A New American Awakening

How the chaos of the phone-based life is giving rise to a quiet revolution in civic life—and what it will take to make it last.

Intro from Zach Rausch and Jon Haidt:

A few weeks ago, Zach met with political scientist Robert Putnam at a small coffee shop near Harvard University. Since the release of The Anxious Generation, we’ve begun telling a broader story that reaches back further than smartphones and cable television, to the long decline of in-person community and civic life that began in the 1960’s. No one has chronicled that decline more powerfully than Putnam in his widely cited book Bowling Alone. The book analyzes the multiple causes of the decline in social capital, including a major role for technology. The proliferation of cars, air conditioning, and television all made life more comfortable and less neighborly—these technologies pulled people away from front porches, public parks, and civic groups.

We believe this erosion of social capital throughout the 1970s and 1980s can explain why Americans took away the play-based childhood in the 1990s. When Americans lost trust in each other, they stopped letting their children roam around without direct adult supervision. But when Zach met with Putnam, the conversation was not primarily about the destruction of social capital. Instead, Putnam talked about renewal—about how deeply polarized and fragmented societies have, at moments in history, managed to regenerate community, civic institutions, and a sense of shared purpose. This is the focus of his most recent book, The Upswing, which looks at how America emerged from the Gilded Age, a time of deep inequality and distrust, into an era of robust civic life and democratic reform.

Today’s post is written by Sam Pressler, creator of the Connective Tissue newsletter and a fellow at UVA’s Karsh Institute of Democracy and at the Harvard Human Flourishing Program, along with Pete Davis, author of Dedicated: The Case For Commitment in an Age of Infinite Browsing, and one of the directors of the new Netflix documentary Join or Die, about Putnam’s research on community in America. Together, they offer a hopeful, grounded vision for how we might revive communal life—and thus, more play-based childhoods—in an era defined by technological disruption and social fragmentation.

– Zach and Jon

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A New American Awakening

By Sam Pressler and Pete Davis

Source: Shutterstock

Doomscrolling teens, catfishing scams, viral conspiracies, AI-generated slop, robot companions for lonely elders—our headlines are filled with dystopian stories of tech-fueled chaos. But in the wake of this upheaval, something else — something more hopeful — is also arising. In the overlooked corners of our fragmented culture, the seeds of community renewal are being planted. Look closely and we can see it everywhere: from national wakeup calls like The Anxious Generation and Of Boys and Men topping bestsellers lists, to a flourishing of thousands of local experiments around the country in new forms of association, social connection, and civic cultivation.

The moment we find ourselves in may feel unprecedented, but it follows a pattern familiar throughout American history: new technologies disrupt our communities, cultures, and constellations of meaning and, in the wake of that disruption, community renewal movements emerge to re-order, re-humanize, and re-knit our communal lives.

These periods of renewal often start as great communal and spiritual awakenings, like the one we seem to be entering today. As Americans become more dislocated by technology, we also become more receptive to prophetic calls to rethink the good life and how society should be organized. In the early 19th century, for example, the building of the Erie Canal brought disruptive economic and population growth to upstate New York. Soon after, utopian communities began to form in what became known as the Second Great Awakening—giving rise to nation-changing movements like Abolition, Suffrage, and Mormonism. A century later, the alienation of postwar mass consumer society (the shopping malls, suburbs, skyscrapers, and interstate highways that brought on both economic prosperity and cultural malaise) inspired a new wave of spiritual upheavals — from the 1960s counterculture and rights revolutions to the evangelical backlash — which still shape American life today.

Each awakening has been followed by decades of civic creativity, experimentation, and reform. The renewal at the turn of the 20th century is especially instructive. As documented by Theda Skocpol and Robert Putnam, the decades between 1880 and 1920 saw the birth and spread of dozens of mass membership organizations like the Girl Scouts, the Rotary Club, and the 4-H. During this era, a labor movement arose to organize worker power, Settlement House movement arose to support and integrate new immigrant communities, public park and playground movement arose to promote recreation in new urban environments, and Arts and Crafts movement arose to revive an aesthetic culture seen to be degraded by mass production. All of these movements were threads of the same pattern: technological and economic disruption, communal awakening, and long-haul renewal efforts.

It appears that we may be at the beginning of another wave of civic renewal. Situating this moment in historical context allows us to learn from past efforts—understanding how they fell short, drawing from their successes, and recognizing that such renewals have been sparked before, and they can be sparked again.

The opportunity is real. But so is the responsibility: this doesn’t happen automatically. We must own our agency by actively choosing to do the generational work of imagining, organizing, and building new civic possibilities. If past eras are a guide, this will be the project of the next few decades of American life — but, fortunately, we have the collective capacity to do it.

Today’s Wave of Community Renewal

The immediate catalyst for today’s wave of community renewal has been the shifting of our time, attention, and humanity from the real world to the digital world. Though our fraught relationship with screens began over half a century ago with television, it has accelerated with personal computers, the internet, smartphones, social media, streaming, and video conferencing. As industries developed to monetize our attention, we underwent a transformation in how we connect and relate to one another. We not only have fewer friends and spend more time alone than in the 1990s and early 2000s (and far, far more time isolated than we did in the mid-twentieth century), we also interact and relate in a fundamentally different way when we are together.

We might have remained in a “frog in boiling water” situation if not for the jolt of the COVID pandemic. It was then that entire technological ecosystems emerged to keep us in our homes — from working, to learning, to shopping, to praying, to playing. As more of life was shifted online (especially for the so-called “laptop class”), more Americans began to see the dystopian absurdity of spending so much of our time in a disembodied, disembedded digital reality. It became increasingly clear that: the good life had to happen in real life. And with that realization, small groups of Americans across the country have begun to sow the seeds of community renewal.

The greenshoots of those seeds are now poking through the surface. New civic groups, like Warm Cookies of the Revolution and CivicLex, are reconnecting residents to their neighbors and local government in fun, joyful ways. New neighborhood groups are arising that explicitly commit to connecting neighbors with neighbors — in Brownsville, NY, South Dallas, TX, Birmingham, AL, and many places in between. Post-pandemic mutual aid networks are emerging — not only in Brooklyn and Chicago, but also in Johnson City, TN and Western North Carolina — that are building locally rooted economic and social solidarity. Creative governments agencies, like Boston’s Office of Civic Organizing, have started offering microgrants for their residents to throw block parties and gather with one another. And even prosocial technologists, like New_Public, Front Porch Forum, and Common Agency, are coming together to build local, in-person relationships at the speed of trust.

A Second Attempt in the Digital Age

This isn’t the first attempt at civic renewal in the digital age. The 1980s and 90s also saw renewed interest in community. Robert Bellah’s Habits of the Heart and Hillary Clinton’s It Takes A Village were bestsellers. George H. W. Bush ran on a message of “A Thousand Points of Light” to promote volunteerism, while the Clinton administration launched Americorps to support youth service programs. And Amitai Etzioni, along with other academics and policymakers, formed a national network to institutionalize their new “Communitarian Movement.”

But today’s wave is different. First, the technological disruptions are even more profound. The alarms being sounded in the 1990s came before the rise of iPhones, Instagram, Netflix, Zoom, and Prime shipping. If people were already raising the alarm back then, two more decades of isolating technological developments — and more importantly, two more decades of growing awareness of the cultural damage wrought by those technologies — have left many more Americans receptive to the idea that a community renewal is needed.

Second, more of today’s leaders of community renewal better understand the broader political, economic, and cultural paradigm that must be challenged. It’s not just particular gadgets and platforms causing dislocation. It’s a deep-rooted ideology, often bipartisan, that prioritizes private and corporate solutions to public problems over cooperative ones, over-values elite technical experts over popular participation, and elevates hyper-individualistic ideals over communal ones.

This is an entrenched way of understanding and addressing public problems — and few in the 1990s wave struck deep enough to begin uprooting it. But the opportunities that arise if we were to strike at the root of this paradigm today — for our families, our communities, and our broader society — are big. That’s why it’s important to understand an emerging fault line within today’s renewal wave: between those who want to build atop the existing paradigm, and those who want to envision and realize a new one.

The former group are at risk of dominating the discourse on community and connection in America. They’re the self-help gurus who are tapping into the loneliness epidemic to build up their lifestyle brands. They’re the corporate startups that are selling everything from premium, exclusive “communities” to AI solutions to elder loneliness. And they’re the policymakers who frame community as having value only insofar as it advances some measurable benefit in a “more important” public outcome, like economic growth.

The latter group, to which we subscribe, believes a little bit more volunteerism, a little bit more community-spirited messaging, and a little bit more sober use of technology is not enough. We need to go deeper to imagine and then build — in piecemeal, over the long haul — a new paradigm. We see the decline of community not as a particular policy problem to be solved within a three-, five-, or even ten-year timeframe, but as a generational challenge that calls us to imagine and live into new civic possibilities. This challenge invites us to co-create new models for building community life and new ways of being when we show up in community — or, at the very least, relearn old models and old ways of being anew. And this challenge calls us to push our motivations beyond the purely material and measurable, creating space for the ineffable, undefinable, and uncontrollable spirit that emerges in human relationships and community.

These views come with a different set of principles for organizing community than those we’ve grown accustomed to in recent decades. Relationships should be valued as ends in and of themselves — in all their messiness, emergence, and inefficiencies — rather than instrumental means toward other ends. Proximate leaders and groups that are rooted in and accountable to particular places should be centered over distant leaders and “placeless” groups. Participatory processes, membership, and governance models — those that blur the lines between insider and outsiders — should be prioritized over managerial approaches that concentrate control and decision-making. It is these principles, translated into embodied and embedded practice, that can set the foundations for the generational work of community renewal that lies ahead.

Making This Wave Stick

But what, exactly, does this generational work entail? How do we support and grow today’s wave of communal renewal? We see three major prongs to the movement.

1. Support Local Civic Experiments

The heart of renewal is local experimentation in new forms of gathering, association, and social connection across America. There are no blueprints and no “silver bullet” solutions to community renewal in the 21st century — we can only discover what needs to be done by trying things out and spreading what works.

The best way to support this flourishing is to support the local cultivators who are experimenting with new approaches to civic life. One form of support is launch funding: dozens of community foundations across the country are starting to give small- and medium-sized grants to community-builders, often in places largely ignored by national philanthropy. Another promising opportunity is to create local and trans-local networks — “gatherings of gatherers” like San Francisco’s BuildIRL or Kentucky’s Rural-Urban Exchange, where organizers can meet, learn best practices, share tricks of the trade, and support each other. Eventually, we believe the local government and associational life of cities and towns can be re-oriented to support some of these functions, promoting “city membership” among their residents.

2. Shift the National Narrative

Every major civic revival has paired local efforts with big storytelling. Today’s movement must leverage the legacy media of mass culture (film, television, cable news, newspapers), new media of fragmented culture (podcasts, YouTube, social media influencers) and our emerging media of re-localized culture (local newspapers, civic media, and newsletters) to question the ideals of hyperindividualism while imagining possibilities for a more community-spirited future. When you have concrete experiments flourishing on the ground and inspiring ideas circulating in the air, momentum builds.

What could this look like, in practice? One such example of a national narrative intervention is Join or Die, a Netflix documentary about the history and importance of joining clubs, based on the work of Robert Putnam. One of us (Pete), with his co-director Rebecca Davis, has been traveling around the country showing the documentary in hundreds of neighborhood screenings and conversations over the past years. Another is Priya Parker’s The Art of Gathering, which has helped build a national understanding that gathering together is a craft we can hone. But national interventions are just the beginning: We should also be investing in the community-spirited influencers and meme-makers — and shouldn’t be above building Barstool-like podcast collectives and Morning Brew-like newsletter collectives in the service of community renewal. Finally, we should be doubling down on efforts to rebuild and re-localize our civic media ecosystems — taking inspiration from groups like News Futures — because a more community-embedded and community-driven media landscape will also be a more community-spirited one.

3. Build Fields of Renewal in the Professions

Major movements succeed when they embed in the various professions and sectors. We must cultivate fields of community renewal in medicine, public health, education, law, business, government, social work, architecture, urban design, engineering, religion, journalism, and beyond. This is how the major social movements of the past decades — like the environmental, feminist, and conservative movements — have had deep impact: By creating fields within the professions that help practitioners see their work through their movement’s lens. In the past, such fields that link movements to sectors have been cultivated both in university settings (through centers, journals, and courses at professional schools) and popular ones (through national conferences and networks). Such fields have served as foundries for generating both new narrative interventions in the national discourse and new concrete experiments and institutional reforms in the social order.

If this sounds strange, take the urban design profession as a real-world precedent. Thanks to both popular networks like Strong Towns and academic subfields like New Urbanism, urban designers are way ahead of other professions in terms of cultivating a young generation of practitioners who are primed to discuss how their profession and its institutional designs (in their case, land use, plazas, sidewalks, main streets, and the like) can better serve the work of community-building. The idea would be to copy their success in other sectors, so that, say, imagined subfields like “Law for Community Renewal,” “Civic Technology,” and “Community Care and Public Health” can have as big an influence on their respective professions.

Conclusion

This work of community renewal is not easy and not quick, but it has a big advantage—it can be conducted piecemeal by anyone, in all sectors, and at all levels of public life. And each seed of community renewal — each tiny neighborhood project, community conversation, institutional reform — is not a small thing, for each contains within it the potential to grow, to inspire, and to spread. If we were to transform from a civic desert into a civic forest over the coming decades, it will have been because you — and thousands of others like you around the country, like millions of others like you in similarly-dispiriting circumstances throughout our history — each decided to act on a belief that your little seed, your little alternative, was worth cultivating. It is a ridiculous belief, until it is not.

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For more from Sam, you can subscribe to his Substack: Connective Tissue.