Mandatory Fun
19th May 2021
Severian is delightfully dyspeptic today.
Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone is one of those books everyone knows, but no one has read (I haven’t). It’s quite a trick, really, to have something so “in the air” like that, such that nobody actually has to read it. If you’ve been to college, or read even a BoomerCon or CivNat site, you know it, in the same way everyone who has been to college knows stuff like Orientalism and Manufacturing Consent. But in case you’ve forgotten, Putnam’s thesis is that social cohesion is real, it’s important, and it is rapidly degrading. His metaphor is bowling leagues — these things used to be everywhere (I was in one in junior high, meaning, the phenomenon was so widespread they could have youth leagues); now they’re not.
…
Mandatory, government-sponsored fun has been on the European Left’s agenda practically since the Estates General. All of that stuff — hiking clubs, guitar clubs, model this-and-that clubs — falls under “building Socialism,” and the idea is either to totally replace a community’s organic ties with State-mandated bonds, or to restore a community’s organic ties via State-mandated bonds, depending on whether the “Socialism” you’re building is of the Soviet or Nazi variety.