In 2000 Robert Putnam wrote a book entitled Bowling Alone. He detailed the collapse in social capital over the last third of the twenty-first century. Social capital is human networking. There are three different types of capital, understanding the difference helps us understand social capital. Economic capital is the most familiar use of the term capital. This capital is about monetary wealth, represented by the amount of money a person, group, country has. Second is human capital which is an individual’s specific contribution. Human capital is related to education level, trade knowledge. An example of human capital is a voice teacher’s human capital is relative to the knowledge of voice. Social capital is the worth of an individual or community based on how well they are connected with each other and those outside their community.
Putnam relates the disillusion of social capital to various topics. Paraphrasing his lengthy discussion I will say the problems are homogenization and technology. He has a chapter on the influences of what he refers to as technology but I am taking a liberty is labeling what he is referring to as homogenization. He is very descriptive and informative with his statistical analysis of information of social capital over the last century. I intend to show the relationship to Robert Putnam’s work to a larger issue of human population.
Before I make my claims I want to assert I am not technophobic. I consider technology as an unintended result of our population. Technology is useful and has added to our ability to move, organize, and collect knowledge about the Universe. While technology is a compliment to our way of life, technology is an easy scapegoat for any problems with population because technology makes population growth possible. Technology is not the problem but without an understanding of the effects of technological advances it has created problems and exacerbated problems related to over population.
Populations rise is best articulated in Overshoot by William Catton Jr. He discusses on a biological level population norms and the relationship to the environment. He discusses technologies usefulness in population increases. He explains the inverse relationship between population quantity and quality, using the word Homo Colossus for our current level of resource consumption. Cargoism is a term he uses to describe the heroic endless uses we attribute to technology.
These two authors seem to talk about two different topics while in they have an interesting and useful relationship. The decline of social capital follows the same relationship Catton discusses about the inverse relationship between quantity and quality of human life. As the quantity of human life goes up or the resource consumption of the individuals increases, the quality of human life decreases. Therefore social capital is a quantitative measure of a society’s health and happiness. Social capital is on a decline as population and resource consumption is on the rise.
Neither author provides a viable solution but simply articulates the problem as they understand it from their perspective fields of study. Putnam is not engaged with the discussion to lower population and Catton’s newest book is about an impending bottleneck for the human species. Catton makes no reference to the relationship between social capital and population. The problem becomes clearer with both authors contributions. We are doing something unhealthy as a population. As a species, Catton explains we are doing something very natural and we have been doing this for a very long time. There are countless examples of other species that outgrow their environmental limits and the next stage is considered a collapse, which takes many forms. A decline in social capital is one of these many forms. As our relationship to resources is affected by our population size so then is our relationship to each other.
The last section in Putnam’s book discusses the parallel of social capital collapse around the turn of the twentieth century. He uses this time period to discuss what worked for them in 1880-1910 should work for us. Putnam does not address the issue that what they saw as a problem in 1880 is the same problem we are facing now, because the rise in social capital in the middle of the twentieth century. This issue was patched up, not fixed, and is now becoming a bigger problem. The patchwork was a lot of what Putnam discusses as an increase in social capital due to innovative ideas of the Progressive Era, but the patchwork was supplemented because we again around the time of the increase social capital in the middle of the twentieth century, increased our resource acquisition with the use of technology, as Catton explains during this same time period.
Although these problems deserve their unique recognition and are not the same problems altogether, these problems have a corresponding relationship. Humans are facing the consequence of depleting the usefulness of our environment. The only solution would be to do what no other species we have an example of has consciously done: understand our relationship as a population to ourselves and our environment, decide what is healthiest and contributes to the capital of everyone involved including future generations. Catton and Putnam are both asking us to do something entirely unique on this planet, consciously weight the consequences of having more children.
