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NEWS for North Dakotans
Agriculture Communication, North Dakota State University
7 Morrill Hall, Fargo, ND 58105-5665
October 5, 2000
A few days ago, on my way back from photographing an abandoned church, I pulled into Luverne, North Dakota, and ordered up a small burger at Rock'n Rodney's. A small burger at Rodney’s means about the size of my hat, so I was there for a while, listening in on the conversation of four guys at a neighboring table.
They were talking about their hopes for business enterprises in small towns on the plains, and their discouragement with the lack of community in the towns. People were dispirited, they thought. It was darned near impossible to keep an Optimist Club, or any such local organization, going anymore.
What they were describing was what Robert Putnam wrote about in 1995 in a now-famous article for the academic publication, Journal of Democracy. The article was called "Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital." Putnam used a trivial example -- the failure of bowling leagues in cities across the United States, people just no longer entering into team competitions -- to make a more general point. He also invented a term to label what he was describing. America was suffering, Putnam said, from a loss of social capital.
Social capital is the fund of loyalty, sociability, and reciprocity that holds a community, or on a broader scale a society, together. It’s something like community spirit, but a little more concrete. Reciprocity is the key to social capital. People have to believe that if they do good things for their neighbors, without expectation of immediate reward, sooner or later their neighbors will do good things for them.
I recall a conversation I had with one of our United States senators just about the time Putnam published his article. The senator was bemoaning the contentiousness and lack of consensus in Congress, saying it was impossible to get anything important accomplished. I said that was because the country was simply not governable; wait a while, I said, and it might get better, or not.
America is losing it, Putnam said, and towns on the plains are losing it, too, I say -- maybe worse than other places. I think we all know how hard it is to hold institutions, organizations, and simple neighborliness together in this part of the country. We have the tyranny of distance and sparse population to deal with first. Then we have long-term depopulation, which continually thins the ranks of any group. Now Putnam tells us that besides the regional causes, we also have a national trend in the same direction -- no wonder the Optimists can’t muster a quorum!
This fall Putnam is writing and speaking again on the same theme, defending himself against critics and offering new evidence -- but also a ray of hope. He points out that a similar thing happened a century ago, when farm people were migrating to the cities, and immigrants were crowding American ports. What happened then, he says, is that old organizations failed, but new ones arose suited to the new America -- organizations like federated women’s clubs, men’s service clubs, and a great array of humanitarian organizations. Perhaps now we’re just awaiting the rise of a new crop of institutions suited to our digital, mobile, millennial society.
I’m thinking, though, what about us here on the plains? Are we giving thought to new institutions, indeed new habits of thought, that will serve our communities and society here? Economic renewal in a time of increasing personal choice -- more people can live and work anywhere, I mean -- depends on the maintenance of quality of life. Central to human perception of quality of life is membership in a meaningful community. Can we offer such membership to new immigrants contemplating a move to the plains, or for that matter, to our children? That is pivotal question for the Great Plains in transition.
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Source: Tom Isern, (701) 799-2942
Editor: Gary Moran, (701) 231-7865
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