to organize in a situation where unionization isn’t easy. And then there’s another group of immigrants, Latino immigrants, in LA. The film is intended to illustrate that you can do this.

As a business leader, I think a lot about remote work. Does remote work help alleviate the social capital shortage? Or hurt the effort?

Historically, work, activity undertaken in the pursuit of income, takes up a third of our time. And you’d think, if we could figure out ways to reduce that through a shorter work week, or make it more efficient by working online, like in the wake of the pandemic, that would leave more time for people to connect . with their neighbors or taking their children to school, or whatever.

All the evidence says that people do that not only now, but way back. The average American is now working fewer hours at work, a trend that goes back at least four decades. What did we do with all that free time? Look at a screen.

So the freedom of being in the office turns out not to be what I had actually hoped for

Bowling only, to free up time so you can spend time with your kids, or in the garden, or something. That’s not what people do. They sit in front of a screen. Back in the day, when I was writing

Bowling only, it was usually sitting in front of a television screen. Now he usually sits behind an iPhone.

Do people make contact with other people through those iPhones?

Well, maybe you can at least make friends over the Internet. But that is not true. Here’s what we’ve learned during the pandemic: Connecting with grandma via Zoom isn’t the same as hugging grandma.

In the first 10 years after that Bowling only, people said, we don’t need bowling teams now because we have Facebook. But that turns out not to be true at all. There are people who say that social media is unadulterated bad. I’m not saying that.

But they are not the solution to this problem.

Does the solution lie with employers?

I don’t think you can do much as an employer to increase social capital. I mean, there are things you could do a little bit in the office, but honestly, in the grand scheme of things, it’s trivial compared to what else is or isn’t happening in their lives. So we need to find a way to take people off the screen and connect them to other real people IRL in real life.

Going back to healthcare, if you were to give healthcare leaders advice on how to truly solve the loneliness of their patients and other people, what advice would you give them?

You have to think in a broader context. The context of health is created by things outside of it. And so if I’m the CEO of a hospital, I also have to think of myself as a community leader. Because we won’t solve your problem until we solve the social capital problem in the community.

Ultimately, you should create a social movement. Collaborate with other community leaders. That’s exactly how it’s going to happen.

What I urge you to do is save America. One community at a time.

You are a political scientist and we are of course in the middle of the presidential elections. What advice would you give to the two candidates?

Go local. Big time. Don’t think in central terms. Look for the local leadership group. Look for this mythical group I’m talking about. Provide incentives for that group and then let them decide how to use that money.

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I spoke separately with filmmakers Rebecca David and Pete Davis about their film:

Why work on a film after Bowling Alone? It seems that Bowling Alone captured everyone’s imagination at the time. Why will a movie be different? Do people really want to watch a movie about ‘becoming a member’?

While people of all ages enjoy the film, we designed it to appeal primarily to young Americans who came of age after the Bowling Alone idea went viral in the 1990s (which is more than half of all Americans!). . Many young people are asking the kinds of questions that are partly answered by Bob’s work: Why do we feel so socially isolated? Why don’t our politics seem to work? Why is there such widespread cynicism? We are hungry for insight into these questions – and more importantly, a path forward to a better America – and revisiting Bob’s work can help on both fronts.

One of the things we particularly like about documentary as a medium – as opposed to scrolling through a social media feed – is that it helps viewers keep their attention on one subject. And I think many people sense the message of the film before they watch it – that we are facing a civic crisis and need a civic rejuvenation – but something special happens when you let yourself sit with that message for an extended period of time. Our hope with the film is that people will come away from the moving saying, “I know I already needed this, but now I’ve added the determination to join a club!”

What do you both see as the solution to our decline in social capital? It increasingly feels like we are nostalgic for a time that will never come back.

One of the things we really appreciate about Bob’s work is that he’s very careful when he says the goal is notto return to the decades of high social capital – and that if we are to successfully rejuvenate community life in America in the coming decades, it will not look the way community life in America looked decades ago. On the contrary, Bob argues, the challenge is to plant the same thing spirit of community and solidarity on new ground, which requires civic creativity anchored in current needs, challenges and opportunities.

Bob also becomes very specific about this, especially in his later work The revival, in which he shows how levels of community involvement have gone up and down throughout history—how it’s not a story of how community groups existed forever and then suddenly began to decline in the second half of the twentieth century . Instead, he explains, a generation of carpenters at the turn of the last century cultivated, for many decades, the institutions that built the high levels of social capital that we benefited from in the mid-twentieth century. And the most important conclusion of this historical phenomenon: if they could do it a century ago, we can do it again.

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Join or die plays in screenings across the country, a list of which can be found at the movie website.