Robert Putnam’s ‘The Upswing’ traces the cycling between “I” and “We” in American life over the past century.…

Robert Putnam’s ‘The Upswing’ traces the cycling between “I” and “We” in American life over the past century. You can see here how the 4 great catastrophic disruptions of the first half of the 20th century drove the emergence of a collective focus. Of a ‘we’. /1 https://t.co/CEiZXG0IH9

Again, those disruptions were: World War 1 Spanish Flu The Great Depression World War 2 When human groups face existential threats, it causes them to mobilise as a ‘we’. Only threat creates a ‘we’. This was the birth of what we call the ‘public’. /2 https://t.co/QX8kMY0nnN

The public is NOT, ever, just a group of people. Like a crowd at a protest, or rock concert. That’s a populist trick. It’s easy to mobilise a crowd. Usually by activating grievances of various kinds. To create a threat to peoples’ status. /3

A public, like the public in public health, or education, or transport, is mobilised in response to a threat. It’s the response TO threats. That ‘upswing’ of ‘we’ you can see between 1900 and 1960 was that response. /4 https://t.co/AzrMgPRUG5

Which then devolved back to “I” societies - societies driven by battles for status (identity) between individuals and groups - as those threats receded. This is the dynamic of all history. When threatened, we act together. When not, we fight each other for status. /5 https://t.co/hpPNRVONQc

The world we’re currently living in is bewildering to those who remember that ‘we’ focus of the past half-century. Our social media culture is a culture of rampant status games, of a proliferation of identity politics. /6

So many assume we don’t do smart things like public health now because people are dumb. It has nothing whatsoever to do with our individual cognitive capacity. We don’t do public things, because a public only exists in response to a perceived existential threat. /7

While objectively many thought a pandemic should have that effect, our vaccinations took the acute edge off that encounter enough to normalise it. Things are not catastrophic enough, yet, in other words, to force the re-emergence of a ‘we’. /8

Coming here every day to post in our team sports status battles is not going to change that. We think we’re only exchanging information and debating our way to some truth. It’s only status games. Jostling for higher rank in our status hierarchies. /9

Like animals and plants, human societies evolve in a punctuated way, in response to existential threat. They don’t run on information or thought, or economics, or any of the -isms. They have a cyclical dynamic, between status games, and collective responses to catastrophe. /10

This is reality politics. Reality always wins, and we have no humility towards it when in our team sports status-battle bubbles. So then it smashes us. Then ‘we’ emerges. Then social progress occurs. /end https://t.co/9wjbVQIkUb