putnam

From Robert Wright’s New York Times review of Putnam and Campbell’s American Grace:

gaining an evangelical friend leads to a warmer assessment of evangelicals — by seven degrees on a “feeling thermometer,” to be exact — and gaining a non­religious friend brings four degrees of added warmth toward the nonreligious.

This suggests that the best antidote to religious intolerance is more religious pluralism. As numbers of Buddhists, Mormons and Muslims grow in the US and proliferate around the country, negative perceptions will be reduced. I look forward to reading their book, particularly how they reconcile Putnam’s hunkering theory that posits a negative relationship between neighborhood diversity and trust, with this finding about religious diversity.  Is race/ethnic diversity qualitatively different than religious diversity in how it affects trust?  It would seem to be.  It is conceivable than in a generation, we see interfaith tension between Christians and Muslims are significantly reduced.

My sense is that what led Putnam down this road is the potential power of religion as a “bridge” between racial and ethnic difference.  Wright’s has an interesting insight about the emerging rift between the “religious” and “non-religious” in society being a rather new cultural chasm.   More than the “clash of civilizations” the religious-non-religious divide  might be what defines the “culture war” for the next few decades.  It’s worth thinking about how the religious and self-identified non-religious talk with each other.  I’m proud to say that my campus seems to be on the forefront of having conversations between these groups.  Can athiests see the value of faith in serving as a central organizing principle for vast numbers of people and can the religious recognize that individuals can construct legitimate  ethical systems without appeals to faith-based systems?

Bummer chart of the day….unless you’re in the military, or a devoted misanthrope.  new data from the 2008 General Social Survey shows declining levels of trust for every institution in the United States except for the military and education.

What accounts for this mass scale institutional distrust?  I think Robert Putnam has a book that talks about this stuff 🙂  One way of looking at all this is to weep for civil society and make the Putnam argument that this is evidence of a decline in social capital.  If we all had each other over for dinner, we’d trust each other more and thus trust the public institutions in which we all have a stake.

I think there’s a lot to this, but I’d offer we also this of this cynicism as increased expectations.  As society has become more inured to mass marketing appeals, we’ve become more desirous of more transparency and more effectiveness from our institutions.  This increased demand that our institutions produce more can be damaging int that they may not be designed to produce at a high level (I’m looking at you California government).  But they can also be the result of a sense of greater agency and efficacy amongst the public in general.

We’ve become a high standards people.  That can redound to our benefit if people back up their high expectations with a sense of engagement.  I fear that our “high expectations” culture is devolving into a flabby grousing about corrupt politicians without any real intention of addressing the problem.

HT: Social Capital Blog