Starving Artist's "good old days"... talked to an expert

Great Debates
1

So, to begin by namedropping for a second, my uncle is Robert Putnam, who is about as close as there is to an authority on topics such as general civility in America. I was at his grandon’s Bar Mitzvah this weekend, so I figured I’d ask him for his view on the general Starving Artist view of the past century of American history.

To sum up, for those of you who have somehow missed it, the same argument has happened here on many, many occasions. It goes approximately like this (obviously omitting a bunch of nuance and exaggerating a bit):

Starving Artist: Back before the 1960’s, life was better in America in lots of ways. People were polite, they dressed up to go to baseball games, they didn’t swear at their elders, teens rarely got pregnant. See all those pictures of the early civil rights pioneers wearing nice suits when they went out to march? That’s why they were so successful. Then the hippies came along and ruined everything, and because hippies ruined everything, and hippies were liberal, I blame every problem America currently has on liberals.

Some other poster: That’s a load of BS. If you want to go back to how things were in the 1950’s you’re racist, because there was lots of racism back then. Oh, and your claims about teen pregnancy are in no way supported by the facts.
So, I ran a hopefully honestly represented version of SA’s claims past my uncle to see what he would say, and I found his response to be very interesting. The key point is that at some level, SA is right about the decline of America since the early 1960’s. That is, if you look at the last 100 years of American history, there are a number of objective ways to rate how “good” American society is – things such as equality of wealth distribution, membership in social and civic organizations, etc., things which generally measure closeknittedness of society and general happiness (I’m probably not quite phrasing that right) – which all look extremely similar. They all go up for 50 years, peak around the early 1960’s, and have been going down since then. So, objectively (or as close to objectively as you can get in a discussion of broad societal trends), SA is right in that there WAS something good in America in the 50’s and early 60’s which has since been lost.

That said, my uncle also immediately pointed out that of course things weren’t perfect then, society was much more racist and homophobic for instance. And being the academic type that he is, he wasn’t making some value judgement of “things were better then”, he was just saying that there are an awful lot of different quantifiable criteria all of which describe the same basic arc, peaking around the same basic time.
So the next question, of course, is what caused the decline? And his basic answer is that no one really knows, but that it’s WAY too big a decline along way too many different axes for it to have been anything as simple as “the hippies” or even “the liberals” or “the conservatives”. He thinks it has to do with a decline of “social capital” (although since that’s a concept that he’s generally associated with inventing/popularizing in the first place in the book Bowling Alone, he’s probably a bit eager to emphasize its importance at all times), in which case as big a single factor as anything is the increased popularity of TV. But it almost has to be a whole lot of different things, and he didn’t have any confidence that he or anyone really knows what they were.
A few other random anecdotes from our conversation:
-I asked him what caused “The Sixties” (ie, the counterculture, hippies, etc.), thinking that the Vietnam War was a big part of it, and he claimed that that wasn’t a huge factor, since The Sixties happened in countries like Sweden which were not involved in Vietnam at all. His belief is that the single biggest factor was purely a generation one… the baby boomers were all teenagers, so the ratio of adults to adolescents was the smallest it has ever been.
-Teen pregnancy specifically doesn’t fit the same curve described above. It continued to increase after the early 60’s for a while, but has been steadily declining since the late 70’s (presumably due to increased access to contraception)
-One other somewhat unrelated point, but one I found to be fascinating: as we all know, the country is extremely polarized right now between left and right, and there’s a large religious element to that polarization. But at the same time that that polarization has been increasing on a macro level, the exact opposite has been happening on a personal level. So while the country-level trends are for religious people as groups to all vote one way and demonize their political opponents; on a personal level, things like interfaith marriage continue to increase. So people distrust other religions AS A GROUP more than in the past, but that doesn’t apply to relations with individual members of those groups, in fact quite the opposite. Interestingly, it really seems that politics has been the driving force in this polarization, with religion being dragged along with it. So 30 or 40 years ago, you had religious liberals, religious conservatives, nonreligious liberals and nonreligious conservatives. Now you have mainly religious conservatives and nonreligious liberals. And, interestingly, instead of people changing their politics to fit their religion (which would seem like the obvious thing to do, if religion is something that, if you get wrong, you believe you’ll be damned to hell for all eternity), in fact the main trend has been people changing their religion to fit their politics.
Anyhow, I’m sure I got some details here wrong, but I hope some of that is comprehensible and interesting.

2

I’ve heard people (seriously!) blaming it all on Dr. Benjamin Spock and his books (wildly popular in that time) on raising babies.

I think, as with any other major social change, there will always be people who seek for a simple, single cause (“The fall of the Roman Empire was caused by Christianity”) and those who see it as a massive, messy constellation of causes.

Trinopus

3

Most nostalgia for the good old days completely ignores the plight of Blacks in America at the time. Who gives a shit if the White middles class is all hunk dunky when millions of people are living in de facto servitude because of their race?

4

Learned scholars recognize the late '80s and early '90s as the best time in human history. It’s a happy coincidence that was also the time of my childhood.

5

I’ve always felt that the biggest factor in this particular area is World War II. The USA had a huge advantage in the 40’s and 50’s in that we were the only industrial power that wasn’t bombed to pieces, and by the 60’s that advantage had started to evaporate. Wealth smooths over lots of disputes. It even explains the Baby Boomer explosion, with the kids born right after WW2 coming of age in the early and mid-60’s. I’m sure there were a million other factors, but WW2 looms large in the background.

6

Holy crap, you’re Robert Putnam’s nephew? Cool, he wrote a heck of a book.

Thing is, and you should certainly ask him about this and report back, I don’t see any of these trends going into reverse. The same factors that drove the “Bowling Alone” effect are still operating. We are still becoming increasingly mobile, increasingly living in large anonymous groups (big corporations, big government), and increasingly reluctant to punish deviation from group norms.

In that world, short-term impressions matter more, long term reputations matter less, so it makes sense to be more aggressive, more solipsistic, more uncivil - if it gets you what you want, there are fewer long term consequences. As the incentives increasingly resemble those of anonymous message boards, social norms are, logically, slowly moving towards message board levels. Hope I’m not around when we hit youtube-comment levels.

7

The existence of Phil Collins and Madonna’s musical careers completely invalidates that argument.

8

You know what else, aside from hippies, came on the scene in the 60s (roughly)? Computers. I blame them.

9

See, while what you’re saying is clearly reasonable, I also think it can sometimes distract from what could be an interesting discussion. It’s unquestionable (to any reasonable person) that full voting rights for Blacks and outlawing of Rosa Parks-style discrimination is a Good Thing. But that shouldn’t automatically overwhelm all other discussions of what’s changed between the 50’s and now. And it’s not just a middle class white thing, either. For instance, one of the issues specifically mentioned was the income gap between the poorest and the richest Americans. And even things like how-likely-are-you-to-know-and-trust-your-neighbors presumably applies on many different places on the socioeconomic scale.

10

The factors SA usually blames are or are about manners and courtesy, and personal sexual morality. Are those included in your uncle’s analysis?

11

Also, he tends to use the term ‘liberal permissiveness’ rather a lot, AFAIK without ever quite explaining how the process of liberals giving people permission to do Bad Things is supposed to work.

12

But the rise of the Pixies and Nirvana completely invalidates yours.

Gotcha-ya!

13

This was my immediate thought as well. And not just the obvious economic factors of being far and away the biggest industrial power. I think another big aspect is the aftermath of such a victory, in the same way that two teammates that might embrace when winning a championship, but be the first to stab eachother in the back when the team falls on hard times.

Moreso, less concern about money meant more time for involvement in a lot of those social activities. If a family in the 50s could live off of a single income, that creates a lot more time for the family as a whole to engage in civic and social organizations, which is something the argument is measuring. Compared to today when most families need two incomes and often have longer hours too. That’s a direct consequence of the economy of a post-WW2 environment.

That all said, I think another big thing is technology, though this is more an accelerant in the last few decades and not so much since the 60s. Not only does technology make it so there’s less need to be involved in social activities, as I have a million options at home, but it also exposes us consistently to a consumer culture that continues to grow and simply didn’t exist in the 50s. People work longer and harder hours for new technologies and gadgets, which not only eats into socialization, but even further reduces the desire to partake in it.

14

My uncle blames it all on the Beatles. This time in 2014 he will be 100, and still wrong on that point. He’s a typical arch-conservative, but when he was a young man my father, 15 years his junior, swears that it was his brother that turned him into a lifelong lefty unionist.

I blame it on the fact that we are very diverse and getting more diverse and that those resistant to diversity insist that it is okay to resist political correctness, aka, being polite to others whom we do not identify with.

15

Excellent post.

So, it seems possible that one could long for the good parts of those “good old days” and not want to revert back to the racism and bigotry that were present at that time. Makes sense. Wonder how many posters will take what your uncle said to heart and apologize to Starving Artist for insisting that his longing for those days of yore means he wants the world to be more racist today.

My prediction: 0.

16

I haven’t, ever, seen anybody tell SA that his longing for “the good old days” means that he wants today’s world to be more racist.

What I have seen, time and again, is people point out that his “good old days” never existed as he sees them, and they were inextricably linked with racism, sexism, homophobia, etc… Talking about how “polite” society is becomes somewhat nonsensical when we realize that blacks were, by law, second class citizens. Now, SA may have an idiosyncratic definition of “politeness”, but most people understand that it’s still remarkably uncivil to tell someone that they have to go use a segregated school system, lunch counter or water fountain, even if you don’t use the word “fuck” while doing it.

That is, in a nutshell, the “good old days” weren’t particularly good on a number of dynamics for a large number of people, and the idea that things were “good” then but “bad” now due to “liberals” is about as absurd and vacuous as you can get. SA has repeatedly characterized factual corrections as if people had told him that he supported racism or wanted the modern world to be racist, or what have you, but what’s really happened is it’s been pointed out to him that the “good” old days were only somewhat “good” if you weren’t black, weren’t a woman, weren’t homosexual, etc, etc, etc.

He’d just often shifts the discussion, at that point, with claims that folks are arguing that politeness and racism are somehow inextricably linked. Or something.

17

And what’s your prediction for the likelihood that Starving Artist will cease and desist blaming the hippies, and apologize for insisting that it’s all the fault of liberals? I’d say those odds are about the same, eh?

18

I think it might have been the demographics of the baby boom. In every society there have been adolescents who question the traditional wisdom of the elders. In most historical societies, the elders have the advantage of power and they win the debate for the most part - traditional values are questioned but eventually hold.

The sixties were different because of the sheer number of young people who were questioning traditional values at the same time. They were actually able to overturn many traditional values and establish a new social order.

Which, Starving Artist aside, wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Personally, I consider the loss of traditional values like wearing a suit and hat and not swearing in public to be an acceptable price for the loss of traditional values like the inferiority of women, black, Jews, and gays.

19

I think it’s a good post, too, but I don’t think it’s nearly the support of Starving Artist that you seem to think it does.

For one thing - who are we measuring for these studies on “happiness” and “closeknittedness of society?” Did anyone in 1940 ask these questions of Black people, or gay people? Or women? Or, like most scientific studies in the first half of that century, were subjects mostly white men, and the results assumed to hold true for the rest of the population?

I’m absolutely, 100% prepared to believe even without a cite that for adult Christian white (and a pretty narrow definition of “white”) males, their feelings of closeknittedness of society and happiness peaked in the early 60’s. No argument from me there, whatsoever.

I’m just so sure about, well, everyone else. And for everyone else - gay people, minorities, women, children, non-atheists - I would need to see cites for such claims to believe them.

Even then, I’m not entirely sure that these are important rubrics. I’d certainly expect people to be happier when they don’t know about or ignored social injustice, corporate malfeasance, environmental destruction, famine, abuse, etc. which are so present in modern news and social media sources. But that doesn’t mean that life was better, it just means that the people answering the questionnaire were more ignorant.

20

Could this be associated with the Kennedy tax cuts of the early '60s, which significantly reduced the maximum tax rates? I don’t remember much discussion on this topic during the '60s, actually. Could the increase in this gap then be between the very richest and the very poorest, as opposed to today, where the gap is between the richest and everyone else?