His talk was based on his newest, not yet published book titled "Turning the Corner: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again".
What an excellent speaker. He began with several slides with graphs depicting things like income equality gaps, political cooperation, public membership in organizations, membership in churches and marriage age rates from 1890 to present day. Each one of the graphs looked exactly the same. Very low in 1890 and steadily rising until 1970 and then steadily falling back to the same levels as 1890 today. He attributes that to a steady shift from a "we" society to an "I" society. Starting in 1910, grass roots efforts had people working together to solve the nations problems. Starting around 1970, efforts to work together began to dwindle until now when we have an almost complete stalemate.
He is confident that we can reverse the trend and he sees the beginnings of that with the way the youth have taken up serious causes like global warming and gun violence with such force and determination. He said involvement in groups and organizations are key. People need to be exposed to and exchange different ideas and knowledge, and they need to do it face to face and not behind a keyboard. We also need a charismatic leader to push us forward.
It was an excellent lecture and I look forward to reading his book when it is published next year.
10 comments:
That sounds interesting, it is clear that histories goes up and down during the ages, I hope he will be right with his view at the future. It is a miserable time at the moment specialy for your divided country with this leader.
Let's hope so. :-)
Interesting! He's the one who wrote "Bowling Alone," I believe -- I read that book years ago. It is interesting how we seem to have abandoned the civic organizations and other social groups that helped sustain our parents and grandparents, and our overall society, years ago. Twitter just isn't a replacement for that kind of engagement!
I took note of the title of the book. I am interested in reading it as well. It's about time we conscienciously choose a different path than includes more than one individual... only then the I becomes we.
I like his positive outlook Sharon. It gets harder every day to look at a positive view of the world situation, so we need all the help we can get ✨
Get involved! A great message, Sharon!
It sounds like he's a very good speaker.
An interesting topic for discussion especially in these times.
Lecture series like these are so worthwhile and it sounds like Putman had a lot to say. How I hope he's right! We've gotten involved in two local organizations this year and feel the connections are vital. But only today my book group, discussing "Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power," veered into a political quagmire with one of our members virtually building a wall in the sand. I sometimes despair of getting back to comfortable disagreement.
Very interesting and I like positive people who look forward and try and succeed to change things. In the past we had read extracts with the kids of his book on the "American Dream".
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