Still Connected: Family and Friends in America since 1970 by Claude S. Fischer (review)

Commentators on American culture have always been struck by the thinness of the country's social fabric. Tocqueville saw the young republic as a nation of strangers. Critics since have almost all feared for—or gloried in—the fragility of the bonds that have held us to one another. In the nineteenth century, Emerson and Whitman celebrated the "isolato" as the quintessential American character. In the twentieth, David Riesman worried about our lonely crowds and Robert Putnam fretted that we were bowling alone. To this day, an arcane academic study alleging that a quarter of us have not a single close friend sets off a journalistic feeding frenzy that reaches to Reuters, NPR, and the New York Times.

Claude Fischer challenged that study when it appeared, and he has made a bit of a career, recently, of impugning prophecies of the imminent unraveling of American society. He has doubted declarations that things are bad and cautioned against claims that they are getting worse. In this book, he brings together the evidence, in the most systematic canvass of the survey data on friendship and social support that we have ever had. What he finds will hearten those inclined to be hopeful and give pause to those disposed to pessimism. It will inform—and surprise—everyone. But in the end it will not change many minds. In the end it simply does not touch our anxieties in the deep places where they actually live.

Fischer knows as much as anyone about American social networks. His command of the immense archive of public opinion research is breathtaking. His treatment of his material is smart, perceptive, and judicious. More than that, it is wryly witty. Its methodological sophistication is powerful yet never ponderous. No modern scholar writes of method and numbers—the stuff and substance of this work—more deftly or seductively. No one makes minute distinctions and subtle differentiations more accessible.

The burden of Fischer's argument and achievement is easily summarized. Very few Americans are without significant support from family and friends, and very little has changed in that regard over the past forty years.

Fischer bases those conclusions on a careful reconnaissance of the survey data collected by the many organizations which regularly ask representative samples of Americans about their activities and attitudes. He is well aware of the shortcomings of these surveys. But, as he says, those polls provide us with "the best evidence we have—really, the only evidence—of what happened."

As Fischer assembles that evidence, it is hard to dispute his insistence that, from 1970 to 2009, not much happened. As he tracks the vicissitudes of our experience of linkage and aloneness, it is hard to take seriously the panic about social connectedness that contemporary critics posit. Give or take a very few percentage points, we spend as much time with our kids today as we did four decades ago, and are as much in touch with our parents, and see other relatives as often. We have as many non-family friends, visit with them as frequently, and message with them as much. We depend on family and friends alike for material and emotional support, and value them and are satisfied with our relations with them, to the same degree today as in 1970.

Even iconoclasts may be astonished by the cumulative force of Fischer's numbers. Constantly across the decades for which we have survey data, 80 percent of us had friends or relatives on whom we could call for money if we needed it, and 60 percent of us had three or more people with whom we discussed "important matters." Two-thirds called their best friend at least once a week, and three-quarters called or visited. Seventy percent were in touch with their mother weekly or more often, and 50 percent with their father. As many as half saw parents every week, and as many as 60 percent spent an evening...