My neighbor’s name is either Alex or Nick.  I’m absolutely 50-50 on being sure which one it is.  He’s lived across the hall from me for more than a year, which means we are wayyyyyyyy past the point where I can ask.  And yes, he is 100 percent sure of my name because he always says it when we say hi in passing.

I tell you this in light of me reading Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone,” which traces the decline in community and social connectedness in America, which in many ways peaked in the late 1960s and have declined since.

It was published in 2000, and I probably bought it somewhere around 2009, so while my procrastination in reading it is generally bad, that extra time does give me the benefit of seeing more how things have played out.  Putnam ends the book with some suggestions for how we can reverse the declines and have a more connected, more community-oriented society.  I’ll start there since we as a society have completely punched his ideas in the face, spit on them and sent them on a rocket to Pluto, which isn’t even a planet anymore.

He rightly suggests that electronic mass media will have the largest influence, but I genuinely felt bad reading this:

“Let us find ways to ensure that by 2010 Americans will spend less leisure time sitting passively alone in front of glowing screens and more time in active connection with our fellow citizens.”

I think that here in late 2017 it’s safe to conclude we have gone the opposite direction and are never, ever, ever going back. Sure, there are ways in which we can harness our own trend for better uses, but the idea that we would walk away is not feasible.

Putnam also talks about the need for people to get more involved in all aspects of politics, from attending public meetings to running for office and voting.  There’s also this:

“Campaign reform (above all, campaign finance reform) should be aimed at increasing the importance of social capital — and decreasing the importance of financial capital — in our elections, federal, state, and local.”

Again, this would be amazing and we should want to get there.  But it’s hard to look at the political landscape heading into 2018 and imagine the influence of money someday declining in our system.

Putnam spends much of the book talking about the benefits of talking to each other more, especially if we’re bridging between different groups.  But he does point out that sometimes building a community can be detrimental to society if it takes the form of something like the Ku Klux Klan.

“Since social capital is inevitably easier to foster within homogeneous communities, emphasis on its creation may inadvertently shift the balance in society away from bridging capital and toward bonding social capital.”

He adds this warning: “Social dislocation can easily breed a reactionary form of nostalgia.”

Speaking of nostalgia, it’s common these days to hear people bemoaning millenials for ruining just about everything, but as Putnam notes in multiple places throughout the book, many declines in social structures started with baby boomers.

“Americans born in the first third of the twentieth century and (to a lesser extent) their grandchildren in the so-called millenial generation demonstrated higher levels of volunteerism in 1998 than people their age had shown in the 1970s, but volunteerism among the late baby boomers (in their thirties and forties in the 1990s) is actually lower now than among people of that age in 1975.”

TAKE THAT BABY BOOMERS.

In general, Putnam attributes the declines in community to pressures of money and time, suburbanization and sprawl, electronic entertainment and generational change.   He also points out that many people who do belong to organizations these days belong less to local ones than to what he calls “mailing list” groups that might spend lots of time lobbying on a topic but never have a meeting of those members.  It’s those meetings where people actually connect, and most importantly, they talk about other aspects of their community.

“We have invented new ways of expressing our demands that demand less of us … We are less generous with our money and (with the important exception of senior citizens) with our time, and we are less likely to give strangers the benefit of the doubt. They, of course, return the favor.”

Now, let’s go back to the fact that this book is nearly two decades old and enjoy that specific era for a minute.  Putnam cites studies of leisure time and notes that bowlers outnumbered joggers two to one and (somehow?) soccer players more than three to one.  And then this gem:

“Despite bowling’s ‘retro’ image, in 1996 even twenty-somethings went bowling about 40 percent more often than they went in-line skating.”

Attention all current pollsters, I need questions about people’s in-line skating habits to compare with other aspects of modern American life.

This book is more than 400 pages long and features dozens of footnotes for every chapter, so I don’t doubt its data.  But I spent minutes re-reading a segment that stated in the mid-1970s 40 percent of American adults played cards at least once a month, and that in 1999 there were still more monthly card players than monthly moviegoers.  Again, I’m sure that’s right, but I was honestly surprised by that.

One more 90s thing and we’ll leave it alone.  He writes that in 1999 AARP’s website had 500,000 individual visitors every month.  The latest data I found in a quick search is from 2014, and guess how high that number is now?  Seven. Million.  Yeah, we’re not reversing that screen time thing.

Now remember I said I had this book for about eight years before I read it.  And the book I read before this one, “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” was on my bookshelf for probably six years before I got to it.  So, naturally, page 20 of “Bowling Alone” directly references “Bonfire.”

I don’t now what that means, but then again I also don’t know my neighbor’s name.  Unless I do.