COVER -> DAY ONE
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As Holy Week and Easter are the most important time of year for me when I try not to become too involved in current affairs, here is a story which might shed some light on the issue of social capital.
One of our current, minor obsessions is "Plane rage" which is generally attributed to excessive alcohol and inadequate leg room. Well, on my way back to London from Los Angeles a couple of weeks ago I had a severe bout of it before the first drinks were served and even though I had a bulk-head seat. I had quite enough leg room but my neighbour overflowed substantially into my limited space; he could not keep still and used his elbows liberally; he had a slight cold which caused him to sneeze regularly but he apparently knew nothing of handkerchiefs and followed each hefty sneeze with an equally hefty sniff. In spite of all these inconveniences I finally slept, only to be awakened by his head set, turned up at full volume, occupying his vacated seat.
Apart from enquiring whether there were any spare seats on the flight there was nothing I could reasonably do. If anything, the seats on public transport of all kinds have become smaller as we have on average grown larger but there is nothing a cabin steward can do about that. You can hardly tell a bloke to blow his nose properly with the tissues provided and you can't chide him to sit still.
Why not? Robert Putnam's answer in Bowling Alone is that we have lost a huge amount of social capital in the last three decades and that we have little sense of community. Accordingly, we cannot make use of that huge corpus of unwritten social code which regulated individual and collective behaviour. Putnam, however, is sensible enough partly to curb his nostalgia and to see that we are on a cusp in our social arrangements. He says that we will have to build new rules for new kinds of community transactions. He also notes that the kind of rules we formulated only worked relatively well in somewhat closed, segregated communities. Rotary Clubs flourished but there weren't many of mixed race.
When I arrived home I reflected on this when listening to a BBC report about political scandal which was clearly rooted in racial antagonism between Hindus of Indian origin and Muslims of Pakistani origin but that is the one aspect of the controversy which the reporter felt he could not mention. Had the faction fighting been between Protestants of Scottish origin and Catholics of Irish origin there would have been no problem. One can understand the reluctance but it made nonsense of the report.
Equally, if I were to name the nationality of my airline neighbour it would be regarded as racist because it would be assumed, wrongly, that I assigned the negative characteristics in his behaviour to his racial origin. Having treated people of other races as inferior for so many centuries it is hardly surprising if they are cautious about transforming our flimsy protection of political correctness into a more robust egalitarianism of praise and blame. Being falsely and often ritualistically accused of racism and having to forebear in silence when a black person treats us badly may simply be the penalty we have to pay for past cruelties. It is unfair, but in this life the best you can expect is justice; and it is not unjust.
The second issue raised by the airliner story is the way in which we behave in public space. People of different races have very different attitudes to physical contact but a much more fundamental problem is the contemporary failure to distinguish between public and private behaviour. My neighbour can sniff all he likes in private but should know not to do so in public and I should feel secure in the right to discuss our behaviour towards each other; but on the plane I did not feel secure in that right at all. I felt that I would be called a racist and that any complaint would lead to a deterioration in his behaviour not an improvement; and I felt that I would certainly not be supported by any of the airline staff.
As we value our lives we had better get on with it.
Putnam shows that social connectivity prolongs life and that being isolated is a bigger health risk than being a heavy smoker. He also shows that every ten minutes added to commuting time cuts 10% of a person's social connectivity. If we are to build new banks of social capital it will have to be on a very different basis from the single race small town model which began to decline around 1970. We no longer have a set of unquestioned collective values; we often do not share a common history; most of us have lost the rhythms of the hymnal and the harvest. Soon, much sooner than you think, we will lose the collective cement of common television entertainment, albeit enjoyed in nuclear families or in isolation.
The single most important but most difficult step is to learn how to ask questions. I am increasingly amazed by how many of my social exchanges consist of my asking strings of questions to people who cannot summon up a single reciprocal enquiry.
I cannot convince myself thoroughly that my appearance is so dull and my manners so unengaging that I transmit an aura of complete nonentity. On reflection, when leaving many such encounters, I have to admit, indeed, that my life and my opinions are much more interesting than those I have been painstakingly exploring.
Most puzzling of all is the almost complete failure, as far as I can tell from my own encounters, of academics and journalists to ask questions from which they might gain interesting if not useful information. It is only through such polite questioning that you learn enough about people to know which you want to cultivate.
Community does not depend upon liking everyone, it depends upon liking some people and getting on reasonably, reciprocally and civilly with all the rest.
Community also depends on at least a minimal notion of common decency and fairness but since Mrs. Margaret Thatcher's "There is no such thing as society" one wonders how to restore the situation.
We might start by being more honest in the use of language. If it wasn't, it deserves to have been, Harry S. Truman who gave articulation to the essential truth that whereas millionaires in search of public sector patronage may be classified as a special interest group the same cannot be said of labour unions and other organisations seeking such rights for citizens as are generally recognised in the Constitution. This document, in line with most other legal expressions of the relationship between the citizen and the state, specifies fair and equal treatment, which is usually what oppressed minorities are looking for, but it does not say that the rich are entitled to become even better off than they are by Government redistribution in their favour nor even by reducing their obligations to pay tax.
Any President up to and particularly including Jimmy Carter would have dismissed as grotesque the notion that a cleaning lady pressing for a raise in the national minimum wage is part of a special interest group whereas employers resisting it are not.
Still, like Putnam, I am by temperament an optimist. I cannot imagine how people will manage to accumulate new forms of social capital in Los Angeles, let alone on an inter-continental airline, but I hope that necessary blandness in human relations is but a temporary necessity. After all, my airline neighbour might have found my bibulous and carnivorous activities offensive; anything would have been better for us both than seething in silence.
