Mass Shootings: Part 4 - Social Fracture

As the advent of the Digital Age accelerated a psychic fracture at the individual level, the fracture of America at the social level has continued apace since the 1960s.

In his 2000 book Bowling Alone — published soon after the Columbine Massacre and so ripe for a readership searching for cause-and-effect — Harvard social scientist Robert Putnam sought to illustrate the decline in what he called “social capital” since 1965. He charted the decline in civic engagement at the community level, manifested in the steep drop in participation in organizations like the Boy Scouts, the Elks Club, the League of Women Voters, and parent-teacher associations. He keyed on a slew of reasons for this, ranging from women’s entry into the workforce to frequent relocation to the “individualizing” effect of new technologies on leisure time. Putnam’s findings were alarming, and were meant to be, since he saw civic engagement and social trust as being key to the basic functioning of the American system as it had run for over two hundred years.

The civic breakdown that Putnam illustrated spoke to a collapse of community, and American communities had been built on a foundation of strong nuclear family units that had also been under intense attack since the 1960s. Divorce rates skyrocketed in the 70s and 80s as the social stigma surrounding that brand of family dissolution faded away. This wasn’t helped by the rise of two-income households, a phenomenon that many touted as a feminist triumph of choice but which became an economic necessity for most in order to maintain a middle class standard of living. Husbands and wives drifted from each other, and they also drifted from their children, who became the “latchkey kids” that free-roamed the decaying communities in a post-60s malaise that were beset by high inflation and rising crime, along with the vanishing civic engagement that Putnam described.

Both downstream and upstream of these ground-level declines — these things tend to form a feedback loop — was the erosion of trust in high-level American institutions. Any chart illustrating the public trust in institutions such as the media, Congress, academia, and more recently the public health bureaucracy looks like an upside down hockey stick. America has always been a fragmented placed to some extent, but this fragmentation was mostly regional, and a country as vast as the United States could fit in a whole lot of different regions that contained within them cohesive and high-trust communities built on strong families. As the frontier closed and those regions became tied together by forces of communication and transportation and a growing federal bureaucracy, there was for a time in the postwar period a high level of trust in the national institutions and their assumed expertise during the Cold War. This trust, however, was forged by an unprecedented nationwide mobilization to fight the Axis Powers and then the Soviets. It’s safe to say that’s broken and gone now, since we have institutional trust levels that would seem to portend revolution.

Revolution has likely been held at bay by the pacifying and atomizing effects of new media technologies, but those bulwarks can only hold for so long.

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Trust is clearly key here, and a close look at its demise can lead people to some uncomfortable realities that track alongside the fractures at the levels of community, family, and institutions. In 2007, Putnam published a landmark paper that zeroed in on a cause of social fracture he had only circled around in Bowling Alone — the rapid increase in racial and cultural diversity in the United States since 1965. The study set down in an academic journal what had been obvious to millions of people throughout the county, especially those in more urban settings - that the more “diverse” an area is, the lower its social capital becomes. Participation in community organizations drops, consensus on local issues comes apart, and most important, the general level of “social trust” erodes — not just between groups, but within them.

It’s hard to believe that Putnam’s focus on 1965 is not at least somewhat connected to that year’s passage of the Hart-Cellar Immigration Act, which ended a 40-year moratorium on almost all immigration into the United States and opened the door for the largest mass movement of people in the history of the world, much of it from Third-World nations. The United States has added roughly the equivalent population of France through immigration alone since the 1970s, at the same time as it has embraced a multiculturalism that eschews assimilation into the Anglocentric identify that had formed the core of the nation for its first two hundred years of existence. The scale and speed of this project is unprecedented in human history, and the idea that it wouldn’t place strain on the nation’s social fabric was delusion at best, malicious at worst. The idea of “diversity” as a sacrosanct value — the notion that aggressively minimizing the amount that people have in common somehow makes the population stronger — is an article of faith, not of logic or observation. It has helped America to become a “low-trust” society, where consensus is more and more impossible and where technocratic solutions to widening social fissures and emergent Third World conditions appear more and more inept. Chaos is inevitable, both between people and within them.

The results of all the fracture at the levels of family, communities, and institutions could be obfuscated for a while by rising wealth. In the 1970s the United States detached its currency from gold and created a powerful fiat dollar on the back of global reserve bank demand and Saudi Arabian oil. It allowed for an absolute torrent of borrowing and money printing that enabled wild speculative markets and ballooning government doles. But as that late imperial system has degraded — and as it stares down its inevitable end — the horsemen of inflation and currency implosion and debt crisis loom in the near distance, and these forces can crack apart even the strongest of societies, as they have throughout history during periods of empire collapse. The havoc they promise to wreak on a culture as fractured as ours is something we are still fumbling to even acknowledge, much less productively discuss. When you can’t even trust the money in your pocket, many ideas suddenly appear possible.

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This discussion of the fractured social landscape in relation to mass shootings may appear tangential, but it is really a discussion of environment. About the where of it all. It is meant to illustrate the setting in which people who might otherwise be seen and helped by vital social systems instead become atomized. They wander alone amidst the barrage of inhuman noise and sinister feedback systems provided by digitized modernity.

When a swimmer finds themself adrift and exhausted with nothing firm in sight to hold onto, they will often panic, despair, or rage before they drown. And so the fractured individuals we looked at earlier find themselves drifting among a fractured social landscape that offers them few buoys to which to tether themselves. Some will panic and cling to something, anything that appears solid — cults, political movements, “woke” grievance crusades, etc. Some will despair, and descend into drugs or hedonism or suicide.

And others will rage. They will take their fight against reality to what seems to them a logical conclusion, by creating a form of ultimate social immolation that tears as wide and bloody a wound in the world as possible. Addled individuals usually, as at the San Ysidro McDonalds and the Luby’s Cafeteria. But perhaps those severed tiny pieces of social fabric find each other, as the boys at Columbine did, and in their unification combine the annihilative nature of fracture with some ancient and eternal force that humans must have to connect the inner with the outer — a combination through which they can light the world on fire, if only for a moment.

We’ll take a closer look at what that force might be later on.