Friendship, Reconstruction, and Bridging Divides
Part 1 of the Friendship and Reconstructionism Series
Last week, I went on a family vacation with the intention of writing a piece about a thus far undiscussed facet of Reconstructionism, yet as I was driving our car down to our vacation destination, I learned that Thomas Matthew Crooks tried to assassinate former president Donald Trump.
By the time we had reached our destination, I knew that I needed to try to write something about the assassination attempt, yet as family vacations often go, I struggled over the next couple of days to find any time to myself in which I could sit down and write. My son who is almost three helped ensure that I had very little free time and that I was exhausted during the little free time I could muster. By Wednesday, I had given up hope on finding the time to write and decided to just focus on having a fun vacation.
Needless to say, at some point, I will talk about the assassination attempt on Trump, the RNC convention, and Biden stepping down, but now I want to write about what I intended to write last week. This piece is about how friendship is an integral aspect of the philosophy of Reconstructionism and how it can counter the loneliness and feeling of division that has become increasingly prevalent in America.
Bowling Alone and Jim Crow
Earlier this month, The New York Times published an interview with Robert Putnam, the author of “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community” that focused on his theories and observations about how Americans are becoming loners and leaving community groups. “Bowling Alone,” which was released in 2000, described how Americans were increasingly losing trust in institutions and their fellow Americans, and over the next two decades, this trend has only increased.
The loss of community in America has become a big issue and topic of discussion ever since “Bowling Alone” was published, yet whenever I hear Americans discuss this topic I worry that their proposed solution is also a continuation of the problem they hope to solve. Let me explain.
When Putnam examines communities or social groups, he classifies them as two types of social capital: “bonding” and “bridging.” Bonding social capital consists of forming bonds with people like yourself and bridging social capital consists of forming connections with people who you consider to be different from yourself. Neither type is inherently good or bad, but they are different types of relationships and this needs to be acknowledged.
For example, I like to play soccer, so joining a soccer team or social club would be an example of bonding social capital. An example of bridging social capital would be joining a group that is outside my comfort zone or “different,” such as parkour or Muay Thai.
Additionally, the social capital that I obtain, regardless of whether it is bonding or bridging, will be sustained by my ability to trust the other people in the group and for all of us to be trustworthy individuals. We would demonstrate our trustworthiness through our actions and this creates trust. As Putnam says, “trust without trustworthiness is just gullibility.”
Bonding and bridging social capital are activities that we all engage in, but in the United States race has historically been used as the main differentiator between bonding and bridging social capital, and this creates a massive problem. White Americans created our entire society around the belief that Europeans, or white people, should be able to bond with each other and not with African, Indigenous, and non-European people. The Ku Klux Klan and various white supremacist groups are a common iteration of white bonding social capital.
White Americans also attempted to justify racial divisions and discourage the cultivation of bridging social capital by proclaiming that non-white people should not be trusted and lack the attributes of a trustworthy individual. When shared trust becomes nearly impossible, so does the cultivation of social capital.
Bonding social capital requires sympathy which British philosopher Adam Smith defined as “fellow-feeling.” With bonding social capital, one can feel and commune together with another person so long as they believe that the other person is the same or not different from themselves. They must feel that the person is a “fellow” and not a foreigner. If they believe that they can trust themselves and they imagine that the other person is the same as them or a “fellow,” it becomes very easy to believe that they can trust the other person because they have projected their identity onto the other person. By trusting the other person, they are trusting themselves.
In contrast to America’s embrace of bonding social capital and sympathy, bridging social capital that crosses a racial divide had been essentially outlawed in the United States before Reconstruction, and Reconstruction amounted to America’s first attempt at prioritizing bridging social capital as being equally as important as bonding social capital.
Bridging social capital requires empathy and not sympathy, and I understand why the United States would struggle to cultivate empathetic social capital because the word “empathy” did not exist in the English language until 1909. In 1873, German philosopher Robert Vischer published his doctoral thesis, and his paper was the first time the German word Einfühlung, meaning “feeling-into” appeared in print. Vischer’s paper fascinated Europeans and they started to explore the idea of being able to feel into something beyond themselves or a fellow. In 1909, British American psychologist Edward Titchener translated Einfühlung into “empathy.” The word “empathy” is barely 100 years old, and America first began to empathize around the same time that Jim Crow segregation became the law of the land.
America has been awful at cultivating bridging social capital because, for most of this nation’s existence, we did not even have the word for articulating how to do it.
Lastly, Putnam’s work is also very data-driven and consists of surveys, questionnaires, interviews, and statistics from the past that help paint a picture of people’s involvement in community groups and their perceptions regarding these relationships. The data that he gathered starts around the early 1900s, and the fact that his data starts around the beginning of Jim Crow significantly impacts the meaning of his data. This is how Putnam describes his findings to The New York Times:
“We were socially isolated and distrustful in the early 1900s, but then there was a turning point, and then we had a long upswing from roughly 1900 or 1910 till roughly 1965, and that was the peak of our social capital. People were more trusting then, they were more connected then, they were more likely to be married then, they were more likely to join clubs then, etc. And then for the next 50 years, that trend turned around.”
Putnam’s analysis is bizarre because his work and its focus on bonding and bridging social capital are essentially built around race and racial division, but his interpretation of the data appears to imagine that the division never existed.
In his analysis, he describes Jim Crow, from roughly 1900 to 1965, as an era where people were more trusting and connected. American apartheid is described as a benevolent communal era according to Putnam’s research, and this is because Americans had a lot of bonding social capital during this time. Empathy was a brand new concept at this time, and white Americans struggled to even imagine that bridging social capital could be positive for society. White people could trust white people and Black people could trust Black people, and this can make a divided untrustworthy society appear to be unified, communal, and trustworthy. Putnam is putting his trust in an untrustworthy era of American history, so there is a dangerous gullibility that undermines this logic
According to Putnam, Americans started to lose trust in institutions and each other starting in 1965, which was around the peak of the Civil Rights Movement. This movement dismantled much of America’s toxic, racist bonding social capital and worked to create more bridging social capital. We attempted to empathize with each other and bridge divides. We should all consider this to be progress, yet according to this analysis, it equates to the dismantling of America’s social fabric and the creation of lonely, isolated Americans.
In no way do I believe that Putnam disparages America’s progress toward racial equality and civil rights, but by not highlighting the importance of race, his theorized solutions consist of rekindling the types of social clubs, groups, and organizations that were created during Jim Crow.
When the Times reporter asks Putnam about policy solutions to remedy social isolation, Putnam references the creation of social groups from “about 125 years ago” such as Big Brothers, Boys Clubs (now called Boys and Girls Clubs), and Boy Scouts that needed to confront America’s “boy problem” because young boys were getting into trouble. These social clubs were effective, but they were also bonding and not bridging social capital. The trust and trustworthiness of these groups also fueled and normalized the racial division of this era as Black Americans were also barred from joining these groups.
This type of race-blind analysis results in people saying that the United States had more trust and community during Jim Crow segregation and that America is even more divided today than when Jim Crow segregation and separate but equal were the laws of the land. As a result, Americans will tacitly proclaim that returning to a Jim Crow and apartheid status quo will make us less divided.
Jim Crow was the problem, but Putnam and many others argue that facets of Jim Crow can also be the solution. Their solution is practically indistinguishable from the problem they hope to solve, yet they remain baffled as to why their work has not solved the problem.
Reconstructionism and Friendship
If we stay with Putnam’s bonding and bridging social capital paradigm, it becomes clear how Reconstruction from 1865 to 1877 amounts to a profound cultural shift. Reconstruction dared to dismantle some of America’s bonding social capital and heavily invest in bridging social capital.
It tried to make a society in which Black and white people could be friends.
In hindsight, the attempted friendships of Reconstruction can seem wholly inadequate and still unequal, but for a society that had never even conceived of empathy, the attempt to reconstruct America around bridging social capital was a radical and revolutionary idea.
In response to the creation of bridging social capital such as the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, racist white Americans responded with violent white terrorist groups committed to ensuring that only bonding social capital remained the law of the land. These white terrorist groups terrorized Black and white Americans in the South so that racist white Americans could reclaim control of their state governments and end the progress of Reconstruction.
My theory of the American Cycle details this process and how this tension has put America on a regressive cycle that can only be broken by embracing and continuing Reconstruction.
When Reconstruction ended in 1877, racist white Southerners actively worked to undo the progress of Reconstruction and ensure that their theory of “separate but equal” became not just the status quo of the South, but for the entire United States.
The goal was for parallel groupings, or bonding social capital, of whites and Blacks to be the law of the land, and to achieve this goal the word “equal” would be used to implement inequality. When one cannot trust the meaning of the words that someone says it is impossible to create trust and untrustworthiness would become the new societal norm. For many analysts, Jim Crow’s problematic foundation of untrustworthiness and corrupted language created a trustworthy society. The dangers of this gullibility should not be understated.
For America’s white racists, Jim Crow became their solution to racial equality, so we should be alarmed when non-racist Americans also see Jim Crow as a solution to today’s problems. Again the solution Putnam proposes is the problem, and a philosophical word to describe this scenario would be: pharmakon. (In a later piece, I will talk about pharmakon in more depth.)
Friendship is vital to Reconstructionism because authentic friendships can only exist through empathy and not sympathy. A friendship built upon sympathy consists of projecting yourself onto another person. It consists of imagining that they are the same as yourself, and it justifies the ending of the friendship whenever someone learns that the other person is different from themselves. A friendship built through sympathy is more akin to narcissism than an authentic, sustainable relationship.
The loneliness that Americans feel cannot be solved by embracing an era that celebrates sympathy and bonding social capital. The solution can only be found during Reconstruction—both the Reconstruction of 1865 to 1877 and Obama’s Reconstruction from 2009 to 2017—when authentic empathetic friendships and bridging social capital became the new philosophy of the nation.
In Part 2, I will discuss how friendship challenges much of Western philosophy and is essential for sustaining a democracy.