#176： The Vanishing Neighbor
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Summary
In the past 20 years or so, there s been an increasing number of research by sociologists and other academics about the declining sense of community in America. Well, my guest today makes the bold case that what we re seeing right now is a transformation in the way Americans organize themselves socially. His name is Mark Duckelman, and he s the author of the book, The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community. And in it, he argues what s going on with this transformation, why it s happening, and what it s having on institutions like government, public schools, and business in America
Transcript
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Rhett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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So in the past 20 years or so, there's been an increasing number of research by sociologists
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and other academics about the declining sense of community, community life in America.
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There's research showing that Americans are joining civic organizations less than they
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used to, things like Civic Club, PTA, even bowling leagues, like people aren't really doing
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In fact, there's research showing that Americans really don't know who their neighbors are anymore.
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They can live in a neighborhood for 10, 15 years and not really know much about the neighbor
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across the streets, complete strangers to them.
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And there's been a lot of theories about why that is.
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Well, my guest today makes the bold case of what we're seeing right now is a transformation
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in the way Americans organize themselves socially.
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He's the author of the book, The Vanishing Neighbor, The Transformation of American Community.
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And in it, he argues what's going on with this transformation, why it's happening, and the
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effects that it's happening, that's having on institutions like government, public schools,
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And today on the show, we're going to discuss why we're seeing a declining sense of community
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in the traditional sense that we think about it, and what's replacing it.
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And without further ado, Mark Duckelman and The Vanishing Neighbor.
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All right, Mark Duckelman, welcome to the show.
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Your book is The Vanishing Neighbor, and it's about the changing ways Americans are organizing
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themselves socially and interacting with each other.
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I'm curious, what led you to the research in the writing of this book?
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Was it a hunch you had or a personal experience?
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I mean, what was it that said, I need to look into this a little bit more, what's going on?
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Two things happened to me almost simultaneously.
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The first was that I'd been working in Washington for several years.
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And I was sitting around with a bunch of old poobahs who were kvetching about how Washington
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And they were going through the whole litany of reasons that we hear about all the time.
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Too much money in politics, gerrymandering, the filibuster, too many lobbyists, goes on
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And I would have this experience where I was living in Washington, but my family's in Buffalo.
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My father would pick me up, and we'd be driving home, and at some point in the course
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of the conversation, he'd turn to me and he'd say, Mark, what the hell are they doing
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And I would try out each of the explanations that I'd heard the poobahs talk about.
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And my dad, who's a pretty smart guy, would say, well, Mark, the filibuster rules haven't
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changed since the 70s, so why is it they're filibustering more now?
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And then the next time I'd fly home to Buffalo, he'd get me up, and I'd complain again, and
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I'd give him another explanation, like, it's gerrymandering.
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And he'd say, Mark, gerrymandering is named after James Madison's vice president.
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And you go through the whole list of common explanations, and they are all, you go through
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They all existed in areas where government seemed to work, or at least it seemed to work
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And so I began thinking, something else has got to be going on.
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Second thing happened was I began thinking more and more about the holidays that I'd spent
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And we would go back to Cincinnati every holiday season, and we'd drive up and down the street
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And he would look at each house, and he'd tell me the story of each family.
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This guy, you know, went, it was a lousy student, but then got into a good college, you know.
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This guy invented the electric toothbrush and sold it to Procter & Gamble for a zillion dollars
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And I realized that back in Buffalo, I didn't have that experience at all.
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I was delivering the Buffalo news to my neighbors four years into having moved, and I couldn't
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have told you the name of any of the people, save for the few kids that went to my elementary
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And I think if I'd bumped into my next-door neighbor at the grocery store, Wakeland's,
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So I began to wonder, is there some connection between what's happened in Washington and what
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And that sort of got me off on a whole jaunt of research that ended up with this book.
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And I think what's interesting is that a lot of people can probably relate to that second.
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I think most people can agree that, you know, the government, Washington is sort of like
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But also that second hunch or that feeling you had that just like something, like there's
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not a sense of community that people used to like, we're very nostalgic for it.
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But before we get to why, why there was a change between you, your experience growing up and
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your father's experience growing up, I guess we could do a lot of groundwork here.
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What are, you argue there are three ways that, or three rings of social organization that humans
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Or, yeah, so my argument is that if you imagine your whole social world on a diagram that looks
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like the rings of Saturn, where you're the planet and the people, everyone you know is
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So the most intimate contacts, your spouse, your best friend, your children, your parents
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And then moving out are to people who are less and less intimacy to the point that you
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get to the barista that you spoke to for five seconds when you ordered a latte or whatever
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several days earlier and you'll never see again.
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So if you think about the time and energy you have each day, you get to choose where
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The sort of innermost rings, I call them the inner rings, are the people who are really,
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So this is generally 10 or 12, 15 people who you know really well.
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It varies from person to person and from culture to culture.
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But generally, those are the people that you know almost everything about you or know the
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So on the very outside rings are people that don't know you at all, except for some, you
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So I am one of about three dozen Cincinnati Bengals fans in the world.
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And unfortunately, I think we've lost a couple since that loss of Pittsburgh.
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But I know a bunch of those people just because I look on blogs about Cincinnati Bengals and follow
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But I have no real tangential connection with them or no substantive connection with them.
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In between those inner and outer rings are what I call the middle rings.
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And those are people who are familiar but not intimate.
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They are people that you would know well enough to ask them about something that's important
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in their lives if you bumped into them on the street.
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I hear, you know, your business is growing like gangbusters.
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You know, you would know enough about them to have sort of a real conversation.
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These are the kind of conversations you would have from a familiarity that would grow maybe
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when you were talking to someone over the donuts at the back of the PTA meeting or while you
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were waiting for your chance to bowl in a bowling league or when you were at a Rotary Club
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Those are the social conversations that sort of happen in the background and you develop
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And the sort of the core thesis of my book is that over the last several decades, we've
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taken the time and attention that we each control and invested it much more heavily in
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those innermost rings, our most intimate connections, and much more heavily in the
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You know, I could not, I live in Providence, Rhode Island, and it would be very hard for
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me to know Cincinnati Bengals fans 40 years ago.
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But now I can know a bunch of them because of all sorts of changes in technology.
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What's been lost in the wash are the middle ring connections.
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We have very few connections or fewer connections than we once did with people who are familiar
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So before we get to why that is, why we've made this transition to focusing more on the
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inner rings and the outer rings and less on the middle ring, let's do a little, let's
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So Utah Art make the case that this focus that, I guess I think all of us have this nostalgia
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for, yeah, there was a time when everything was sort of Norman Rockwell, neighbors, new
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People went to church and did, you know, cake walks and, you know, or cake bakes and whatever
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and went to PTA meetings and this idea that we have, the sort of ideal of community in
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America, you argue got its start all the way in when the colonies first organized themselves.
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So how did colonial Americans organize themselves?
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How did that differ from their European contemporaries?
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It's sort of a fascinating, it's a fascinating story.
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The, the, um, when, when people came to the new world, the old social hierarchies that
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had existed in Europe for the most part, couldn't exist in quite the same way.
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So you lived in a town, you got to know people across really what I call the middle
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range, whether you were of a certain, certain, uh, standing, if you had a certain religious
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background, if you had a certain, uh, point of view, it's, it's not to say that, that it
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was entirely diverse, but there was a, a standard of, uh, of community organization that Tocqueville
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talked about in the 1830s that differed from what existed in the, in the, in the, in Europe,
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in the sense that if you had a problem in the community, in your town, in your village,
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in New England, in the 1700s, everyone got together and tried to figure out a solution.
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Um, you could have hated the guy down in the corner.
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But on some level, you had to develop some sort of mutual understanding because you needed
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That didn't exist in the much more bifurcated European society where people were much more
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split along, uh, class lines, uh, hierarchies, royalty, the whole bit.
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And so there was sort of a, a, sort of a core way of, of organizing your community that made
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it look much more like little house on the prairie versus in Europe, they had sort of a, a, a,
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uh, in Europe, they organized themselves much more like Downton Abbey, where you had a sort
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of a central manor, powerful family, and then, uh, a class of the people below it.
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There was a much more egalitarian orientation in the United States or, or in the colonies
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Um, and what's fascinating is that that sort of core building block of American, uh, community
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existed in, in colonial villages and frontier towns.
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It existed even in, uh, in, in urban suburbs at the turn of the 20th century and in, and
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Um, and I think that it's only now for the first time that that core building block, what
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I call township community is beginning to fly apart.
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And in this, this township community, I mean, how did this township model of community organize,
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organizing ourselves socially, how did that affect like American political organization,
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not only in government, but also sort of civic organizations and, um, uh, non-profit, I
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guess what you'd call non-profit organizations, I guess, what are you, would you call them?
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Um, let's think of how to, how to, how to answer that.
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Um, every institution is built on a certain foundation.
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There's like a house is built on a foundation, an institution is built on a foundation.
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And you would build your house to, uh, to the specifications detailed by the foundation.
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If you had a, uh, a foundation that was cracked, you'd need to find some way to either fix the
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foundation or build a house in a different way.
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The foundation for American institutions of all sorts, the way we governed ourselves, the
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way we took care of ourselves medically or through healthcare, the way we educated ourselves,
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the foundation in each case was this building block of township community, where people
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who didn't know one another intimately well, but knew each other to a degree of familiarity
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that they could understand where the other was coming from, came together and discussed
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their ideas and, uh, negotiated and, um, uh, traded back and forth what they wanted, what the
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other people wanted, tried to accommodate, uh, one another in a way that that, that didn't
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And so the, the sort of, the, the unwritten part of the American constitution is that we
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expect that the voters will, uh, have some experience with the people on the other side.
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So even if they feel strongly about one party or another, or if they feel strongly about one
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position or another, the presumption is that in the course of thinking about who they're going
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to vote for, that they will have some appreciation for the other point of view, that they'll have
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some, uh, sense that maybe they don't agree with what Sarah Palin says, or maybe they don't
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agree with what Bernie Sanders says, or whoever it is, that they will at least have some appreciation
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for why they, why someone else would feel strongly passionate about supporting that candidate.
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Um, and so we build a, the, the whole system of American government presumes that voters
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will have that sort of tendency to accommodate various points of view in mind when they are
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And that, that, that, that sort of one example, but that exists across the span, uh, of American
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So why has the, this township model of a community organization, why has that been in decline in
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America for the, the past, you know, several decades?
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Cause I mean, it's interesting, you talk about in the book how, you know, it was founded in
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sort of this frontier idea of America, uh, with the colonists where they had to rely on
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each other, but it even survived, uh, the industrial revolution, but something changed in the past
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40, you know, 50 years that, that, that it's no longer surviving.
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Like it's being replaced by another form of a social organization.
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I like to think of this as a classic sort of whodunit.
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So you've got, you've got to figure out the motive and the opportunity.
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The opportunity is probably pretty clear to most people who listen to this podcast.
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We've got many more opportunities to, uh, interact with people of our choice than we did,
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You can now, as I said, I'm a Cincinnati Bengals fan and I can be in touch with other
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Alternatively, on sort of in the inner rings, when I travel for work now, probably three
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generations ago, I would have been really bored.
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There would have been three channels to watch on the television and, and I couldn't have been
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So I would have, uh, gone down to the hotel bar and had a conversation with somebody I didn't
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So now when I get to my hotel and it's, uh, it's seven o'clock, I can order room service,
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watch any movie I want, uh, read, you know, good night moons to my children over, over FaceTime.
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Um, and there's no reason for me to, to go to, to go downstairs.
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So, so like there you're seeing how opportunity, our opportunities to invest our time in the
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outer and the inner rings have grown dramatically.
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Um, no matter what your particular instance, maybe you're really into knitting or maybe you're,
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or into a different football team, or maybe you're very interested in, in bike lanes.
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Um, whatever it is, you can find your people in the outer rings and also spend more time
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The, the question then is, are we motivated to take those opportunities?
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Are you more interested when you get to your hotel room while traveling to check your blog,
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to FaceTime with your family, uh, watch it, watch a movie by yourself, or you're more
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more motivated to go downstairs, uh, and meet people you don't know?
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I don't know if you'll remember 20 years ago when people had Palm Pilots.
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There was a, there was an app on the Palm Pilot called Vindigo.
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And Vindigo was this really cool app at the time where you could type in the intersection
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where you were in most major cities and ask for a certain cuisine.
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So if you wanted a bowl of pasta, you'd put in Italian and Vindigo would tell you where
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I thought this was the coolest thing I'd ever seen.
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My grandfather, who has since passed away, I showed it to him.
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And he said, Mark, let me tell you, when I was a traveling salesman, I lived in Cincinnati
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and I would take a train down to North Carolina, uh, to, to, to talk with, he was, uh, in the
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hosiery business, uh, and he'd get out of the train station.
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And, uh, if he was hungry, he'd go and say to somebody at the train station or somebody
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that looked like they knew what they were doing.
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Is there a place where I can grab a bowl of pasta?
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And the person would, they'd have a conversation and then maybe they would go to dinner together
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or maybe he would go to the restaurant and he'd develop a conversation with the people
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He desired the opportunity to, to talk to people like that.
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And my grandfather's reaction when he saw, my grandfather's desire when he saw Vindigo,
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my grandfather's fear when he saw Vindigo was those sorts of conversations, which he thought
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had sort of added such value to his life, expanded his experience, sort of widened his understanding
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of how the world worked, would be lost because we would no longer have those sorts of random interactions.
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And that's sort of an indication of how the technology and, and, and desire have changed.
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But it's, um, uh, it's sort of a broader phenomenon as well.
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One thing I've noticed is that the, the, and there's some scholarship on this as well,
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the very word neighborly has changed in America over the past, course, the past several decades.
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It used to be that being neighborly meant that when someone moved in next door, you brought
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over a plate of cookies or you, uh, uh, you, if you needed milk, uh, in a pinch, you could,
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you can walk next door and, and, and grab a gallon.
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Today, the word neighborly has been turned on its head.
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Today, neighborly means that if you're living in an apartment building and you hear a couple
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have an argument through the wall, when you see them in the lobby the next morning, you
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Neighborly has come to mean something that is much more about, uh, uh, boundaries between
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And so the, the, the confluence of those two elements, the fact that we have, have more
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opportunities to make different sorts of, of, of, uh, connections with people and the fact
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that we are, we don't desire, we're more, we're more tethered to our privacy than
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to our sense of connection to the people who live next door.
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But those two things have compelled people to invest their time and attention in different
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So it seems like it's technology had a lot of effect, right?
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Cause we can communicate with, or associate with who we want to associate, not necessarily
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are not confined by geography and the technology in a way changed our motivations to like, okay,
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I don't know whether, whether I'm sure that the technology has necessarily been the sole
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I think that that, that there are a whole series of factors that, that, that play some
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role in explaining who you want to spend time with.
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Um, uh, there's evidence now that narcissism is up in American culture.
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Um, uh, but I think that at, at root, you have to ask yourself, what is it that I want
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And the truth is that middle ring interactions with people who are familiar, but not intimate
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are the most difficult to maintain because inner ring react relationships with your family,
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with your best friends, those are people that love you implicitly.
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Uh, you can say something that they disagree with and they're going to love you no matter
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The outer rings, those are relationships that if someone says something that you disagree
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with, you just, you just abandon the relationship, right?
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If, if I'm talking to somebody about the Cincinnati Bengals on a blog and it turns out that they're
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a Pittsburgh Steelers fan, I just abandon the relationship.
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Like I don't really want to talk to them anymore.
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Same is true if you're, uh, on a whole range of, of outer ring relationship.
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It's sort of the nature of it is you, you, you, you've connected over a single common
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And if you don't share the common interest, you don't maintain the relationship.
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In the middle rings, it's a very different situation.
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The middle rings are people that you're going to see the next week at the PTB or at the bowling
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league or at the little league game, wherever you see them, you're going to see them on
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Like you can't afford in the moment when they say that they support a candidate that you
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think is crazy, or they announced that they've got religious beliefs that you think are,
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uh, are, are, are totally out of line or, um, or, or they, uh, they disparage your favorite
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football team, whatever it is, you need to maintain that relationship.
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Like that's the moment where you can't lash out.
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Or if you do, you need to do it in a, in a collegial way that maintains relationships with
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and you don't both go away mad and abandon it, abandon it.
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For some reason today, we've got limited time and attention.
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We don't necessarily want to spend our time and attention on people who don't share our
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common, uh, we don't want to spend our time and attention talking to people with whom we
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need to sort of, uh, we don't want to spend our time and attention talking to people who
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We'd re we'd rather spend it with people that love us implicitly or the people that
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So there's that, that's a sort of a, a fundamental change in motivation that would spur us to
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abandon middle ring relationships in lieu of, uh, having tighter inner and outer ring relationships.
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Cause I think, uh, I mean, like I know I do this.
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I, I, I definitely am nostalgic for the days of, you know, tight knit communities, uh, sort
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of Norman Rockwell-esque pictures of community, but then you forget that it is exhausting, right?
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There's all these benefits of having a township idea of community, but like you forget that
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And if you look at, I mean, you can even read diaries and, uh, you know, letters from like,
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even like Marcus Aurelius kind of complained about people.
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They're just like, Oh, they're just so annoying.
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And it's a lot of hard work, but I have to like put up with them because that's part of
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my social duty as, as, as a human being is to interact with people that I don't necessarily
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So I guess one of the downsides of a township, it does, it does require a lot of, uh, energy
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More than that, you know, it sort of cuts against the Norman Rockwell view of America.
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The truth is that the institute that we think of middle ring institutions, rotary clubs
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and church choirs and little leagues and, uh, PTA associations, uh, all of those are truly
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middle ring institutions and there's value in them, but gangs are also middle ring institutions.
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Those were people that knew each other fairly well.
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So it's not that they are, uh, uniformly for the good of America, uh, there are advantages
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and disadvantages for the institutions of all sorts.
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So if we had township for the first 200 odd years of our, of our country, what is replacing
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Well, the, the, the, the, I think networks, I mean, sort of in a word, networks are replacing
00:25:10.160
And what I mean by that is that now, if you're a, an ophthalmologist, uh, in, in Oklahoma,
00:25:18.320
uh, it used to be that your community was still the people who lived around you.
00:25:23.580
But if you've got, if you're an ophthalmologist and you want to be now be in touch with ophthalmologists
00:25:33.420
Uh, they did, uh, there's a, there's a horrible case that is really instructive that's happening
00:25:39.120
You can be in touch with people who are talking about that all the time and you can develop
00:25:43.760
a real sense of, it's, it's not the sort of intimacy that you might've had otherwise,
00:25:48.460
but it, but you can develop, uh, a sense of community that is at arm's length with those
00:25:54.760
people who are sharing your interests, uh, share your concerns.
00:25:58.700
Um, the, the, the example that I use in my book, which I think is a pretty powerful one
00:26:06.240
That these, these, these, uh, uh, games that are online that allow people, one who lives
00:26:13.260
in Hong Kong, one who lives in California, one, uh, who lives in Europe to coordinate the
00:26:20.260
And those are, those are by some stretch real relationships, right?
00:26:25.400
They're coordinating their strategy, they're coordinating their timing.
00:26:28.620
They're all, uh, wrapped up in the same, uh, the same adventure.
00:26:32.580
The question is, do, are those relationships that come to the depth of if one of those players,
00:26:38.500
their, their wife gets sick or their kids in trouble, or they're very sad about something,
00:26:45.020
or they're extremely excited about a promotion at work.
00:26:47.280
Is that necessarily something that they're going to, uh, that they're going to, that
00:26:50.960
they're going to interact with those folks about, or is it really just about World of
00:26:55.660
Is that relationship, uh, really centered around one, one single, uh, shared interest?
00:27:03.220
Um, so I, I, I mean, obviously in both of those examples, you see real advantages.
00:27:08.400
People are really into World of Warcraft, people are really interested in their professions.
00:27:12.240
They can dive much more deeply into those interests with people who share, uh, share those interests.
00:27:19.160
But the downside is that the auxiliary benefits of having local or, or middle ring oriented
00:27:27.000
relationships, um, uh, there's something lost as well.
00:27:30.680
Gotcha. And it seems like it, it fractures the individual in a way, right? Cause you're
00:27:34.120
like, you had to put on your world of Warcraft face on and then like, that's it. Like, then
00:27:38.720
you go off into it. You have like another aspect of your life that you focus on. Like people,
00:27:42.160
when you interact with people in these different little nodes in your network, people aren't
00:27:46.620
really concerned about your other aspects of your identity. It would seem, or maybe I'm
00:27:51.620
exactly right. Okay. I, I, I sort of tell a hypothetical example, uh, in, in my book about,
00:27:56.940
uh, uh, a bigoted guy who lives in Kentucky, who, who, uh, who wants to sell a vintage baseball
00:28:01.840
card. 40 years ago, he has to go to a baseball card convention and actually have a face-to-face
00:28:07.380
interaction with someone or he has to go to a local store or whatever it is. And, and you
00:28:12.160
know, when he's wearing, uh, uh, his, his, you know, his, his white power t-shirt or whatever
00:28:17.660
it is, people know what he's about. And that's going to affect who he sells to today. That same
00:28:22.780
guy could anonymously sell his card to someone who's also anonymous, who happens to be a woman
00:28:27.560
who owns a small business, who's African-American in Oakland, California. And the two of them
00:28:31.860
today are now doing commerce together, right? There used to be that they were separated from
00:28:35.360
one other because they would never, never interaction. They were never in the same circles.
00:28:38.360
And so they were, they were sort of an economic division between the two of them because of
00:28:42.320
their, uh, various, uh, identities. Today, those people are now interacting, but not in a
00:28:48.680
substantive way, right? There's going to be no exchange of ideas. It's not that it's not that
00:28:52.420
he's going to glean any sense of wisdom, uh, from her about where she came from or, or, or what she's
00:28:57.920
about. Same. I don't know if she'd want to glean anything from him, but, but, but, but there'd be no
00:29:03.600
flow of information the other way. There's something valuable in having people who have different
00:29:08.520
points of view, even if they disagree, actual, actually having interactions. Um, that's how good
00:29:14.360
ideas come from. Like they come from the fact that people who have, uh, different
00:29:18.460
bits of expertise, take an idea from one sphere of the world and apply it to another.
00:29:24.840
That's actually, frankly, that's what, where, how Gutenberg came up with the, with the printing
00:29:29.240
press. It wasn't that it was a stroke of a genius. It was that he sort of lived at this
00:29:34.240
nexus where he knew people who, uh, had figured out how printing presses, uh, how, how presses
00:29:39.520
worked, how movable type worked, how ink worked, how paperwork. And he put it all together in
00:29:44.080
sort of an interesting way and developed this incredible technology of the printing press.
00:29:48.460
That sort of interaction happens every day. How are you going to figure out how to get
00:29:53.600
your kids between, uh, all these different activities? Have you had a conversation with
00:29:57.800
other parents who are doing the same thing or people, people who have, uh, a different
00:30:02.520
ideas about how you're going to manage your sales force? Uh, this is how we did it. This
00:30:07.100
is how, you know, good ideas come when people who have different points of view come together
00:30:12.120
and share ideas. And if you're only interacting with them on, over the plane of World of Warcraft
00:30:17.820
or only interacting with them, um, uh, because you're selling something to them on eBay,
00:30:25.900
Well, and going back to the baseball card, uh, aficionados, you know, one's black woman,
00:30:31.260
another one's sort of, uh, you know, uh, white power, white supremacist type guy. And you make,
00:30:36.280
make the subtle case in your book, uh, point that maybe this is one of the issues with why we're having
00:30:41.260
a problem with race in America today. Cause on the one hand, like, we're not, it's not like the
00:30:45.480
overt racism that was existed. Um, like in the, you know, in the early part of the 20th century
00:30:51.700
in the 19th century, but because of these sort of this community or network community that we have
00:30:56.560
now, we can sort of take out some of the friction because you can associate with people who are,
00:31:00.340
who are like you and you can interact with, with people who are not like you on a very superficial
00:31:05.060
level. But when you reduce that friction, you reduce the opportunities actually talking about
00:31:09.980
the substance of an issue on a very, uh, in-depth way to actually solve the problem.
00:31:16.020
I mean, I think, I, I, I think you've, you've hit it exactly that, that there is, uh, we've made
00:31:21.320
enormous progress, particularly on the, the legal, uh, the legal barriers that separated communities
00:31:27.280
of different races. The question now is, and this sort of gets back to the sort of issue of,
00:31:32.100
of a mode of an opportunity. We now have the opportunity to interact with people who have
00:31:36.840
different points of view and come from different communities. The question is, are we actually
00:31:40.320
choosing, uh, to take advantage? Are we motivated to spend our time and attention with people
00:31:44.860
who are different from us? And in too many cases, it seems to me, there's, there's too much
00:31:52.180
at risk, right? That you're going to say something wrong, that you're going to offend somebody else,
00:31:56.520
that you're going to somehow come off, um, uh, having exposed some, uh, inner prejudice,
00:32:02.620
um, to the point that that risk that, that, that you're going to say something wrong in many cases
00:32:08.340
makes it so that you don't actually reach out. What a shame that is, right? What a shame it is
00:32:13.040
that the people who have different points of view are not actually having interactions that we're
00:32:17.200
learning from one another. Um, and that we prefer in too many cases, uh, to spend time, uh, with people
00:32:24.480
who share our point of view. Um, and that's, I mean, that's not just about race. That's all sorts of
00:32:29.180
issues. That's, you know, people who support Donald Trump and people who don't support Donald Trump
00:32:32.740
or people who, uh, who think we need a single payer healthcare and people who don't. Are they
00:32:38.040
actually having interactions so that they have some depth of mutual understanding? You know,
00:32:44.720
one's a liberal college professor who, uh, who really believes that we need to break down all
00:32:51.300
sorts of social barriers. One's a, an independent business woman who runs a coffee shop and is
00:32:55.100
completely bogged down by all the regulations that come from the local government. She gets
00:32:59.580
four pieces of mail from the department of business regulation every, every day. You can't
00:33:04.120
figure out what any of the means. That's a, have to hire a lawyer and, uh, it might put her out of
00:33:08.200
business. If the two of them have a conversation, a substantive conversation about what the other's
00:33:15.200
point of view is, it may be, it may not be that they end up voting for the same candidate,
00:33:19.620
but at least when their candidate wins and goes to Washington or goes to the state house or goes to
00:33:24.800
city hall and starts reaching out to the other, other side, they're not going to think that
00:33:29.500
they've abandoned, you know, the voters that sent them, right? They're not going to say, oh, well,
00:33:35.400
you, you, you, you, you've, uh, you're reaching out to somebody else. You clearly have no principles.
00:33:41.780
No, they've got principles, but they are trying to accommodate somebody else's concerns as well.
00:33:46.900
Um, if you're not able to do that in your own life, it's much harder. You're not taking the
00:33:51.480
opportunity to do that in your own life. If you're not taking the opportunity to do that in your own
00:33:55.520
life, it's much harder for you to stomach the idea that your guy or your, uh, Congresswoman would go
00:34:03.300
to Washington and actually do it themselves. Um, and so that, that is sort of right at the core.
00:34:09.300
That's not about filibustering or gerrymandering or money in politics. That's just about what it is
00:34:15.060
that the average American wants their member of Congress to do. Gotcha. So this goes back to this,
00:34:21.080
it goes back to your original hunch, right? About, uh, why you started researching this book is
00:34:25.800
basically there's a Mitch mismatch, um, between the way Americans are starting to organize themselves
00:34:31.380
socially and sort of these networks and these institutions that we have that were founded when
00:34:36.620
we were based in sort of a township model. That's the problem or one of the problems.
00:34:41.440
Yeah, no, I think, I think that is the core of the problem. And, and so when my father,
00:34:47.780
I would get in the car with me and I would explain that the, uh, the, the filibuster in the Senate was
00:34:52.520
the reason, uh, the Washington was broken was because these crazy senators were, uh, stopping up
00:34:57.860
pieces of legislation. And he said, well, the rules haven't changed. Why are they filibustering more
00:35:02.260
often? The reason is because on some level, it's smart politically to filibuster, right? It's,
00:35:07.660
you want to be seen as a purist and not as a principal politician. You want to be viewed as
00:35:13.400
carrying a banner and, uh, you're unwilling to back down. We have this sensitive people would
00:35:19.480
just stick to their, stick to their guns more frequently. We would get more, more out of
00:35:23.580
Washington. Well, in fact, the whole premise of American democracy is that you're going to have
00:35:27.860
factions who have different interests and different ideas and different, uh, points of view. And the
00:35:32.980
magic of American democracy was that Washington was a place, uh, that would, uh, would try to
00:35:38.400
accommodate as much of that as possible. And that there would be, that you would get more from the
00:35:42.580
sum of the parts, uh, than you would have if, um, uh, if, if everyone, uh, just went their own way.
00:35:48.940
And that the, the premise in each of those cases was that the members of Congress or the politicians
00:35:55.040
writ large in the United States would, um, uh, would reflect the community's view
00:36:02.420
that there are a whole variety of points of view and we need to accommodate it. We need to sort of
00:36:08.880
harness the magic of that diversity. And if, uh, and so the, the, the problem today, more than the
00:36:16.480
sort of traditional litany of, of explanations, money in politics and filibustering and sharing
00:36:21.420
measures, the real change is that people in their own experience aren't reached across the
00:36:27.800
proverbial aisle. They aren't having interactions across the middle rings. And in the absence of
00:36:32.400
those interactions, they're not willing to support politicians, support leaders who are interested
00:36:38.760
in trying to meld the diversity of opinion. Right. And going back to, I mean, this is even
00:36:42.960
on a personal level for the politicians. So going back to that opportunity motivation, I mean, you
00:36:47.520
talk about how in the book it used to be because there, it was so hard to get to Washington, right?
00:36:52.020
You had to take trains or carriages or whatever to actually do the voting and do your work. You'd like
00:36:55.720
live there, right? Like politicians would move to Washington DC. Um, and because of that,
00:37:00.600
they got to interact with other politicians, they'd go to dinner with each other, the families
00:37:04.880
would get together. But now, uh, going back to now, people are motivated to focus on those
00:37:09.660
inner rings. They're more likely to not live in Washington. They might sleep in their office
00:37:14.760
and then take a plane back to their homes, hometown to be with their family during, on the weekends.
00:37:20.340
So there's not that, that mixture that once existed before.
00:37:23.300
So it's certainly, that's certainly true. That's certainly true.
00:37:26.960
Okay. So, I mean, what's the solution then, right? Uh, so this is the, the trend we're going
00:37:32.700
to, we're going towards, uh, networked communities. And I'm sure you talk about in the book, this
00:37:37.200
isn't like a complete transition. Like there are still townships that exist in America, pockets
00:37:42.000
of it and where you see it, but we're, there's the trend is toward this network community.
00:37:46.540
Um, do we try to push back against that? So like, you know, they're in the past, I guess,
00:37:51.440
20 odd years have been a lot of books written about that. Um, Robert Putnam, the book comes
00:37:54.720
to mind about, we need to do a lot to bring back these middle rings that we're all bowling
00:37:58.560
alone, et cetera. And we should do things to, uh, encourage these middle ring communities
00:38:03.480
or should we try to adapt our institutions and organizations to this new reality?
00:38:10.720
I don't, I don't have a clear answer to that question. It's a terrific question. And frankly,
00:38:15.780
I think people, readers, uh, well, let me say this. I think that people who have listened
00:38:21.180
to interviews with me have gotten frustrated that I don't sort of have a single, uh, uh,
00:38:27.140
silver bullet answer to what we ought to do. Um, I will, uh, say this, I think on the opportunity
00:38:35.320
for us, there's nothing much to do, right? Our opportunities have expanded. People have
00:38:40.420
more choices about how to invest the limited fund of time and attention that they each control.
00:38:45.800
Um, we're not going to make it so that people can't play World of Warcraft. We're not going
00:38:50.060
to make it so that ophthalmologists can't interact with one another across the world. We're not going
00:38:53.400
to make it, uh, so that, uh, I can't, uh, FaceTime goodnight moon to my daughter when I've traveled
00:38:59.580
across the country. In each of those cases, we prize those opportunities and, uh, we are, uh,
00:39:05.940
we're not going to give them up. The thing that we can begin to look at is what motivates us
00:39:11.180
not to join the PTA. It's not that we shouldn't spend time with our children. It's not that we
00:39:15.800
shouldn't find time for people who share our particular interests, but what would motivate us
00:39:21.800
not to be afraid to spend more of our time and attention in the middle rings? What would make it so
00:39:28.520
that we're more inclined, uh, to invest our time and attention in, uh, in middle ring interactions?
00:39:34.880
My experience is that the sort of single determining factor that is, uh, most powerful
00:39:42.480
in helping us to decide is what sort of a series of educated, education, uh, uh, researchers have
00:39:50.800
called grit, which is the ability to, to thwart an impulse. So if you're in a, in a conversation
00:39:57.580
with somebody that, you know, fairly well, a middle ring connection, and they say something
00:40:01.460
that you think is really crazy, uh, they support a candidate that you think is, is nuts, or they,
00:40:06.940
they, they are supportive or they're on, on one side or the other of a gun control debate or
00:40:11.860
whatever, you've got sort of a few, uh, options about how to react, right? You could, you could say
00:40:18.240
you're an idiot, uh, and walk away. You could just end the conversation right there. You could offend
00:40:23.920
them. You could, uh, you could, you, you, or, or you could just sort of abandon the relationship
00:40:28.820
altogether. The question is, are you able to develop some sort of reply where you say, you know,
00:40:35.420
I'm not sure I totally agree with you on that. This is what I think. So that you're actually
00:40:39.060
continuing the relationship. Are you able to withstand the impulse, uh, to lash out or to, or to,
00:40:47.520
to, to walk away? To my mind, that, that sort of single, uh, determining factor, that, that sort of,
00:40:56.880
that sort of issue is it's sort of entirely personalized. Do you have the grit to handle
00:41:01.820
a disagreement? That's something that has diminished, uh, in many cases in American
00:41:07.940
community today or within American individuals, that because you, you, you, you are, uh, less
00:41:14.500
inclined because, because you, you're angered by what the other person had to say, or you're,
00:41:19.200
you, you, you'd rather spend time with people who love you implicitly, who, who agree with
00:41:23.880
you, uh, you, you decide you're not gonna, you're not gonna stick it out. I think that
00:41:29.180
the most powerful thing we could do to reconstitute middle ring relationships is to teach future
00:41:34.940
generations grit. Um, and we're right, actually, we're the sort of, if you, if you read the
00:41:40.600
education of journals, we're sort of right on the cusp of being, being able to develop a
00:41:45.060
curriculum that encourages people to develop grit at a young age. There's this fairly well-known
00:41:51.760
in certain, in certain circles, a fair known test called the marshmallow test, where you
00:41:55.460
put a four-year-old in front of a marshmallow and you say to him or her, you can eat this
00:42:00.400
marshmallow at any point. I'm going to walk away. I need to run an errand. When I get back,
00:42:04.320
if the marshmallow is still here, I'll give you a second marshmallow and you can eat both
00:42:08.620
of them. And what they found is this started in the sixties. They found that 20 years later,
00:42:13.740
the kids who were able to withstand the impulse to eat that first marshmallow and waited for
00:42:17.740
the second marshmallow were light years ahead in all sorts of facets of life. They were less
00:42:23.320
likely to be incarcerated, less likely to be, uh, addicted to a substance. They earned more
00:42:28.960
money. They were more likely to have gotten a college degree. They, the, across the span of
00:42:34.920
life, you do better if you've got, uh, the, the grit to control your impulses. And I think
00:42:43.180
that that, that we rarely connect that idea of impulse control to community. But the truth is
00:42:48.380
that sort of, that is the core competency when it comes to building a middle-ring relationship.
00:42:53.780
The core competency is being able to deal with a disagreement in an agreeable way to maintain a
00:43:00.460
relationship, even when there's some ideological disagreement. Um, and if we were able to build
00:43:06.640
the next generation of Americans to have additional grit, to have that impulse control, they'll be much
00:43:11.980
more likely to invest their time and attention in those sorts of relationships that have been lost.
00:43:16.460
That's awesome. And, and even for our listeners who are, you know, not children, you have, you know,
00:43:20.680
if you have parent, if you have, if you're a parent, you can start doing that. But like,
00:43:23.880
you know, this is the art of manliness podcast. This sounds like, you know, developing middle ring
00:43:27.820
relationship is like, you know, throwing your hat in the arena, like Teddy Roosevelt style,
00:43:31.900
like seen as a challenge and not, not shying away from it.
00:43:34.560
I mean, I think you couldn't, you couldn't put it any better way.
00:43:39.040
I love it. Well, Mark Dunkelman, where can people learn more about the book and your work?
00:43:44.580
Um, well, I've written a bunch. Uh, the, the, the, the book is, uh, the vanishing neighbor,
00:43:51.600
the transformation of American community. It's sold wherever quality books are, uh, are, are on offer.
00:43:56.900
Um, and, uh, uh, Google my name. You'll find all sorts of interesting stuff. I hope.
00:44:03.620
Awesome. Well, Mark Dunkelman, thanks so much for your time. It's been a pleasure.
00:44:06.920
My guest today was Mark Dunkelman. He's the author of the book,
00:44:08.860
the vanishing neighbor, the transformation of American community.
00:44:11.760
You can find that on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere.
00:44:17.980
Well, that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness podcast. For more manly tips and advice,
00:44:22.580
make sure to check out the art of manliness website at art of manliness.com. And if you enjoy this
00:44:26.140
podcast, I'd really appreciate it. If you give us a review on iTunes or stitcher, as always,
00:44:29.840
appreciate the support. And until next time, this is Brett McKay telling you to stay madly.