The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

144 chapter 9Putnam’s work by Dora Costa, Matthew Hahn, Robert Cushing, andothers. 19 The decline of social solidarity that worries Putnam seems to beexaggerated.In particular the numerous “weak ties” of the modern world, as MarkGranovetter put it, have, taken together, great strength. They are like a ropemade of many strands. At the beginning of modernity Bishop Butler usedthe same phrase as the sociologists now use looking back on it: “Anythingmay serve ...to hold humanity together in little fraternities and copartnerships:weak ties, indeed, and what may afford fund enough forridicule, if they are absurdly considered as the real principle of that union;but they are in truth merely the occasions.” 20 The occasions of work groupingsand hobby clubs and NASCAR races is the “natural principle of attractionin man towards man” which one finds in 2006 as much as in 1725.Putnam yearns for the one-strand rope of an invented tradition. Floridachallenges him gently:I am not advocating that we adopt lives composed entirely of weak ties. ...Butmost Creative Class people that I’ve met and studied do not aspire to such a lifeand don’t seem to be falling into it. ...They have significant others; they haveclose friends; they call mom. But their lives are not dominated or dictated bystrong ties to the extent that many lives were in the past. . . . Interestingly, peopleseem to prefer it this way. Weak ties allow us to mobilize more resources andmore possibilities for ourselves and others, and expose us to novel ideas that arethe source of creativity. 21Richard Sennett, in The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequencesof Work in the New Capitalism (1998) is, like Bellah and other communitarians,nostalgic for strong ties, the “social bonds [which] take time todevelop, slowly rooting into the cracks and crevices of institutions.” 22 He hasparticular nostalgia, as many on the left and right do, for the 1950s in America:“Strong unions, guarantees of the welfare state, and large-scale corporationscombined to produce an era of relative stability.” 23 I remind mycommunitarian and neocon friends—who share more than they realize alove of “stability”—that if you were not male and white and straight and asuburbanite and a union member, those 1950s were not in fact very nice,even in America. They were nice only by comparison with still earlier timesof still stronger ties, still greater stability, and still tighter social bonds rootedin institutions. Enracinement sounds nice. But the real glory is the flower,the human flourishing, not the roots.