Underpaid Genius

Social Capital: De Tocqueville, Putnam, and the Future of New Orleans

[reposted from Centrality, originally published 15 September 2005]

A recent Washington Post editorial by Joel Garreau on the heartbreaking Katrina disaster, entitled A Sad Truth: Cities Aren’t Forever, starts out stating a historial truth — that cities don’t necessarily live forever — and then winds up suggesting that New Orleans will find it difficult to bounce back from Katrina because of relatively low social capital:

In his 2000 book, “Bowling Alone,” political scientist Robert Putnam measured social capital around the country — the group cohesion that allows people to come together in times of great need to perform seemingly impossible feats together. He found some of the lowest levels in Louisiana. (More Louisianans agree with the statement “I do better than average in a fistfight” than people from almost anywhere else.) His data do not seem to be contradicted by New Orleans’s murder rate, which is 10 times the national average.

Garreau sparked my curiousity, so I dug out Bowling Alone, and looked through for the salient mention of Louisiana, and discovered a much darker truth buried there:

[from pp 292-294 Bowling Alone] Differences among the states on the underlying measures [of social capital] are substantial, with ratios of roughly three to one between high- and low-ranking states. Social trust, for example, ranges from 16 percent in Mississippi to 67 percent in North Dakota. The average number of associational memberships per capita varies from 1.3 in Louisiana and North Carolina to 3.3 in North Dakota. […] Even a cursory glance at America’s social capital resources leads one to ask, “Where in the world did these differences come from from?” Answering that question in detail is a task for another day, but this pattern has deep historical roots. Alexis de Tocqueville, patron saint of contemporary social capitalists, observed precisely the same patterns in his travels in the America of the 1030s, attributing it, atleast in part, to patterns of settlement:

As one goes farther south [from New England], one finds a less active municipal life; the township has fewer officials, rights, and duties; the population does not exercise such a direct influence on affairs; the town meetings are less frequent and deal with fewer matters. For this reason the power of the elected official is comparatively greater and that of the voter less; municipal spirit is less awake and less strong…. Most of the immigrants who founded the northwestern states came from New England, and they brought the administrative habits of their old home to the new.

Well-trod paths of migration helped establish regional and local patterns of social capital in contemporary America. […] Still more striking is the spatial correlation between low social capital at the end of the twentieth century and slavery in the first half of the nineteeth century. The more virulent the system of slavery then, the less civic the state today. Slavery was, in fact, a social system designed to destroy social capital among slaves and between slaves and freemen. Well-established networks of reciprocity among the oppressed would have raised the risk of rebellion, and egalitarian bonds of sympathy between slave and free would have undermined the very legitimacy of the system. After emancipation the dominant classes in the South continued to have a strong interest in inhibiting horizontal social networks. It is not happendstance that the lowest levels of community-based social capital are found where a century of plantation slavery was followed by a century of Jim Crow politics. Inequality and social solidarity are deeply incompatible. [emphasis mine.]

As a result of these observations — based on nationwide studies, not anecdotal observations, like de Tocqueville — we would be less surprised, although no less grief-stricken, by the events that unfolded in New Orleans. New Orleans is smackdab in the heart of the Old South, a city where the great majority of the poor are black, in a region with next to no history of “horizontal social networks”, but instead more than two centuries of intentionally stunted and blocked social networks, dividing individual from individual, individual from group, and group from group. This is not meant to blame the victims or to condone the evident lack of planning on the part of municipal, state, and federal authorities. On the contrary: awareness of the social capital that can be expected in an emergency is just as important as knowing that the levees will be swamped in a Force Four hurricane. It’s just a different element of the same problem. Just as any sensible military commander knows that morale is just as important as weaponry, our leaders need to move beyond a superficial and potentially catastrophic attitude about social capital. People in different parts of the country may respond radically differently to similar sorts of emergencies, based on social trust, affiliation, and other factors. And I am explicitly not singling out the poor or Blacks; the region as a whole is the question. As we turn our thoughts to rebuilding the fallen buildings, removing the debris, and burying our dead, it will be insufficient to only look to the physical infrastructure necessary to make a city alive. We have a much larger and potentially longer-term project ahead of us: to increase social capital in a region that has been starved for centuries. Perhaps the potential windfall from the enormous diaspora of all walks of life from the region — the rich, the poor, the powerful, and the weak — may actually increase the social connectedness in these benighted states. Although Barbara Bush had something else in mind (I think) when she said Katrina evacuees are better off now because “they were underprivileged anyway,” she may be revealing a higher truth. Yes, they lived in a region of enormous social poverty: not just the financial sort, but where everyone has come to expect lack of involvement, divided communities, and low connectedness between feuding camps. A wave of outsiders coming in to rebuild and reanimate the darkened city and the greater region around it might trigger an increase in social capital, and those who have been displaced — many who will never return — now have the chance to become connected with possibly richer, more open, and at the very least different social networks, elsewhere. But those elected and appointed officials theoretically in charge of mobilizing us in times of emergency simply did not heed the experts who have been making warnings about the city’s social vulnerability for years. Now we know that social capital in the Gulf region is also below sea level, and it is likely to take a lot longer to raise that than repairing the levees and pumping the streets dry.