Beyond Putnam: Theda Skocpol's Diagnosis

Sam Pressler is co-founder of Connective Tissue, which helps communities and leaders rebuild civic life. He founded the Armed Services Arts Partnership, the nation’s largest community arts group for veterans and families. He is a Fellow at UVA’s Karsh Institute of Democracy, a Research Affiliate at Harvard, and studied at William & Mary, Harvard, and Stanford.

This was the piece that inspired me to invite Sam into a conversation: “Beyond Bob” :

By granting Robert Putnam intellectual hegemony on all things community in America, we limit our understanding of the past and constrain our visions of what’s possible for the future

So I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine who helps people tell their story. And it's a big, beautiful question, which is why I use it. But because it's big, I kind of over-explain it the way that I'm doing right now.

So before I ask it, I want you to know that you're in total control. And you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And it is impossible to make a mistake. The question is, where do you come from?

I'll start with place. I come from a place called Wayne, New Jersey, not too far from where you live. And I come from a place where I was the third generation of my family in that town. That town is probably not too far from where my family, when they were Jewish European immigrants in the late 1800s, early 1900s, came into the New York–New Jersey area.

And I came up in a place where, because of that history, I was deeply known in ways that were, I think, really positive when you think about being in a community where most people knew your grandma and your grandpa, and they knew your dad and your uncles and your aunts, and the kind of support structure that can come from that.

And I think I got to see the other side of that, which is when you're a teenager and being deeply known is not necessarily the best thing, where you feel like you don't necessarily have a place to hide and just be your own person. And so I think the place where I'm from shapes me in ways visible and invisible to this point.

I think the New Jersey and New York area has the funniest people on earth. And I think, particularly growing up in a very comedic Jewish family, my sense of humor and my ability to joke around with people comes from that place. I think my directness comes from being in that place.

And I think the path that I'm on, and as I've thought about the importance of community and the kinds of relationships and bonds that hold us together, a lot of that is the model of my grandma from that particular place and the way that she was embedded in that community and building institutions of that community and being a part of it.

And seeing what that looked like at the time of her death when she was in her late 80s and passed away. And I think when most folks grow old—grow that old—and have a funeral, maybe it's a small gathering. And she had several hundred people there. And it was one of these things where every single grandchild needed to eulogize her.

And they shut down a four-lane highway to help us get to the cemetery. And I think all of that came from a sense of rootedness and an actual commitment to a particular place over a long period of time.

I love hearing you talk about being really known, is how you said it. And what can you tell us? Can you tell us a little bit more about a story about what it was like being known growing up in Wayne, or maybe even more about your grandmother? She sounds like quite a figure.

Yeah, I like the excuse to talk about Grandma Sandy. I was the first grandchild in the whole extended family. So they used to joke around that I was like baby Jesus to her, like I could do no wrong in her eyes, which was true.

The thing about Grandma Sandy was, when you were with her—and I think me in particular, because I was baby Jesus, but also other people—you were the most important person in the room. We would joke that she moonlighted as a detective because you couldn't get through a conversation without having 20 questions asked of you.

The funny thing about growing up with Grandma Sandy was, she would do the Jewish grandma thing where she would guilt trip you—like, "Hi, I haven't seen you in a few days. Where have you been?" But then on the other hand, you'd say, "Okay, I'm around at this time, Grandma," and she'd say, "Well, I’ve got plans. I'm playing cards with Bev on Tuesday, and then I have dinner on Wednesday with the girls, and then Thursday I'm going to a show." So you had to schedule out with her several weeks in advance.

That is maybe where I do have a bit of my social side—it comes from her—but also someone who was both deeply committed to her people, but also didn't take herself too seriously.

Do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be as a kid, like what you wanted to be when you grew up?

Yeah, I wanted to be a comedy writer for SNL. It was funny—in my fifth-grade yearbook, everyone had "basketball player," "baseball player," "football player," and I was like, no—comedy writer for SNL. I grew up with the VHS and the DVDs of "Best of Adam Sandler," "Best of Chris Farley," and I would watch those pretty religiously.

From as early as I can remember, I wanted to be a comedy writer. There's a funny story from this. My dad, in the building he worked in, there was a physical therapist that he went to, and Tina Fey also went to that physical therapist. One day, he went and said, "Hey, my son really wants to be a comedy writer. Do you think Tina Fey would meet with him?"

Fast forward a few weeks, I'm having a lunch meeting as a nine- or ten-year-old with Tina Fey. I had a list of questions that I’m sure my parents helped me develop. She spent an hour—hour plus—with me over lunch, a nine- or ten-year-old, answering these questions about being a comedy writer. This was when she was the head writer for SNL.

Apparently, I was really into Jimmy Fallon at the time and kept asking about Jimmy Fallon. She wrote me a note after our time together, and she basically said, "I hope to become the next Jimmy Fallon." That was a huge part of my aspirations and never really left me.

So catch us up. Tell us sort of where you are now, what you're up to, what keeps you busy, what are you working on?

Yeah. So, interestingly, my first real thing I did in my life after college—and while I was in college—was in comedy. Somewhat not directly as a comedy writer, but I spent seven years building this organization called the Armed Services Arts Partnership, or ASAP, which is now the largest community arts organization in the country for veterans and military families.

That started with a stand-up comedy class for veterans because I wanted to do—comedy was kind of like how I connected with people; it's how I coped. And I also wanted to do something at the intersection of humor and comedy and service, and was living in Southeast Virginia, which is a big military community. So I was like, let's do a stand-up comedy class for veterans.

I spent my formative years building that organization. There's a lot that came from that, but I'd say the biggest thing was having this experience of going from a 20-year-old to a 27-year-old and becoming the face of this large military arts organization—while not being a veteran and not being an artist. It was kind of bizarre that my identity and purpose were tied to something that I was not.

Then I kind of had this set of realizations—while I was there, but then after—that the thing underneath the thing for me was not just the art or comedy. It wasn't veterans or the military necessarily. It was: how do we connect, or how do we reconnect people to the communities, commitments, and connections that make our lives worth living?

Following that thread in grad school, I did a fellowship at Harvard. While I was there, I was doing a bunch of academic research on the intersection of civic life and social connection and class. I was also doing my own kind of spiritual exploration through the Divinity School there and through my own writing and reading—people like Rabbi Heschel and Thomas Merton.

I’ve really just been following those threads since. So now, I guess my life is focused on those things, both in theory and practice. I have a newsletter called Connected Tissue, which is on the communities, commitments, and connections that make our lives worth living—that bind us together. I’m doing policy work around the role of government in strengthening connection in American communities. I published a policy framework on that last year and continue to work with leaders at the federal, state, and local level along those lines.

I published research on the role of civic life, social connection, and class—creating one report last year called Disconnected that got quite a bit of attention. Where I'm kind of going now is doing more network-based organizing around how we realize our generational project of renewing civic life and our relationships. What is the role of building new forms of networks that are centering people who are rooted in place, who are drawing on principles of participation, who are centering relationships as ends in and of themselves, and who are really thinking of this work as not a one-, three-, or five-year problem to be solved—but like a real generational project.

How do you talk about the problem—or the “how did we get here”? Do you know what I mean? I feel like, what has changed? What happened in the past 25 or 35, or whatever timescale, that we've ended up needing to do all this work so intentionally, as if starting over? That's been my experience. So how do you think about it?

Well, there's like a Russian nesting doll of timescales, right? You can look at this on various timescales.

The most immediate, I think, is maybe starting with the last 20 years, where there was this sense that the internet and technology would bring us closer together. Maybe that would be the thing that would replace and rebuild community—that Robert Putnam wrote about in his work on Bowling Alone and the decline of community.

I think we've come to the end of that narrative. Now, there's this real sense that the business models and incentive structures of our tech and media ecosystem have pulled us more inward—less in community with people. Because ultimately, the local community group is competing with your social media apps, your streaming services, all of these things—for your leisure time, just as television was doing before.

So that's the more immediate timescale story—a kind of leisure time competition and capture of our attention.

Then you can zoom out to the next nesting doll, which would be the more Robert Putnam story around the decline of community. You had these great civic institutions that were cross-class, spread across the United States, and quite accessible. They boomed through the mid-20th century and then started experiencing steep declines. You see significant drop-offs in participation, membership, and connection—through to when he wrote Bowling Alone in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

There are lots of culprits in that story. One is the role of television. Television makes it really easy to get a synthetic experience of connection and entertainment, so you don't need to leave the home. That's a strong culprit.

It’s also changing labor market dynamics. A lot of those groups were supported by women who were working for free. Then women entered the workforce and could no longer provide that free support—which is understandable.

It’s also, frankly, a story of organizational calcification—organizations that emerged to meet a need but were no longer keeping up with the times. For example, when veterans came home from the post-9/11 wars, they weren't going to the American Legion or the VFW nearly as much. They were forming their own new institutions because those past institutions weren’t meeting that need for purpose, community, or translatable skills. They were more active in orientation—not just sitting around the bar.

That’s the 60-year story—the decline of community.

But then there's the 150-year story, which is the story of industrialization itself. The 150- to 200-year period we’re living in right now is quite unique in human history. Historically, we were hunter-gatherers. Then we were living village and agrarian lives, where the scale of the human experience was much smaller. We were more rooted in place, more connected across time.

Then industrialization happened. Men moved into cities, became displaced from organic networks of relationships, connections, memberships. That brought a complete change in our way of life.

Durkheim writes about suicide in that period—the sense of alienation and disconnection that happened as we became uprooted. Much of what Putnam talks about—the birth of civic life in the late 1800s through mid-1900s—was trying to replicate the lost village and agrarian life as people entered cities.

That’s when the YMCA was built. You had all these disconnected men going to brothels and abusing alcohol, and people said, “We need a more pro-social place for men.” The YMCA movement began. That’s when you start to see the Rotaries come about. Not to mention settlement houses and things like that.

That, in and of itself, was a simulacrum of something that was missing. So it's worth thinking about how much of a generational project this is, how much there is to learn and pull from the past that we’ve forgotten—and how much we need to imagine anew. That was more than you probably thought you were going to get bargained for.

Yeah, it was great. I loved how you picked up the timescale part of the argument. It puts it in amazing context and relief. You mentioned Robert Putnam and Bowling Alone, which is one of those books I think a lot of people— I can confess it’s one of those books I own and can nod knowingly about but haven’t actually read. You know what I mean? It's like 600 pages of charts. You're like, yeah, I get the point.

But I think you had a post where you said sort of “Beyond Bob”—that he’s sort of monopolized our imagination of the problem. You introduced me to— is it Theda? Theda Skocpol?

Skocpol. Theda Skocpol, yeah.

And I felt like her diagnosis of the situation was something I really identified with and connected with. It seemed to speak to what I experienced here in my town of Hudson, which had maybe a different kind of culprit. How would you talk about her culprit?

Yeah, I appreciate you bringing that up. I wrote this article about thinking beyond Bob Putnam, and it was much less about Bob himself and more about our inability to expand beyond Bob as our primary reference point. I think he’s potentially one of the top three most prolific and influential social scientists of the last 50 years. So it’s not a critique of Bob as much as a critique of our inability to expand our horizons and the stories we’re telling—because Bob is telling one story, and there are actually a multitude of stories.

One of those stories is by a contemporary of Bob—actually, they’re close friends—Theda Skocpol, also a professor at Harvard. She's likewise prolific and has written a bunch, but the particular relevant line of research is from her book Diminished Democracy, which is about how we’ve shifted from participatory membership to top-down management in civic life. And what that’s done to our experience of being members, neighbors, and citizens within community.

She makes the case that over the same time period that Putnam is talking about civic life declining, civic life was also transforming. The federated, locally rooted membership networks started to be displaced by top-down, managerial, more “grass-tops” advocacy organizations.

What that did was change the relationship between three things: membership, governance, and revenue.

In the old organizations, members were the source of both revenue and governance. They gave the money, and from that, they made decisions about how it was spent. As things shifted, outside funders—big philanthropy—became the source of money. So now, when you're running an organization, you're answering to where the money comes from.

That changes civic life. Instead of being treated as active members who shape the experience—who practice everyday democracy in a very Tocquevillian sense—you become another consumer or client to be delivered a set of services, or to be used instrumentally toward some kind of mobilization endgame.

She argues that this has significantly shaped how we experience democracy. Not to mention, the grass-tops groups became much more upper-middle class in orientation. We actually lost the genuine cross-class membership that defined civic life—particularly from the late 1800s to the mid-1900s—where it really was a cross-class experience to be a member of the Rotary, the YMCA, and things like that.

That aligns with the research we published last year, which was about the growing class divide in civic life. We found that people with college degrees are three to four times more likely to be members of not only community groups, but also religious groups, unions, and other civic forms of participation.

They’re also more likely to access what is now a commercialized and privatized version of community—like SoulCycle, CrossFit, or Equinox, which cost $200 a month, or improv classes that cost $500. We are really seeing what Theda was writing about in the late ’90s and early 2000s just accelerate even further with growing class divides in civic life.

Maybe this is an opportunity to talk about what you're up to and the work that you're doing, and how you see us tackling this generational problem and civic renewal. I feel like this is at the heart—this is what attracted me to your work. So yeah, at Connected Tissue, what's the vision moving forward? What do we do?

Yeah. There are so many ways to tackle this question. I think the first thing is just actually being able to say—to imagine what's possible. What could things be like 100 years from now?

What does it look, feel, smell like to be in a community where you're deeply known, where you're actively participating, where you know your neighbors, where when you're falling on a time of need, you can be supported, where you feel like you have the agency and the trust to shape the direction and the future of your community?

How do we imagine what that possibility is? Then I think, what are the first few steps you take? Because there's no—part of the problem here is we think that there's a strategic plan. We think these things can be measured in this corporate, managerial way. And that's just not how this stuff works. It's much more improvisational and emergent.

If anything, those things are part of the problem because we apply the principles of the machine and these managerial approaches to life and community, which is much more alive, much more organic, much more like an ecosystem than a machine.

So the way I think about it, there are really three— and even this is creating a separation that shouldn't be a separation, but just for the sake of understanding where we can begin—three elements, or three paths, that we can really go down to start to shift civic life and change our experience of relationships and communities. In no particular order:

One is cultural. We’re in a moment of hyper-individualism and self-orientation. What does it look like to shift this back into a more communitarian or solidaristic type of culture? And what are the avenues for exercising cultural change?

In my opinion, one of the most important things we can be doing is relocalizing our fragmented media environment. If you think of the trajectory of media in this country, we went from locally rooted culture—oral and written traditions—to mass culture through radio and television. Now we're in fragmented culture, where I don't have a shared reality with many people, but I do know everyone who's interested in civic life, or everyone who's interested in lifestyle trends, or whatever.

Fragmented culture allows voices and interests that weren't part of the conversation in mass or local culture to have access. Where it could have real potential is using the new forms of media to rebuild localized media ecosystems that are more participatory and community-driven—not just local news telling us what’s best, but incorporating the voices that have been left out.

To me, that's a really interesting potential—making people feel connected to the local culture of their place through the media channels and instruments we have today. This is even an example—you could do a Hudson Today podcast that gets at that.

The second piece is probably equally important, if not more important, enabling the local cultivators of civic life. That means promoting and supporting the people who do the work that makes civic life work—allowing them to do more of it, and creating more people who feel like that’s part of their purpose and meaning in life.

It’s also about creating permission structures to experiment with new things and to share those experiments. “This worked here in Hudson, let’s try it in Charlottesville—how do we adapt that?” And it's about building networks that aren’t mediated by philanthropy, government, corporations, or nonprofits—networks of people rooted in place who are strengthening civic and communal life locally, but also connected across place.

They have the ability to shape their own communities and these networks—in the way Theda Skocpol talked about—where they’re genuine members, actually driving governance decisions, actually figuring out revenue sources to sustain the work so they're not reliant on outside actors. It's about regenerating local activity and organizing to promote it.

The third is really structural change. Thinking about shifting institutions, government, and policy. There’s a lot to be done there. My friend Pete Davis is more fluent on this than I am. He has ideas about building communitarian, community-oriented fields in every institution—reimagining those institutions to be in service of connection and community, rather than just their current purpose.

The policy framework I published is one example. I worked with federal, state, but especially local policymakers to ask: “How do you shift your attention?” For $10,000, you can give away 100 micro-grants for neighbors to gather with neighbors. A block party, a dinner series—whatever it is—that gathering can have positive effects for civic life. It’s affordable, but it’s a shift in attention that can transform the local experience.

These institutions—just like the ones Putnam was talking about in the 1960s—are going through the same process of calcification and rigidity. They need to die, in some cases, and be reborn to serve our shared lives together. That is very much a generational project. And it doesn’t come easily, because there are lots of existing interests keeping institutions the way they are—whether it's the over-professionalization of nonprofits, or the risk mitigation mindset of local governments. These are major shifts. But those are your three pillars to start with.

I think the last thing I'll say—because this is a very long response—but the last thing I'll say is, it's worth thinking through what are the principles that will underpin this moment. Because if we can ground onto principles that hold us together, the practices, in some ways, should flow from those principles and should be adapted and responsive to local context, because every place is going to be different. The principles that I've kind of started to land on—I alluded to it, but I'll just spell it out a little bit more.

First is centering the role of proximity and place. What's important is place-based work in particular places, with particular leaders who are embedded in those places. Thinking of scale not as something that happens top-down in a corporate style, but about locally rooted people who are connected across place. That's in opposition to the kinds of abstractions we see—particularly in the nonprofit and government world, but also from this leap of scale that happened from venture capital and private equity and corporate world into civic world—where it's about ownership and owning as much as possible across place. That’s what we’re pushing back against.

The second thing is participation and participatory practices. It’s not treating residents as customers, consumers, or clients to be delivered a set of services. It's not that technocratic approach. It's actually inviting residents and neighbors to participate at every phase of the process. I know you’ve talked a little about citizens’ assemblies; I know you’re interested in this. But it’s everything—from the beginning to the end—should be participatory, including governance, including decision-making.

The third piece, I think, is really important and could be lost: emphasizing relational approaches and relationships as ends in and of themselves. I’m not talking to you because I want to get my voice out there through a podcast. Our relationship started from mutual appreciation, and things can flow from that. But that has to be translated into all elements of civic life.

Right now, we're so caught in this transactionalization and instrumentalization of things, where everything becomes “in order to.” To really recover relationships, it’s a shift toward the sense that relationships are ends in and of themselves.

Then the last piece—you could call it durability, you could call it generational work—is what I was saying: you need to be thinking about this in much larger timescales. Because if we're not thinking about it that way, we're going to be disappointed. This stuff isn’t going to change overnight. This stuff is not going to have measurable outcomes in a short period of time. So thinking about this in terms of that generational context is quite important.

No, it’s wonderful. What do you love about the work that you’re doing? I mean, clearly, in listening to you tell the story, this sort of came out of you and it comes from a deep place. What do you love about the work, and where’s the joy in it for you?

Yeah. I’ll say this because I think it’s worth naming: I think people who feel a good sense of belonging and feel very much at home are not often the people who are doing this work. I think you're often doing it because you’ve had bad experiences with groups, or discomfort with groups, and you’re curious about why and want to understand it. I very much fit into that. My friends make fun of me that I’ve left more group chats than anyone they know. So I very much fit into that category.

What brings me joy—I think there’s such a moment of potential right now. There are so many cool experiments happening in communities across the United States. Every day I learn about a new one. I see people doing work that is very countercultural, which is to say, “I’m going to come up with creative ways to bring people together around a shared purpose in a particular place.” So much of that is happening right now.

That’s extraordinarily joyful—meeting those people, seeing this moment of tense experimentation and creativity. I think it’s happening because we’re in this in-between story. We’re at the end of the post–World War II, particularly neoliberal, narrative, and the new story hasn’t been written yet.

It’s a fraught moment—there could be very scary narratives that fill that void—but it’s also a moment of intense possibility. A lot of people are waking up to that. Being in relationship with those people, learning from them, and sharing what they’re doing is really exciting.

There’s also a cultural shift. I've been saying this: a recovery of the idea that you don’t need permission to do s**t. You can just do stuff. This collective recognition that, “Oh, I don’t need the expert to tell me how. I don’t need the manager to approve it. I can just turn my garage into a bar for my neighbors, and we can hang out there.”

That’s really exciting. It’s a big part of recovering a sense of agency—recovering what it means to be an active member of a community.

The last thing I’ll say is, there’s a real spirit underpinning this. For some it’s religious; for others, broadly spiritual. But the turn toward saying, “The destinies and fates of the people who live near me are important, and I want to be in solidarity and communion with them”—that’s a spiritual turn.

For me, being Jewish, maybe it’s the idea that other humans are made in the image of God. For someone else, it might be an ecological sense that we’re all part of a bigger project. But the injection of spirit into a world that, for me at least, has felt very material and dead in many ways—that’s quite energizing.

Yeah, I mean, so much you said I connect with there. In particular, that recovery of agency. My story in Hudson is a very generic sort of—I was just a new dad frustrated about an intersection, you know what I mean? And it's really banal, but somebody in government said to me, “No one will stop you.” I had never been told that before. But it was exactly what I needed to hear because I was operating under the assumption that I'm not somebody that can do something like this. There are other people that do this for a living, and it's all very complicated and way above my pay grade. But it was a giant unlock for me to be told that you can just do these things because you live where you live, and it’s yours to make it into what you want it to be, in a way. Or at least to invite the people around you into imagining—yeah, that you could do something different.

And then what? You're—how many years later now—you’re actually saying, “Well, I could run for mayor.” I could do that.

Yeah. Yeah. One hundred percent. Yeah, it is, too. Yeah, it's amazing. And I'm curious—two things there, but I have two questions trying to get out at the same time. One, I think, is: how do you know that we're in this moment? Both in terms of: how do you know that it's as bad as it is, or that there's a problem? What's the evidence that you have?

Because I think you and I connect, because there's a lot of abstractions even in what you and I are talking about. I'm wondering, on the day-to-day, on-the-ground level, what do you point to to help people see the absence, the gap, the lack?

Yeah, it's interesting. It's one of those things where you draw on data to tell a story about the problem. And then, part of the story about what goes forward is saying: we need to rely a little bit less on data. Because data can give us one window into our reality, but it's one of many windows.

So I’ll start with the statistical, the data story. Then I’ll say what I think is the experiential story, which hopefully goes beyond the data.

What we know from a data perspective is that the story Putnam told about the decline of civic life has just amplified in the 25 years since he wrote it.

Religious membership is at an all-time low. Religious participation is at an all-time low—though it seems to be bottoming out. It doesn’t seem to be dropping further, which is interesting.

Union membership—particularly for people without college degrees—has declined. Unions were, for working-class people, not only a source of worker protections and stability, but also a community. That has declined, and it’s now become more dominated by people with college degrees. Think about public-sector unions.

Community participation—though harder to measure, because community has transformed—has particularly declined among people without college degrees.

When we think about the outcomes of all these avenues for community participation, it’s our relationships. What we see is that a quarter of Americans without degrees have no close friends, compared to 10 percent of Americans with degrees.

That’s up since 1990. It used to be only 3 percent of Americans without degrees and 2 percent of Americans with degrees had no close friends. So you're seeing an eightfold increase.

I don't even think it's loneliness—because loneliness is subjective. This is just being left alone. It’s aloneness. You don’t have anyone to turn to. That translates into social support. Particularly among people without degrees, a good portion—if they lost housing—don’t have someone they can turn to who could put a roof over their head. Many don’t have someone to turn to who could care for their child in a time of need.

So this is not just an abstract thing, or what could feel like a squishy thing. It’s the difference between having a roof over your head or not. It’s the difference between having care or not.

Then we can look at the data on premature mortality for people without college degrees—particularly men—which has increased significantly. The lifespan for people without college degrees has gone down. Life expectancy has gone down in the last 15 years.

Part of that’s the opioid epidemic, part is suicide, part is heart disease and things like that. But people’s lives are being cut short.

All of those things, I think, are part of it. Then there's the experiential part. When I’ve shared it, it seems like people relate to it. I think many people feel like there are forces—this is where the agency piece comes in—there are forces outside of your control that are exerting influence on your life, where you feel like you're a pawn in someone else's game.

That could be government. Honestly, people on both sides have felt this for a period of time. That could be corporations—our technology, our concentrated tech ecosystem, which is shaping human behavior. It could also be nonprofits and the social sector.

Particularly poor people, who are more often dealing with social services, feel like they are being treated as pawns in the social services ecosystem. There’s this experiential feeling. On the other side of that is: we’re designed for connection. Not only connection to other people, but connection to the natural world, and to something transcendent or beyond us.

The disembodiedness, disembeddedness, disconnectedness, and alienation of many people’s modern experiences is a signal—a turn toward something else.

I’ve observed a real shift toward the mystical. Toward mysticism—not just in my circles, but across the world. There’s this new kind of theism emerging. I think that's in response to the deadness of the world in some ways.

You're seeing mass turns to people going out into nature. Hiking has gone through the roof in the last 15 years. Visitation of national parks has gone through the roof.

That's a direct response to this disembeddedness and disembodiedness. We can point to the data, but we can also point to: “Huh, something doesn’t feel right.” And that’s okay.

Honestly, I think we should be able to try—part of the realization that we don’t need permission to do anything is realizing we can trust our intuition. If something feels off, trust that something feels off. So I don’t know. It’s messy and complicated. But I think it’s all of those things, and much, much more.

Yeah, well, I love that you pushed back on my request for data and argued for the validity of intuition. I mean, I’m a qualitative researcher who talks to people face-to-face and is advocating all the time, you know what I mean? For the validity of intuition and imagination and all the messy, squishy human stuff.

It’s funny how much of what you're talking about mirrors the corporatization of life, you know what I mean? With quantitative data and measurement as the lingua franca, just edging out any space for creative, imaginative talk or anything. Right?

Yeah. I mean, it's just one of—it's not illegitimate. It’s one of many ways of knowing. And I think it’s about recognizing that we need a pluralism of ways of knowing—a multiplicity of ways of knowing. That changes how we show up, the stories we tell, and all of these types of things.

I have this sense that life, our place on Earth, the universe—it’s much more ineffable, much more bizarre, much weirder than we can really put into words or fully understand. There’s a kind of hubris in thinking that we can know a lot of these things.

Hopefully, as I’m talking, this doesn’t come off as authoritative. My real orientation is curiosity and openness. In Judaism, it’s very much about living into the questions—being driven by inquiry rather than by answers. That’s how I hope to keep showing up.

Yeah, it’s beautiful. I really love what you’re doing. I’m excited that you joined me here for this conversation. I have one thought that’s bouncing around, which gets to what you’re talking about. Actually, I’m going to forget the guy’s name—the author who wrote Against Elections: The Case for Democracy. David Van Reybrouck. My butchered summarization is that democratic participation has been winnowed down to voting every four years. The whole landscape of opportunity to behave as a citizen has been minimized to this one act—flipping a switch or checking a box every four years. So it’s no wonder we don’t have any behaviors. We need to develop new ways of interacting with each other and coming together.

Yeah. One of the groups I always shout out—they’re a member of one of the networks I’m helping bring together—is called Warm Cookies of the Revolution. They’re in Denver, Colorado, and throughout Colorado.

Their motto is: “Vote every day.” It’s exactly that idea. Voting, when it becomes a transaction—and when we’re treated by politicians as instruments—it becomes just a checkbox.

Sure, voting is a part of democracy. But it should be one expression of it, not the only expression. It’s about how we all collectively work to vote every day—to make it part of our day-to-day experiences, not just one little thing we do.

That’s right. I think he had said that we’ve democratized everything except democracy. Are there other—what other beacons of hope are there? You mentioned Warm Cookies. What are the models out there that you see that are working, that excite you? Any other stories from the network that you’d want to share or call attention to as part of the evidence of the future story?

Yeah. There are so many little examples.

We’re doing an event at the end of September—talking in September now—where we’re doing a showcase of people who are cultivating civic membership. It’s all these people asking: how do we welcome newcomers? How do we deepen a sense of connection and membership when you're in a place? And even, how do you feel like an alumni of a place after you leave?

Some of this is just recovering things we've always done. There are groups around the country. I wrote a piece called “Why Every Town Should Have a Welcome Kit.” Now, there are groups all over the country creating welcome kits for newcomers—making it part of a welcoming process for new neighbors. Because transitioning to a new place is a moment of great peril, but also great possibility. You can reconnect with people, connect to participation, all of that.

So let’s actually think about welcoming when people arrive.

There’s a ton happening now to deepen that sense of membership. One of the people joining our event has been hosting activities fairs in Philadelphia, where people can meet different clubs—like the activities fairs you’d have in high school or college, but for participating in community as an adult.

There are people building directories of local groups and clubs, so you can easily find how to get involved.

Boston has an Office of Civic Organizing that gives out $500 block party grants to neighbors across the city—to just host block parties and bring people together. It’s government-funded. They make permitting easier so you don’t have to deal with all the BS. They don’t ask for receipts. They just say, “Send us a picture to prove the block party happened.”

That’s a great example of something that’s popular. Why doesn’t every government do that? Every government should be giving out these grants. That’s all really exciting examples of things that are going on.

Then there are traditions we forget about that were part of culture in so many places—like this idea of old home days or old home weeks. Throughout the country, every year or every few years, you invite people who’ve left your place to come back and reconnect. It’s like a homecoming. That creates a sense of rootedness. That stuff alone is really quite interesting.

I think there’s a ton of experimentation that’s just starting to happen around how we make third places more accessible while also being commercially viable. I just heard of a guy who’s doing phone-free third places. You go to a coffee shop, bar, or gym, and you have to put your phone in a pouch—so you interact with people when you’re there. You’re not just on your phone or computer while you’re in that place.

I also just think—you’re starting to see it in the culture. For the first time in the ten years I’ve been working on this, I actually think we are at the start of that generational moment. I think it has the potential to be much more durable.

Part of that is because the conditions have gotten so dire technologically. I think the threat of AI is going to challenge what it means to be human, and people are going to lean into more human experiences because of that.

We’re at this hinge-point moment. When you start looking around, you start seeing that these seeds of renewal are popping up everywhere. I’m sure you’re seeing that in Hudson. Again, I learn a new thing every day that’s going on, which is really cool.

That’s the time that we have. How should people find you? What’s the best way to connect with you?

I’m not a big social media guy, but the Connective Tissue newsletter is probably the best way to keep up with what we’re doing. You can contact me directly through that if you want. I’m honestly always interested in not only learning about what people are doing, but as people are thinking about experimenting in their place—being of support for these little local experiments.

Sam, thank you so much.

Thanks, Peter.