There is a silent crisis across much of the world today, one that is criminally neglected because it is invisible, affects younger and poorer people most of all, and yet has dire consequences for all our lives far beyond most of the issues that pass for News. Many of the chronic ailments in modern life are downstream of this crisis; the health and wealth of millions could be improved if we fixed it; and plenty of recent research suggests that the surge in populism and polarisation across Western democracies is directly linked to this issue, which I want to explore in this week’s newsletter.

I’m talking about the Crisis of Connection.

Across many countries, cultures and continents in the first quarter of the 21st century, social bonds have attenuated at an alarming rate. Civic and associational life, the life of the neighbourhood and local community, the farmer’s market and the bazaar, is in retreat. The little platoons of Burkean folklore are becoming fewer and smaller. Membership of local groups and clubs beyond our families has been falling, and continues to fall. And yet all the evidence suggests there is a yearning for such belonging, and an enduring desire for the social bonds - the connections - that give us support and joy. This gap - between the trend and the common hope - is one of the great callings of our time, and it is one of the primary reasons I called my new world The Amol Rajan Connection. 

To understand this gap, how we got here, and how we might fix it, we have to go back to the mid-1990s. There is a lot of nostalgia for the 1990s around right now (see below), and I wish to submit another candidate for your attention, worthy of a revisit.  My submission is a seminal book that explained much of our politics before it meant to. 

In 1995, the Harvard Professor Robert Putnam published an essay on “the collapse and revival of American community.” Since then, it’s been mostly collapse, and little revival. Five years after the original essay, it became the seminal Bowling Alone, a bestseller that turned Putnam into an globally feted star Putnam used decades of social data to show that across countless indicators, Americans were spending less time with people outside of their family. Mixing socially was in hasty retreat. Remarkably, in the 1960s, America was more equal and less polarised than egalitarian Sweden. But then something changed. Where once upon a time Americans would go bowling in local leagues, increasingly they would bowl alone. 

Sports clubs were showing this marked trend across the country, and across all sports. Meanwhile, mothers unions, friendly societies, trade unions, the Rotary Club, and countless other local institutions once embedded in American life were slowly decaying. Add to that the rapid decline in religious attendance, even in godly America, and the citizens of this beautiful experiment in democracy were becoming estranged. 

Putnam gave us the useful distinction between bonding capital - that is, relations between us and people like ourselves - and bridging capital - that is, relations between us and people unlike ourselves. He argued that both were weakening, and two technologies were key to the decline of civic and associational life. The car allowed people to live further from the city centre, giving rise to the suburbs and longer, more solitary commutes. In a previous era, that commuting time might have been spent talking to a neighbour, or in the pub. And, to a much greater extent than we realised at the time, television transformed modern life. Instead of playing outside, kids were watching the box in the corner with their family. Hard to recall: televisions weren’t very common even in the 1950s, whether in America, Britain, India, or wherever. Before then, screen culture was a social experience: you watched on a big screen, often outside, among big audiences. Television initiated the privatisation of leisure.

Well, technology has been on a wild ride since then. The internet, social media and smartphones are familiar foes in this arena. It sometimes feels as if smartphones get blamed for everything, not just the dawn of the post-literate society, but England’s failure to win the World Cup and my excessive pizza consumption last Friday. It seems common sense to suggest that the smartphone is the biggest killer of social capital ever invented, and it probably is; but the causality is hard to prove. What isn’t hard to prove is the isolation of an entire generation. 

We are blessed today with several excellent data journalists in Britain, including John Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times and Tom Calver of The Sunday Times. Last month, Burn-Murdoch produced a scorcher of a column, which opened with him figuratively falling off his chair on seeing a data point in the American Time Use Survey. He was shocked to discover that “on an average day in 2023, one in 10 young Americans aged between 23 and 29 did not spend a single minute interacting face to face with another person.” That is shocking, but to me somehow not surprising, given what we know about the impact of the pandemic. The extraordinary change in Britain is that, according to the IPPR, “while the average young Briton has roughly 5 close friends - the same figure as in 2015 - the portion with not a single close friend has shot up from 1 in 100 to 1 in 20. 

A new class of super-alienated young people is emerging. A bunch of absolute loners. 

I was actually much more horrified by a previous column Burn-Murdoch wrote, in January 2025, showing the degree to which loneliness is rising among young people. On a graph, it looks like the side of a mountain. We used to think of loneliness as a phenomenon of the old. Today it is most acute among the young. 

Last month, Calver wrote a superb column about how, in the past 15 years, Boomers and Zoomers have inhabited completely different media universes, and so no longer have a shared cultural script. He reported that, among the over-65s, linear TV viewing has remained largely unchanged. But among 16-24 year-olds “it has cratered from 171 minutes a day to just 36. Britain is losing the cultural hegemony,” Calver wrote, “that acted as a sort of social glue between ages.”. He also looked at at the old-age dependency ratio, which is the number of over-65s as a percentage of the number of 16 to 64 year-olds in an area. He found that in the 1980s, young and old lived side-by-side. Today, urban areas remain young, but rural areas have become much older: “In other words, this media fragmentation is mirrored in the real world, with one sad consequence: young and old are increasingly unlikely to interact at all.”

In a major report last year, working alongside UCL and Citizens UK, the research group More in Common found that 44% of Britons say they sometimes feel like strangers to those around them. It’s hard to know how much of an increase this is on, say, the 1950s, because historic data is patchy. But an increase it is likely to be. There is a class divide here, of course: among the poorest, 67% say they feel disconnected from society, whereas only 37% of those who describe themselves as financially comfortable say the same. Nearly two centuries after Marx pinched the idea of alienation from Ludwig Feuerbach, and applied it to Money rather than God, the poor are more alienated than ever: socially as much as economically. 

This is a central argument of Gordon Brown’s excellent new book, The Future Starts With Us. In my last week at BBC News, I spent over an hour talking to Gordon (no, this is not name-dropping; yes, now that I’m writing to you, rather than talking on the BBC, I will call friends by their first name). He is riveting company. His new book specifically sets out to update Putnam. Fresh polling he conducted for the book paints a grim picture of social life in modern Britain. Half of our adult population are not involved in any civic community group; 40% say if they were in difficulty, apart from their immediate family, there’s nobody they could turn to; 67% say they’ve got 3 friends or less; and 12% say they’ve got no friends. (This last stat seems consistent with Burn-Murdoch’s finding about absolute loners).

“We’re witnessing something epochal,” Gordon told me on the TODAY Programme. “If the physical infrastructure like the roads and the railways broke down, there’d be immediate calls for action,” he said. “If the financial infrastructure broke down, there’d be this panic. But we’ve got this breakdown in our civic society, and we have to turn our attention to it.”

The specific argument of Brown’s book is that those who feel most socially disconnected are likely to be attracted to extreme politics, and less likely to support the principle of international co-operation. They are also likely to be less happy and healthy. Decades of abundant evidence prove that, on average, the greatest source of happiness for most people is connection to other people, and that strong social capital is a good indicator of longevity. 

Perhaps the most common symbol of this Crisis of Connection is the decline of the English pub. This is a complicated story: another superb Calver column showed it’s not as clear cut as some people suggest. It is true that Britain’s overall pub numbers have fallen from around 100,000 in 1900 to 38,000 today; but the rise of gastro-pubs and chains means actually there are many bigger pubs which employ more people. Still, pubs are disappearing at quite a clip. They added, in Roger Scruton’s beautiful phrase, to the moral savings of the community; and those savings are in short supply.

Before turning to the cause of this slowly unfolding catastrophe, it is worth saying that some people reject the declinist narrative. I had a brief email exchange last month with Ravi Gurumurthy, the boss of NESTA and one of the smartest policy thinkers around. (Check out his Substack). He said that Bobby Duffy’s work argues that social capital has been pretty resilient, and indeed rose during COVID. In his own work on the subject, Gurumurthy shows that there are different types of social capital and - like Brown - argues that mixing people across class boundaries is a key driver of social mobility. In general, he says, Whitehall pays scandalously little attention to social capital.

There is a common argument between scholars about what really drives human History: technology or culture? Naturally, I think it’s a mix of both. Of course, the smartphone has given rise to deep isolation among many young people. But it’s also connected many others, and though fragmentation of the media is unstoppable, we are now seeing audiences for shows on YouTube or streaming giants which unite audiences as big as some of the most famous TV shows of old. That’s certainly an ambition of our YouTube channel, and if you’re interested in these ideas, they were central to my Alternative MacTaggart Lecture in Edinburgh last month, which you can see now. 

I actually think culture has got off too lightly here. Liberalism, with its sharp emphasis on autonomy, the individual, and self-actualisation, has been too quiet for too long on social contribution and civic virtues such as duty. It is also worth saying that there is a clearly a trade-off between diversity and solidarity, at least in the short-term. This is a point Putnam has himself acknowledged in sensitive, caveated, careful arguments. We have had immigration on an unprecedented scale in Britain, and indeed many Western democracies. Well managed migration can and does clearly make not just countries but cultures stronger. The point is you have to plan it well, execute it competently, be honest about the trade-offs, recognise that the costs and benefits are unevenly distributed, and where necessary prioritise the gentle application of national citizen contracts. On every one of those fronts, recent British governments have not excelled. 

And of course work has completely changed. As I’ve tried to argue in recent years, the old working class of post-war Britain doesn’t exist any more. It’s easy to romanticise life in a mine or on a factory floor from decades ago; but it had certain social compensations, including trade union membership and camaraderie, which many of today’s poorest workers don’t have. The post-war working class sold labour, or muscle, for a wage; was ethnically homogeneous; had a tremendous sense of social solidarity and even class consciousness, and belonged to clubs that have long since disappeared. 

So the technologies of today, the moral space vacated by liberalism, the decline of faith, demographic transformation and new forms of work have all dramatically accentuated the trends that Professor Putnam warned us about a quarter of a century ago. I emailed him this week, finding his address just by Googling his name. (We take this sort of thing for granted; barely a few decades ago, you’d have to write a letter and send it by plane). I wanted to say thank you for the profound influence his thinking had on mine. Within a couple of hours, the great Professor had replied.

After 20 years of meeting famous people, and a decade of interviewing them on the airwaves, I really don’t get star-struck anymore. Unless, that is, I come across a great intellect; a mind that I revere. When I saw the email from ‘Bob’ Putnam, I must tell you, my heart skipped a beat. I had mentioned my conversations with Gordon in my email to him. I hope “Bob”, as he signed off, won’t mind my quoting him: “Gordon and I share a similar diagnosis, including a sense that until we can have a moral revival—not sexual morality, but simply the Golden Rule [treat others as you wish to be treated yourself], it will be hard to turn the various vicious circles in which we are trapped into virtuous ones.”

Me too, Professor. How do we go about that, and revive community life in Britain? That will be the subject of next week’s newsletter.

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Many of you have kindly asked for recommendations of things to watch, see and listen to. It is nice and humbling to be asked, and given the whole ethos of the ARC Universe is to slow your world down, and try to be useful to you, I’m happy to oblige. Out of respect for your precious time, I’ll generally keep these brief.

Visit:

What with being a fully paid-up panjandrum, I was invited along with dozens of others to have an early viewing of the Bayeaux Tapestry at the British Museum this week. It is a quite astonishing achievement - and that’s just the diplomacy to get it here, never mind the unfathomable practicalities. Kudos to George Osborne, the Chair, Nicholas Cullinan, the Director, and all the unrecognised Foreign Office officials who worked so hard on the deal. First impressions: it is very long, it is very detailed (you can really make out the expressions on some of the faces more than you think you might, given they were put together a millennium ago) and it is (ahem) a ripping yarn. The sense of narrative, of an unfolding plot as you move along, is utterly remarkable, and being within centimetres of lived history, woven a thousand years ago, is immense and special. Worth trying to go if you can.

Read:

Natural Disaster, by Lisa Owens. She is a good mate, but you’ll have to trust me on this: I haven’t read a novel in one sitting for years, what with having a busy life. But I started this on the flight to Jamaica earlier this year, and finished it as we landed. It was quite literally unputdownable. It’s a day-in-the-life romp about a nameless young Mum for whom everything that could go wrong does go wrong, and it observes all the little conflicts and neuroses and particulars of life on maternity paternity leave with a crime reporter’s attention to detail, and irresistible wit. I found it so painful and funny and it made me feel very, very glad that our youngest has now turned 3. Hard recommend, whether you’re a parent or not.

Watch:

This week I saw the first episode of Katie Price: Nothing to Hide. What is it with all these documentaries about screwed up famous people, all these documentaries about the 1990s, and all these documentaries that combine the two? And yet it was brilliantly made, and rather riveting. All the key players in her life were there, and it was just profoundly sad to discover that this beautiful young girl was sexually assaulted in a park as a child. I didn’t know that. The Freudian theme that runs through this episode, in which ‘Jordan’ comes across as likeable, smart, and lacking in self-pity, was that this childhood trauma inspired the darker days that lay ahead, and which ensuing episodes will chronicle. 

Listen: 

I have become a bit obsessed with investing, for personal reasons that I might explain as the ARC Universe grows. I don’t do it much, as I’m still learning. I do think the allocation of capital is a very useful way to understand the world, and where it’s going, at a deep level. That is why my current favourite podcast is Wilfred Frost’s Master Investor. It does require a little bit of specialist knowledge, but for me it’s pitched at just the right level (as is Merryn Talks Money, hosted by the excellent Merryn Somerset Webb of Bloomberg, and the always valuable Making Money Podcast). Wilfred worked in Finance, and then presented CNBC’s Closing Bell from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. His grasp of markets and economics more broadly are unmistakeable, and you can tell he exudes intellectual confidence precisely because he avoids jargon. It’s a great place for specialists and beginners alike, and I am addicted to it. 

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One solution to the crisis of community is, obviously, live events. You couldn’t really say they’re having a moment, because they never went away. I love the energy and thrill and dynamism of live events, and I can honestly say the prospect of next year’s national tour is one of the things I’m most excited about. We’re doing live recordings of the vodcast (the weekly show on YouTube and podcast platforms) all around the country. Though I’m very sorry to those people from Exeter to Brighton and Glasgow who have upbraided me for ignoring them. We’ll come to you soon! 

We have had a bonkers number of people sign up - and yet tickets are only available on general release from… today. Please come! I can promise you high energy, entertainment, a great crowd, plenty of laughs and a small but - who knows? - durable improvement in your life. Maybe even Enlightenment. The guests are going to be phenomenal, trust me; I’ve just signed up a former Prime Minister. Tickets available on the Fane website. 

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I really do mean it when I say I want to create a club with a strong sense of connection and membership. As a subscriber, please do always say hi if you ever see me out and about. As long as I’m not trying to feed an unruly toddler at that precise moment, I’m generally quite amiable. Earlier this week I was next to St Paul’s Cathedral, gawping at its majestic design, and a wonderful lady called Helen - Hi Helen! - said hello. I won’t give you her surname in case Helen is mortified at being a new subscriber to the coolest club anywhere. But given how nice she was, my impression is that she’s pretty happy about it. Thanks Helen. I’m very grateful that you signed up, and I hope to bump into you again. 

Have a great weekend!

Yours ARCfully

AMOL

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