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...highest government levels both the US and the UK as containing the answer to multifarious social and cultural problems. The basic lesson that emerges from Putnam's research is that high levels of diversity currently have a negative impact on levels of social capital. It is an approach that, as argued here, displays serious methodological and analytical shortcomings.
Keywords: Bloom, community, culture wars, multiculturalism, social capital
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In this essay, we offer a critique of the work of Robert D. Putnam, the Harvard-based political scientist famous for popularising a vocabulary of 'social capital' and one of the most influential academic authors of recent years. Our intervention situates his writing and thinking about society in what we call the apocalyptic genre of public discourse. With its hallmark gestures of constructing social problems as cultural emergencies and revealing their solutions through appeals to tradition, the apocalyptic genre becomes an emotive and missionary science whose force propels public debate and even policy-making today. Putnam has recently taken his extensive work on social capital--the idea that interpersonal connections and contacts constitute value--and recentred it explicitly around questions of ethno-racial diversity and its relation to community. Most of this work is still unpublished. Its basic arguments have nevertheless begun to circulate: besides emerging on a number of websites associated directly with Putnam's research, it has also become a major theme of his frequent lectures. Placing Putnam's ideas on diversity in the context of the apocalyptic tendencies in his previous work reveals a clear affinity to the content and form of an old conversation, most recently rehearsed during the 1980s era of 'culture wars' which concerned arguments over the imminent decline of civilisation and the dangers of multiculturalism and feminism. Far softer than the conservative cultural warriors, Putnam essentially argues that diversity poses a critical challenge to community and must thus be managed accordingly. The culture wars proved the marketability of this kind of argument. But, as serious cultural criticism, his argument obscures more than it reveals, lending a veneer of economistic and empirical legitimacy to flimsy analysis and helping to establish the conditions of possibility for questionable social policy.
In 1987, Allan Bloom published The Closing of the American Mind. (1) An uncompromising indictment of the decadent intellectual and moral depths to which the United States had slid, it surprisingly topped best-seller lists across the country. Its publishers Simon & Schuster called the book's first run 'a publishing phenomenon' and the paperback edition a 'literary event'. Indignant, Bloom captured a certain strain of the national mood by asking his readers to '[p]icture a thirteen-year-old boy sitting in the living room of his family home doing his math assignment while wearing his Walkman headphones or watching MTV'. This archetypal teenager stood in contrast to the nation's pantheon of political and industrial heroes, those who had paid in blood and toil to create the basic conditions for a lifestyle now ungratefully enjoyed. Intended as a portrait of 'today's youth', Bloom confronted us with an adolescent 'whose body throbs with orgasmic rhythms; whose feelings are made articulate in hymns to the joys of onanism or the killing of parents; whose ambition is to win fame and wealth in imitating the drag-queen who makes the music'. (2)
While, as the above passage suggests, 'literary event' seems somewhat hyperbolic, The Closing of the American Mind was certainly big business. The impeccable timing of its release placed it at the leading edge of the so-called 'culture wars', and a remarkable 750,000 copies were sold in its initial year of publication. It was a sign of those times, and its loud polemics were complemented by a score of other works that stemmed from the same essential preoccupations: decadence and doom. These themes suggest something important about the rise of and fascination with the book, and link it to currents in western culture more profound than its immediate context. The secret of Bloom's success was not that he wrote the most convincing diagnosis of a set of social or cultural problems. It was the way in which he harnessed his ideas about those 'problems' to a literary category that, under the right conditions, has historically found a vast and sympathetic audience: the genre of apocalypse. And, as authors working in this genre are supposed to do, he offered solace, solutions and even redemption. If we only listened to Bloom and returned our attention to selected classics of western philosophy, the apocalypse could be avoided, or at least suspended. As the two titles of the last book of the New Testament suggest, every apocalypse is, after all, also a revelation.
America, in its long-standing association with discourses on the end of history and manifest destiny, has for centuries served as fertile ground for fantasies of finality. It is thus to be expected that the skilful deployment of the apocalyptic genre, in turn, is a lucrative endeavour in the American culture industries. The alarmist tendency in contemporary public culture, which habitually frames even the most marginal topics as personal or social emergencies, is not the exclusive property of screen-writers, news editors and authors of self-help manuals. Understood as a particular way of talking about cultural and social affairs, the discourse of emergency extends to politics (as a way to win votes or as a manoeuvre to disengage the public from inopportune news cycles) and academia (as a way to win funding and high-profile book contracts). In the business of commentary, where politics and academia tend to overlap, the rhetoric of emergency serves as a blanket argument for having something to say and a ticket to creating a public persona.
The conservative participants in the 'culture wars' that we have been living since...
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