Neighborhoods are one of the most important human support structures, argues Seth D. Kaplan. Yet modern politics, economics, and social habits all seem aligned to undermine them. Discussing his recent book, Fragile Neighborhoods, Kaplan explains why neighborhoods are irreplaceable sources of human community, and why they are often in such bad shape today. “No government or philanthropic program can replace the benefits that the day-in-day-out love of parents and the continuous support of the community provide. Social services may address material needs, and they may help mitigate specific problems after the fact, but they’re rarely equipped to provide the care, nurturing, and targeted discipline that a supportive family and community deliver.”

Related Links

Fragile Neighborhoods by Seth D. Kaplan
Seth D. Kaplan’s website

Transcript

James Patterson:

Welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m your host, James Patterson. Law & Liberty is an online magazine featuring serious commentary on law, policy, books, and culture, and formed by a commitment to a society of free and responsible people living under the rule of law. Law & Liberty in this podcast are published by Liberty Fund. Hello and welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. My name is James Patterson, contributing editor to Law & Liberty. With me today is my guest, Dr. Sty Kaplan. He’s a leading expert on fragile states and a professional lecturer in the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, senior Advisor for the Institute for Integrated Transitions and consultant to multilateral organizations such as the World Bank, US State Department, US Agency for International Development, and the OECD, as well as developing country governments and NGOs. And today we’re going to be talking about his recent book, Fragile Neighborhoods: Repairing American Society, One Zip Code at a Time. Dr. Kaplan, welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast.

Seth Kaplan:

I’m grateful to be here. Thank you so much for the invitation.

James Patterson:

Yes. So I was introduced to your work at a panel back at the Ciceronian Society in March, and I found the book absolutely fascinating and very much speaks to my own experiences. I live in a very intentional Catholic community here in Ave Maria, and some of the things that you describe as missing in many communities are very much front and center here. And so the explanation of the contrast really helped me appreciate the differences you experience in these kinds of communities. So let’s start off with a narrative, and I want you to tell me, because the book really takes this narrative on in a very detailed but also fair way. So let’s say you’re a young woman who grows up in a religiously repressive Idaho town of 5,000 people. She is smart, academically successful, and at odds with the norms of her fellow townspeople. After graduating from high school, she attends a prestigious college far from home and meets people like herself, and graduates only to move to New York and work in a large corporation that shares her values and rejects those of her town. Meanwhile, she does everything she can to never return to the place where she grew up. Is this a happy story, or is this a sad story?

Seth Kaplan:

First, I would say it’s not great to think in terms of binaries.

James Patterson:

Yes,

Seth Kaplan:

She gained something and she lost something, and we need to think about, I would say in general, our debates are good and bad, and so I’m good, you’re bad, or however we want to frame things. It’s always binaries, but the world is complicated, and so she got more opportunity. She got to do things she might not have been able to do otherwise. She got certain freedoms she might’ve ended up materially better off. Again, New York, possibly not because New York is crowded and things are expensive and probably where she came from, she could have had a big house. So it’s not clear she gained materially, but she certainly gained in terms of a certain amount of freedom, an opportunity she might not have had. And she might’ve met people that she had closer, let’s say relationship with. But you have to also think what she lost. And I think that’s a lot of what we as a country have done.

That’s almost what you gave us a metaphor I think, I wouldn’t say for the whole country, but for a part of the country, we lost this type of security blanket we might’ve had of people. If she does well in her career and she gets into the right networks and she gets the right her own personal support system and she goes step by step throughout her career with the right people around her, she could do great. There’s going to be people like her who made those choices and maybe don’t thrive as well end up without the friendships or the social support. What she lost was a support network, I might call it a security blanket that would protect her when she was down that would provide her with immediate institutions and relationships that would include everyone in that place. And she might’ve lost a sense of community.

She might recreate it on a small scale. I would call that not quite a community, but she might have lost. She has a sense of meaning and purpose for herself, but a lot of people will take the path she might’ve that she took, they might’ve ended up with less meaning, less relationships. So I would just say there’s pluses and minuses and you’re presenting sort of again, a metaphor for how much of the country has evolved. And I think what that picture misses, it misses the people who didn’t end up well from taking the same choices.

James Patterson:

I think that, yeah, that was the impression that I got from finishing this book was that story is one that we often tell, but the ending is not always a happy one, but it’s also not unambiguously a bad one that there’s a lot of people who suffer quietly or experience trade-offs they didn’t anticipate. Right. They did not all end up Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City.

Seth Kaplan:

I mean for me, you’ve lost again. Again, we’re a diverse country. There’s a portion of people in which you can say good plus good. They’ve ended up much better. There’s a set of people in which the result is much more mixed. They’ve lost something important and they’ve traded for something else. And then there’s a group of people I think, which maybe they have some gains, but the losses you might say clearly outweigh the gains. And so I think it’s a much more mixed picture than we want to tell ourselves.

James Patterson:

So this gets us into the book itself, which helps broaden that picture and provide more detail than I think some of the more conventional narratives we tell ourselves or people tell each other. But let’s start with the basics here. What is a neighborhood and what roles does the neighborhood play in structuring American life?

Seth Kaplan:

Well, again, there’s no fixed definition. A neighborhood has to be like this, but I roughly think of it as five to 8,000 people. Again, it could be 2000, it could be maybe 10,000. It’s not 25, 50,000. So there’s a certain human scale, it’s walkable, an ideal neighborhood. And I have to say there’s parts of America that are built up with house, house, house, house, house. And there’s no, they’re not really neighborhoods, but an ideal neighborhood, has a sense of identity, has a sense of beginning and end, has a center, has a lot of place, unique institutions. I live in a real neighborhood, so we’re surrounded on three sides by green areas. There’s only three roads that come in, one in three different directions that take us in and out of the community. We have a center, not a beautiful, I wish it was beautiful, like small commercial district, like a parking lot with a bunch of stores.

So we have the restaurant, everybody goes to the supermarket that we sort of don’t want to go to, but often end up at our own drug store, that type of, we have a dry cleaner, a barbershop, and we have lots. And so a good neighborhood has lots of institutions and activities happening in the place and you know, belong to this place. You have a feeling of community around the place. And I would say you could live in a part of America, house, house, house, no center, no beginning end, nothing that brings you together. And our neighborhood, I mean most of the kids go to one of several schools. So my daughter, my oldest is in seventh grade and probably about three-quarters of her classmates, she can walk to their home from our house 20 minutes, sometimes it’s 25, it’s a little bit longer. Closest starts literally I’m here, I go out at my front door and there’s two houses within one across the street and one, two houses down.

Those aren’t her friends to be honest, but there’s a two other classmates within literally a stone’s throw of my front door and then she’s out a couple of best friends within three blocks. And then you go a little further, but a neighborhood has those things. The neighborhood’s imported because it’s uplifting you, that network effect, you need something. My wife goes away because her mother’s ill, I need help. And I got four neighbors, two mornings, two afternoons helping me take care of my kids, get them where they have to go. If I personally don’t need it, someone needs help with the job, there’s a neighbor’s going to help me. I need someone again, got to go pick up something, can someone, I mean if you live in a good neighborhood, there’s hundreds and hundreds of examples you can give of people stepping up and doing for one another. The woman down my street who knocks on the doors of people living alone, the person who runs some sort of career support system, the program for middle-aged kids that my daughter goes to every couple of weeks, whatever, that’s all happening in my neighborhood. So you’re gaining all these benefits and you’re also giving and you, you’re shaping yourself and being shaped by your neighborhood.

James Patterson:

So what makes a neighborhood fragile versus robust? This is of course part of the major thrust of the book. The range of neighborhoods would explain to me that maybe it’s not so much that they’re not in the right place, it’s more like there’s some other features such as especially family life.

Seth Kaplan:

Yes. Yeah. So I’ll give you a big picture and then I’ll break it down. So broadly speaking, there’s two buckets. I think they’re both for me a question of social disconnection and weak institutions.

But case one is you go to a distressed neighborhood, 30 percent plus poverty levels, and you have a lot of family breakdown. You have probably outside of churches and maybe a public school, there’s no local institutions, there’s not really local businesses, there’s not really local civic associations. Families are weak, inter-family support networks are also weak. There’s a lot of mistrust, there’s not a lot of cooperation. And the places that are doing worse and have the worst social mobility is that type of place. People don’t check in on each other. It’s very isolating and material as well as social conditions are. And you often are disconnected from the rest of your city or area. Another bucket I would say is we’re materially well off. We have nice houses, nobody knows each other. No one is willing to do anything but sow their Instagram face to people. And they’re not like, I have a problem, I’m vulnerable.

I might reach out to you and talk about my challenges and have some relationship and we share and we help each other. You don’t have that much of that. And so I would say when you look at lots of social problems that appear in middle-income or upper-income homes or neighborhoods, that’s likely because there’s not a supporting system around people based on relationships. Broadly speaking, both of those are caused to me by disconnection and a lack of local institutions. Our country’s full of these big systems of services. Services can’t build relationships, companies, nonprofits, government. If you don’t have local people connecting, stewarding places, supporting people, mentoring people, even classmates, you have a lot of negative downstream effects in my opinion. And so if you think about this problem, I think you could talk about lots of specifics, but broadly what I’m trying to say here is different types of institutions don’t exist and we are disconnected isolated from each other in various forms.

James Patterson:

On page 22 of the book, you have this account of purchase care reviewing some of the research by other people and how purchase care emerged as a substitute for parental care. And this occurs around the same time. We have an increasing number of women entering the workforce and families begin to experience higher rates of divorce in single motherhood. This isn’t a chapter that I did not expect to read, it’s on how the rich suffer from fragile neighborhoods. So you often have two earners. Sometimes these families break apart and even in the intact two-earner homes, they’re not getting the kind of neighborhood that you’d expect because so much of it has been outsourced. So why is it that we see fragile neighborhoods even among the rich? Is this why?

Seth Kaplan:

Well, first of all, we have a mindset that we outsource everything and we have a mindset that everything can be transactional and bought.

And I would say I don’t want to compare the problems of the well off with the problems of the poor because clearly if you’re a child and you don’t even have a stable home, it is a different problem than if you have a stable home, but you have no care for that child. I don’t want to compare those problems because some of the kids end up on the street and their outcomes are quite different. But I would say the idea that you can have a society without love and a society without the strong social, I call it my security blanket. I walk out my door, I walk down the street, I feel a sense of joy. I literally feel a security blanket wrapping around me because I know hundreds of my neighbors, they’re not my friends, they’re like my community. Community and friends is not the same thing.

We tend to think one is the same. A community is people that you may not be friends with but are there for you. And there’s an expectation that we take care of each other and we support each other. And I would say those people who are materially well off, but they’re alone or they’re isolated, your apps can do so much, your wallet can do so much, but kids that don’t have love, kids that grow up, that they’re basically being socialized by TV or by phones and maybe schools have become very vocational and there’s not an emphasis on relationships and community. With my kids’ schools, they are so focused on having a good experience, having fun, literally doing things together. And so much time on one level you might think is wasted on holidays or things that collaborative things or even part of what they do is go out and fundraise and do things like that for different activities.

I mean that’s not very vocational, but this whole idea that we live with each other amongst each other and that we are more than ourselves, we have a greater meaning and purpose, and that we have expectations of each other’s and norms towards each other. It’s something that we forget. I think we’ve undervalued it. We see a lot of our social problems to me are downstream. Yes, we need social services, but if we don’t have strong community, strong social fabric, we will spend and spend and we will see social problems go up and up. And I think you see that I literally have a presentation somewhere where I look at all these social problems and the money goes up, the problems go up, and it’s more correlation and causation. I’m not always sure the services are causing the problems, but that means there’s something upstream from both that’s not working.

And for me it’s the loss of the social fabric, the loss of the community and neighborhoods is the one practical unit of change that you can enter as a society, examine what’s going on, measure what’s going on, have a theory of change around. So we talk about these problems for decades actually, but we haven’t tried to be, in my opinion, very practical about them and neighborhoods is the way to be practical and enter into addressing, examining, finding solutions to this problem. And that’s why my book is Fragile Neighborhoods. They’re not fragile communities or fragile cities, it’s the fragile social fabric and what can we do about it?

James Patterson:

The local state and federal governments have had programs and they have expanded very significant amount of resources to revitalize ailing communities for the last century. Maybe a little shorter than that, but what we find is that the impact of airlifting cash into communities, it’s not very good. So a lot of the money ends up not so much wasted as it feels as though it could have been spent on something with better returns. Is the problem that we’re not spending enough money or is there another problem that we’ve missed in these policies?

Seth Kaplan:

Well, I think we spend money the wrong way would be an easier argument to make than to say we’re spending too much. I don’t think we need to spend too more. I think saying we’re spending too much, then we get into politics. A much easier argument is we are spending money the wrong way and the people we’re trying to help were failing to help. And that’s why I would argue for a play space versus a siloed service approach. And we have lots of examples of neighborhoods that have gone from distress to thriving. And that is mostly, I mean there’s some that just happen because a city gets better and the prosperity spreads and it gentrifies neighborhoods. But you can find really good examples. For example, in Atlanta where there’s a systematic attempt to improve a neighborhood, but there is some investments needed. You need to change the housing mix.

You need to sometimes improve the commercial district, like the shops might make streets a little more pretty. You might have to make the local school better. And so there’s different very specific policies. The key point, when you take a place-based approach, you’re being very strategic about ensuring that place has all the ingredients to thrive. When you take a siloed service approach, what typically happens is you’re acting in a humanitarian manner by giving resources to somebody who needs it, whether it’s housing or food or whatever it might be or money. But you’re actually not uplifting people because you’re not changing their context. And so they might need this today and maybe some people will take your material resources and they’ll be okay, but what will happen the moment they’re okay, they will leave their neighborhood and the neighborhood will be worse off. And meanwhile, you’re still giving these resources to 90, 95 percent of the people who are still there.

And what this ends up happening is it ends up, I would say reducing need but failing to uplift people. And to some extent it encourages the top performers or people who do manage to do better to move to better neighborhoods. And so we have this long-term brain drain from places that are not doing well to places that aren’t doing well. And the whole social service support system. And even programs that universities, they want to identify the best students in schools, they take them out and they push them into this national whatever rat race or career track, and they never go back. And so I think what you see over and over again is one of the problems of the worst off neighborhoods, these are not the materially well off but the distressed neighborhoods is we literally have been spending money both in terms of putting in services in neighborhoods that make the neighborhoods unattractive, putting in housing in neighborhoods that makes it no one else wants to live there and taking people out. We are actually reconfiguring or moving our population around to ensure that some neighborhoods do very badly. And that to me is a failed model and it’s left tens of millions of people living in neighborhoods that are weights on your shoulder and make it very hard for you to succeed.

James Patterson:

So one of the things that’s been sort of in the background for a lot of your answers has been that when it comes to people who are practitioners or if they’re theorists on the question, they’re often ideologically coding what they want to do. So the left focuses on things like structural and economic inequalities and they’re right to do that, but that’s not the whole picture. And on the right they focus on things like religious formation and family formation, but they miss a lot that the left wants to incorporate. So is there something about bringing the two critiques together or maybe even just abandoning this kind of firefight for a better methodology?

Seth Kaplan:

Well, in general, my approach is I want to learn from everybody. I want to hear what the left says, I want to hear what the right says, and I’m very intentional in how I think and how I write. And I think if you read this book, I have people on the left who love this book and I have people on the right who love this book. They don’t love every part of it. I would say there’s pieces, I talk about marriage and family and maybe people on the left don’t want to emphasize that some people on the right maybe don’t want to talk about the fact that I do talk about racism and some of the legacies of how we’ve treated parts of our population. But I would say I think both have some legitimacy in what they say and both don’t want to have a complete picture or are unwilling to have a complete picture.

And so I like to say that I would say my whole life is about being hybrid. That’s actually, you could say I’m personally a hybrid. I do things that normal people aren’t supposed to do together. I travel the world and I’m religious, for example. And in my religious community, most people don’t go to Nigeria, whatever or so I go to places. So there’s a lot of things that I do that I would say don’t fit in a specific box. So I have tried really hard to say these are ideas on the right, which I think are great and need to be building blocks. And these are ideas on the left, which I think are important and I definitely want to listen to them and bring them in. And I want to do something that I think is the best approach. And by the way, I look at the data.

The data says that this is what we should be doing because I am looking at the data and I went and found the best research on neighborhoods and neighborhoods. The data says family structure matters, but it also says that distanced opportunity, for example, might matter the type of physical conditions in the neighborhood matter. So therefore we do need to invest to make these places better, which might be what the left says. But we also really need to emphasize the importance of family, which is what the right would say. So I do think we can learn for both. We just have to make sure we’re building a case on the data and that we’re speaking in a way that ideally we’ll appeal to a broad audience. And in my ideal future there will be a coalition of left and right that will say, enough of all this politics, let’s get back to basics, let’s get back to practical, let’s get back to the local and the neighborhood is a unit that we can all agree on, some things that we can do together and that’s how we can help the most amount of people.

James Patterson:

Social institutions play crucial roles in shaping the social dynamics of a neighborhood by either bonding or dividing, bridging or isolating. And by molding norms and values, they act as rule makers and keepers setting codes of conducts and standards both nationally and locally at the local level. Family, neighborhood associations and schools dictate patterns and norms and that is the sort of thing that consolidates a lot of the views and focuses our intention on the things that come right, but also this attempts to kind of hybridize the approaches. The way that you describe very well flows into the first case study of these people making differences. And that is the one in Detroit. So why don’t you tell me about Detroit since it captures both the family critique and institutional critique as well as the structural and economic inequality critique?

Seth Kaplan:

Well, okay, first let me say that you’ve touched upon the point is that I’m an institutionalist and I believe that local institutions, you could think family and you can also think of civic, social, religious, educational, political, all of these. We need to create a society which every neighborhood is thick with institutions and some of that is formal, some of that is invisible, informal, like parental groups or whatever it is or the norm of helping each other. That’s the type of institution. But places with thick institutions and norms will have a stronger social fabric. So if I go to the Detroit example, Detroit example, let me just go through the sequence. Here’s a guy started as a pastor in a church and said that he wanted to take his faith into the community. He didn’t want to just be in the church with the sermons. So he basically got out of the church and he tried to help people building homes, beautifying neighborhoods changing, fixing roofs and stuff like that for people.

Eventually he went from doing that as well as being a pastor to doing that work in the neighborhoods as his full-time job, carried forth by his faith or inspired by his faith. And he built an organization originally around what we called the sixth day. It was basically a six-day event once a year. He got thousands and thousands of volunteers to go around Detroit and Detroit, many places really needed this again, fixing houses, beautifying streets, just doing things and getting lots and lots of people together. So it’s also bridge building. He did this so well. Then he started doing things, helping schools and raising money and bringing his volunteers to fix places and parks and all this stuff. And then they got this great opportunity that they asked him to take over a middle school, beautiful gothic, 1920s, middle schools, the number of students were shrinking the city could not afford to run this school, gave him a long-term lease, very inexpensively condition is you got to build a neighborhood hub here.

And he says, that’s great, it’s a big challenge from a big step up. But he leaned into it and he went to that neighborhood and he announced his plans and he thought everybody would be grateful that he was doing this, but he was, to be honest, he was a white guy from the suburbs and he had been doing things for them, just a black neighborhood. Doing things for them was very different than setting up shop next door and by the way, taking over the most beautiful important place, physical place in their neighborhood. And who’s this guy coming in here and maybe they’re going to push us out tomorrow. And so he had to learn how to build trust. And his journey was that he had to learn to break bread, he had to learn to go street by street, he had to be humble, he had to listen, he had to change the makeup of the staff so it more reflected the neighborhood or the people in the neighborhood.

They had to create advisory boards. But eventually he built this trust by showing up over and over and over again, modifying the way he was doing things, localizing it. Because again, if you’re not rooted in the local, people don’t trust you. I think this is one of the big lessons about the problems of our civil side today. Civil society is no longer rooted in the local and when you’re rooted in the local you’re doing with versus doing too. And so he transformed basically his organization, his posture, and they eventually brought in 39 organizations. And then this place, literally, it’s actually not in the book because I know what happens after I publish the book, the level of crime. They don’t focus on reducing crime. But the level of crime in this neighborhood went way down. It was like the second safest neighborhood in Detroit. I think that was about a year ago.

That data I come from, and it used to be above average and now it was the second lowest because the collective capacity, the collective efficiency, the relationships, you also people, people, they did some survey of neighborhoods and this neighborhood came up and had one of the highest scores for people’s opinion about the flourishing nature of the neighborhood. They brought these institutions in, they established several institutions like an elders council, a student council. And what they’re doing again is building and bringing into a neighborhood lots of place unique or place-based institutions. And when I talk about institutions being important, here’s an example where yes, in some cases they brought them in, but by providing this space and by leading with the fact is if you’re going to be involved in this hub, you got to have the right posture, you got to be working with others, you got to be cooperating, you got to be thinking about building relationships and institutions in the place. So even if you are a government office and you’re setting up here, you need to take that posture and the end result is you go from a place that’s thin on institutions. I can’t say it’s perfect, they got a long way to go, but it’s gotten much thicker with institutions and this is transformative in terms of what is able to do to transform a place.

James Patterson:

There was, for me, a very compelling story about attempts to revivify marriage by a man named JP de Gans and Kimo. And I was surprised that it all kicks off with a divorce. And this sort of points to the fact that marriage and family formation is so important, but the norms around encouraging those things sometimes are not always good because the divorce in this case was of a woman who was subject to pretty extensive abuse. So tell me about communo family formation, but also the right way to form norms so that you don’t trap women and children in bad marriages.

Seth Kaplan:

Again, I think this is a debate that tends to be very binary.

James Patterson:

Yes, yes.

Seth Kaplan:

And I think one of our problems is we only think of two outcomes, and it’s a complex subject that requires a lot of nuance. There’s a great value for having strong families, not only for ourselves, but I think even more important for our kids. Kids are the biggest losers when families break down. But on other hand, if a relationship isn’t good at a certain level for one of the parents, you again, these are all balances. So it’s a really hard without a fixed answer because every case is a little bit different. It’s a complex subject. But in this case, talking about forming norms I would say is we often talk about the problems of, I mean our society has a caste system around family structure. If you’re materially well off, there’s a lot of data on this, there’s several good books on this, you tend to live in and come from a relatively stable two-parent family.

And if you’re poor, you tend to come from a single-parent family. In fact, there are a significant number of kids that don’t live with either parent in this country. In fact, just the data between the US and Europe, which is a comparably rich country. One of the big gaps in data on relationships is actually the presence of two parents in a home with young children, the gap is enormous. Actually, I think it was 18-19 percent gap. It wasn’t a marriage gap, even though I think marriage is important because northern Europeans don’t get married. It was a gap of simply both parents living with their kids. So in Europe, they may not always get married, but they do stay with their kids as a couple. In the United States, there’s a lot of kids, I mean literally 20 million, whatever the number is. I think it was 23 million kids that do not live with both parents.

And just think of the outcomes of those kids. We know the data. It’s quite different than if you live with both. So how do you establish norms about this? Mostly when we discuss this issue, we get stuck on policy questions. I mean, how do we change divorce? I don’t think that’s a big conversation point, but how do we promote marriage? There’s a lot of debate about that. There’s some really good books on that. And too often I think we get stuck with the idea that there’s a policy lever, maybe there’s an incentive in the tax code, maybe there’s something that can be done. And I think what Communio shows is this is much about forming norms at the very local level. So Communio works with a chain of churches across the country. That guy, JP Degan, JP is a genius, really like a brilliant guy, social entrepreneur, constantly learning, evolving, gaining, making progress.

And his organization understands the importance again, of institutions that are bringing people into an ecosystem where relationships mean something, where having kids mean something where there’s a whole narrative, there’s a whole support structure. He’s not neighborhood-focused, but he is focused on churches working within several miles of their location, which is probably a couple of neighborhoods, not a specific neighborhood. And so for me, it very much fits with this model that if you want to make change happen, yes, we could think about policy, but actually we got to think neighborhood by neighborhood. How do we norm and not only create those norms or reor, but we also have to create a support system. We have to create models and mentors. We have to literally socialize people that there’s an alternative pathway in terms of your life choices. And I’ve seen debates about the success sequence and all that stuff, but everything is thought about up here.

And really I think communion shows that if you’re going to make change happen, you’re going to have to have something like a church, make this a priority, and then go out there and reach people in a certain way and they’ll provide a whole infrastructure of learning and stories and examples and people stepping up for each other and bringing you into this ecosystem where you’re going to have a completely different understanding of what relationships are, what family is, what does it mean to have responsibility to kids. And I don’t think you get that when we just talk about changes in the tax code.

James Patterson:

Yeah, there’s this sense of not so much what works, but what is it that we can directly control? And the problem with so many people in the policy world is they want to have an answer, but a lot of the times they’re not equipped with the right abilities to provide those answers. And so a big part of the story you see among the social entrepreneurs in the book is that they’re just people with good ideas that have to actually learn some pretty hard lessons about how to manage all of this. And you actually list what those lessons are at the end because no one comes into any of these circumstances with all the answers.

Seth Kaplan:

Well, I think too much of our intellectual discussion is we’re looking for the one answer. And we’re thinking, again, if you’re a think tanker or a newspaper or an academic, we are much like, again, this is what’s in the media, what the newspapers cover. The newspapers don’t cover the social entrepreneurs. They cover the policy debates, the think tanks publish on the policy debates, they’re publishing for Congress or the White House or what have you. And so our whole ideas debate around ideas is all about the magic bullet as if we change a single or second, third policy and the world will be different. And actually when it comes to questions of family, there’s certainly a lot of evidence across countries that those actually don’t make a huge difference at all. And my argument is if you really want to make a difference, you got to roll up your sleeves, you got to focus on specific geographies, ideally start with your own, and then you got to work with other people, build institutions, change how things are.

And we are only going to fix our country’s many social ills by having tens of thousands and a hundred thousands of people become activated in various ways. You could be small businesses, it could be small civic organizations, it could be churches leaning into some of this work. It could be schools in a different way, working in terms of community. I mean, so I think there’s not an answer. There’s only tens of thousands of ventures and each of us have a role to play where we are and basically having a different mindset of how we matter and what difference we can make in the lives of our place.

James Patterson:

A great line that you have in the book to this effect, no government or philanthropic program can replace the benefits that the day in day out love of parents and the continuous support of the community provide. Social services may address material needs and they may help mitigate specific problems after the fact, but they’re rarely equipped to provide the care nurturing and targeted discipline that a supportive family and community deliver. So you mentioned in the book the problems of COVID-19 and the movement to mediated communities, especially through the online portals and meetings and the like that we experienced. And you explain that this actually helps underline how communities really are in place and that cyberspace does not provide a really meaningful alternative at best. It’s a kind of subsidizing feature. So the way that I see that in some of the things that you describe is that areas with very high level of neighborliness of community involvement also have lots of Facebook groups or WhatsApp groups, but that nobody who lives relatively unintegrated with their neighborhoods also does. Instead they tend to be isolated also online. So what is it about the role that the internet and social media play in neighborhoods?

Seth Kaplan:

So again, when we talk about technology, you’re specifically asking about technology in the last 15 years, roughly. And I would say technology has been driving us apart roughly since the sixties. And I think the biggest technology is the car, the way the car is. And then you have tv, you have air conditioning, and then you have the internet. And the phones are simply the latest wave of a series of waves of technology that disconnects people and separates them. And that’s why 1964 is the peak year for the US for the social fabric. And I mean we could talk about other technologies beyond that, but I think the key point is here is technology puts a lot of pressure on stress on the social fabric. And what that means is that places that are, this is what we saw, COVID places that are strong, that have strong social fabric and preexisting institutions and relationships and that are working strong as a community, they are much more resilient in the face of technology and the places that are very atomized and weak and lacking institutions, they’re much more vulnerable.

And actually as an example of that, we talk a lot about in the last year, Jonathan Hez spoke the anxious generation. And you look at the impact of phones on kids, I mean the data is clear. People who are embedded in strong community are the least affected by the phones and the kids who are embedded in weak community. And the religion plays some role of that, but there’s also culture on other aspects are the most affected. So the mental health issues, the depression, the self-harming is actually much worse among kids, especially girls that are not in strong community. And I think you could take those data points and that one question of the phones and you could enlarge it. And I think what you see is that again, in Covid places that in my neighborhood, what happened when Covid happened, the first reaction of people is let’s form WhatsApp groups.

Let’s organize to help people who can’t go shopping because they are older or they’re more at risk. People started putting benches. People talk about how we’ve changed the physical layout of houses because we’re less social. Who cares in I there? But everyone just started putting benches and chairs in front of their house. My neighbor out in the corner when the weather got colder, put the couches in the carport, like not a garage, but it’s a covered area and then brought the heaters outside and everyone could have a living room outdoors. And so the point is, when you’re in a strong community, whether it’s the stress from technology in the phone or it’s the shock of covid and what do we do in that situation? People come together, people support each other. I mean, we had backyard camps for kids because they couldn’t go to the regular camp.

We had some sort of joint things through Zoom with neighbors. All this stuff happened. And so first of all, we made a lot more emphasis that we would support each other, be there for each other and that we would, to be honest, that we would reopen soon because we were there for the kids, not for us. And I would say, but even if you want to get around that question, which I do think people might have a different opinion on at times, the fact that people were so oriented towards helping each other and being there for each other meant that we were much less affected by both of these scenarios than I think most people, we are not strongly affected. There’s phones like there used to not be, but we are much more protective of anything that affects the community. And technology is more of a positive.

The debate around technology, good, bad, again, it’s a binary. Technology is good and bad. And what we need to do is the stronger the social fabric, the stronger family, inter-family networks are local institutions. The more the phones actually will be a positive in my opinion, as long as you have some limits around them. We do have limits around them, but they bring us together because the folds work very place-based. And for many people, I think the phone makes us placeless and less willing to meet people and less socialized to caring for each other. And that’s the opposite of what I see in my neighborhood. To be honest.

James Patterson:

The book is Fragile Neighborhoods: Repairing American Society, One Zip Code at a Time. The author, Dr. Seth D. Kaplan. Dr. Kaplan, thank you so much for appearing on the Law & Liberty Podcast.

Seth Kaplan:

Thank you so much, James. If anyone wants to find me, the easiest way is LinkedIn, find me on LinkedIn, or you can certainly go to my website. Thank you so much.

James Patterson:

Thanks for listening to this episode of Law & Liberty Podcast. Be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And visit us online at www.lawliberty.org.