What is the real state of the union?

The second reason these large objectives - a growing, job-creating economy along with more solidarity and compassion - seem incompatible in the long run is that the values promoted by American capitalism have a negative effect on the solidity of society.

We are better paid, better fed, better housed, better educated, and healthier than ever before. We have faster communication and more convenient transportation, and our average disposable income in constant currency is more than double that of the mid-1950s. Life expectancy has risen from 47 (1900) to 76 years.

However, from 1960 until the early 2000's, our countries slid into a deepening social recession that dwarfed the comparatively briefer economic recessions often dominating news and politics. Since 1960, the divorce rate has doubled, the recorded violent crime rate has quadrupled, the prison population has quintupled, the percent of babies born to unmarried parents has sextupled, and cohabitation (a predictor of future divorce) has increased sevenfold. The American National Commission on Civic Renewal combined social trends such as these in creating its 1998 "Index of National Civic Health" which has plunged since 1960. Suicide mortality has increased by around 60% in the past 45 years - suicide is one of the five leading causes of death for people 15-24 years old.

The concept of "social capital" is another way to formulate the problem. Social capital, according to a definition by sociologist Francis Fukuyama, is an instantiated informal norm that promotes cooperation between individuals. It is therefore embedded in traditional virtues like honesty, the keeping of commitments, trust, reliable performance of duties, reciprocity, and the like.

Professor Robert Putnam, at Harvard University, fed a debate on the erosion of social capital in the US in an article published in 1995 called "Bowling Alone", and later in his book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. What he shows is that people who used to join bowling leagues have, in recent years, dropped out and instead simply bowl with friends. And the same holds for membership in practically all other voluntary associations: Since the mid-sixties, religious affiliation, membership in labor unions, affiliation with school associations, and membership in (and volunteering for) civic organizations have declined more or less steadily. Similar observations can be made about the decline in participation in U.S. national, state, and local elections over the last three decades. Similar relative declines are evident in political rally attendance, and local organization committee membership.

Yet many students of the new democracies that have emerged over the past decade and a half have emphasized the importance of a strong, active civil society for the consolidation of democracy.

Many of us did not need Putnam's research to experience the difficulty in mobilizing people within movements or projects oriented towards the good of the community. Most political parties, unions, and associations have difficulties keeping their members, even in the countries that have less individualistic cultures, such as Germany and Japan. It is all the more difficult to institute these organizations. Aspirations for change exist, but few are those who actually are willing to invest their energy or financial means; mistrust and fear of taking risks dominate their feelings and behaviors.

If social capital is an instantiated norm (a set of norms or mental attitudes underlying actual behaviors), it follows that the manifestations of the decline of social capital in our countries derives from the transformation of these norms and attitudes. The erosion of the social link - and beyond that, the erosion of underlying social capital - must therefore be analyzed in terms of systems of values. The less the systems of values include social capital, the less they will induce actual behaviors likely to strengthen the social bond.

In 2001 in the North of France, in a train, a girl was raped by seven adolescents. There were 200 people in the train - no one moved. This is a clear example of a situation generated by the lack of feelings of belonging to a community. The first explanation is radical individualism and indifference. The second explanation is fear of not being supported by others.

Radical individualism is familiar from contemporary values that encourage people to think that they can find happiness and self-accomplishment without the community, instead of finding them within the community. Paradoxically, however, it seems difficult for even reclusive personalities to find happiness without some harmonious interaction with others.

This is notably the thesis of the Communitarian network. In 1991, Professor Amitai Etzioni, a George Washington University sociologist, became known as the "guru" of the Communitarian movement. Etzioni, influenced by ideas drawn from traditional German community spirit, contended that the tension between personal privacy and the common good should be diminished through a limitation on the importance of individualism.

Individualism, though, is not the only component of the new system of values spreading within our societies from the late 1960s. A second important element is based on the concept that accomplishment and happiness are found in pleasure. This is the hedonic component of contemporary morality. This covers sexual pleasure, as shown by the success in the 1970's of Emmanuelle, a novel by Emmanuelle Arsan, (and film), for which an unrestricted sexuality was becoming an honor, inverting, more than rejecting, traditional values. In this culture, personal attractiveness and youth become capital values. This is exemplified in the novels of Michel Houellebecq. Consuming goods also can be a source of this pleasure supposedly guaranteeing happiness in opposition to the sterner former morality, which insisted on duties, responsibilities, work and constructive values. Of course, the Communitarian Movement similarly suggested balancing individual rights with responsibilities.