The Blindness of Social Wealth

James A. Montanye
Every social thinker since antiquity has complained that contemporaneous society was in descent.

The philosopher of history Oswald Spengler, who stressed destiny over causality, characterized
The Decline of the West (1926) as the final stage in the evolutionary cycle of culture and
civilization, during which “Late-Classical man [re]turns to the practice of the cults … dispense[s]
with proof, [and] desire[s] only to believe and not to dissect.”

More recent thinkers have stressed causality over destiny. In the 1990s, the sociologist Robert
Putnam launched his now-famous Bowling Alone (2000) thesis, which sought to explain the
apparent decline of civic engagement, and with it, the decline of social capital. Putnam defined
“social capital” as “connections among individuals—social networking and the norm of
reciprocity and trustworthyness that arises from them.” Putnam concluded that the decline of
“social capital is a cause, not merely an effect, of contemporary social circumstances [i.e.,
general malaise].” Putnam attributed this decline principally to “Americans’ love affair with
television entertainment … [and also to] a pervasive and continuing generational decline in
almost all forms of civic engagement,” which he attributed, as a first cause, to the Great
Depression and Second World War.

Comes now New York Times columnist David Brooks’ commentary on “the quality of our
[social] relationships [which] has been in steady decline for ages” Brooks, like Putnam, places
the onus on technology. Putnam called television “the single most consistent predictor” of civic
disengagement. For Brooks, the villain is modern social media; smartphones and Facebook in
particular, which are responsible for worsening the epidemic of “loneliness and social isolation.”
By Brooks’ lights, “[t]he mass migration to online life is not the only force driving these trends,
but it is a big one.”

Blaming technology confuses correlation with causation. Individuals are not lonely and isolated
because of television, smartphones, and Facebook: if they were, then they might be expected to
seek help. Rather, lonely and isolated individuals retreat willingly into these divertissements.

Aristotle famously observed more than two millennia ago that human individuals were social and
political animals whose brains were geared—by evolution, as we now know—for working in
harmony with other individuals. Modern economics and evolutionary biology teach that the
purpose of civic engagement and social capital is to mitigate collectively the adverse
consequences that resource scarcity has upon every individual’s prospects for survival and
reproductive success.

In the mid-Nineteenth Century, social thinkers like Auguste Comte and Karl Marx predicted that
the social-scientific management of capital would create a sunny and carefree world of economic
abundance, in which individuals would put aside their socially destructive egoism and come
together through the “charm” of altruism. Gains from capital accumulation subsequently
exceeded those thinkers’ wildest imaginings, and yet civic engagement declined, against
predictions.

Beginning around 1960, America and other Great Societies began creating webs of social
“entitlements” for distributing rising economic prosperity. Spengler’s “cults” became the
political factions of identity politics. Economic redistribution reduced the necessity for civic
engagement as a counterforce against scarcity. Social programs now administer to hard luck
cases, like Brooks’ example of Bob Hall, who died tragically in 1936, leaving his family debt-
ridden.

Pace Comte and Marx, and Brooks as well, economic abundance dulls the edge of scarcity,
diminishing in the process the importance of social cooperation, reciprocity, trust, and of civic
engagement generally.

Modern social media fill the increasing void created by prosperity. For many individuals, life
would be lonelier and more isolated without smartphones, Facebook, and the rewards of online
life.