Secret to Living Longer, Join A Club! Social Ties, Civic Engagement Help Democracy: 'Join or Die' Film

'The secret to living longer: join a club.' The documentary Join or Die examines the decline of civic engagement in America – and how it has fueled a worsening national crisis. The Guardian, July 23, 2024. 🎾 📚
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Between the 1970s and 1990s, the number of Americans who attended a single local civic meeting in a year plummeted by 40%. The number who went to a single meeting of a club – say, the Rotary or a local tennis team – dropped by 50%. Even the number of picnics Americans joined dropped by 60%. And as the social scientist Robert Putnam has been telling us for decades, this matters – in fact, it may be a question of life or death.

That’s because, as Putnam has told audiences, “your chances of dying over the next year are cut in half by joining one group.”

And it’s not just a matter of our own health – it’s about the health of democracy itself.

Hence the strikingly direct title of a new documentary focused on Putnam’s life: Join or Die. The phrase harks back to Ben Franklin’s call for unity among the colonies, appropriate given the film’s central message: a healthy democracy depends on citizens’ sense of connection to each other, and that sense depends on participation in organizations of all kinds, from churches to bowling leagues. The decline of these groups, the film argues, is linked to plunging faith in our system of government.

The film, which arrived in US theaters on Friday, combines a memoir of sorts with a call to action, issued by prominent figures including Hillary Clinton and Pete Buttigieg; the surgeon general, Vivek Murthy; the economists Glenn Loury and Raj Chetty; and the union organizer Jane McAlevey. Its central character is Putnam himself, the gregarious author of the landmark 2000 book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community.

The book, and an article that preceded it, made waves in American civic life, leading the Harvard professor, now 83, to make appearances at the Clinton White House, on talkshows and in People magazine. The topic it shares with the film – the decline of social cohesion in the US, and the accompanying downward spiral of democracy – might sound like a bit of a downer. But Join Or Die, produced and directed by the siblings Rebecca and Pete Davis, makes its case in upbeat terms, with delightful archival images of 20th-century clubs, sketch-like animations by Mark Lopez and enthusiastic narration by Pete Davis...
https://www.theguardian.com/film/article/2024/jul/23/join-or-die-documentary-review