Book Chapter Review: Weaving Social Capital

Grandmother: Le, let's stay at Grandmother's house, accompany Grandmother
Grandson: No, there's no wifi at Grandma's house
Grandmother: Yes, you can buy a quota package later, right? Would you like that?
Grandson: Yes, but promise, okay?
Grandpa: Yes

That's the conversation between a grandmother and her grandson who has just entered elementary school. A dialogue fragment that is actually unusual and never crossed the minds of the younger generation. baby boomers, generation x and generation y. This is at least starting to be found in generation z. From the dialogue excerpt I just want to show that the world has now experienced a transition phase. A truly real condition that George Gilder, Newt Gingrich, Al Gore, Nicholas Negroponte and the husband and wife Alvin and Heidi Toffler reviewed long before. How information (which we can now represent with internet quota) really penetrates the recesses of human life, especially generation z who since birth have been presented with the information era.

The era also known as the post-industrial era, or the third wave era is now really getting clearer. In the transition era entering the information era, there are many things that must be started to be thought about, because in fact what futurologists long for is that the change towards an information society will create prosperity and maturity of democracy, but the facts that emerge are not always like that. Fukuyama is really very worried about this condition by imagining that the world has headed towards its own era of destruction.

One of the things that Fukuyama is very worried about in this information age is the increasingly fading mutual bonds of society, even tending to be individualistic (p. 6). The relationship between technology and economy is also related to cultural issues. Like the story of Grandpa and his Grandson which describes how the development of information technology brings dependency that erodes kinship values even with the smallest environment in a family. Behind all his worries, at least Fukuyama still has a sense of optimism that in essence humans are social creatures, in time there will be an effort to reorganize all the weakening of communality that arises due to the transition process from an industrial society to an information society.

The breakdown of social order due to technological progress is actually not a new thing. The early phase of the industrial revolution experienced by the world also experienced this. The rhythm of village life, habits, customs were replaced by the rhythm of companies and cities. Which ultimately led Ferdinand Tonnies to come up with the term now known as community and community.

Touching on the issue of individualism, Fukuyama stated that it is basically a problematic issue, many parties, both on the left and right ideological lines, try to destroy unfair, irrelevant or outdated rules by trying to maximize personal freedom, but at the same time this is attempted to be achieved with new cooperative efforts that allow them to feel a connection with others in a community. Moreover, in the era of democracy, social capital take an important role. Without it, there would be no civil society, and without civil society, democracy would not work.

Fukuyama also saw great disruption from the symptoms of increasing crime rates and social chaos, as well as the decline of family and kinship as sources of social cohesion and the decline in levels of trust (p. 87). These symptoms have been seen since the 1960s in various developed countries with a skyrocketing trend compared to several previous periods. Although Fukuyama also mentioned that there are several countries such as Japan and Korea that tend to be outlier because it does not show symptoms of a transition phase accompanied by increased crime and family breakdown.

In general, Fukuyama explains that there are at least four causes for what he calls great disruption (p. 104). First, the phenomenon arises because of increasing poverty and/or income inequality. Second, and conversely, it can also arise because of increasing wealth. Third, it is a product of the modern welfare state (modern welfare state). Finally, it arose from a broad cultural shift that included the decline of religion and the rise of individualistic self-gratification over communal obligation. These four things are a summary of the rapid social changes in norms that have occurred since 1965.

Unlike some who may only see the increasing crime statistics as just a regular report, Fukuyama tries to question why it happened in a short period of time and massively in several countries. He links it to the significant increase in the number of young people around the 1960s and 1970s. It could be Baby Boom become the cause of increasing crime statistics. However, the two things are not always correlated, this is also proven by several research findings that changes in the age structure of society are not related to an increase in the number of crimes across countries or cross sectional.

The second explanation related to crime, Fukuyama linked it to modernization, population density and the opportunity to commit the crime. He actually saw urbanization and the physical environment that changed not too significantly as an explanation for the increasing crime rate in the 1960s. Although, Paul Vidal de la Blanche, had said that agglomeration which was accompanied by urbanization which also caused many people to gather in one area also created negative externalities in urban areas, one of which resulted in increasing crime rates.

The third explanation related to the causes of increased crime, Fukuyama calls it “social heterogeneity”. He states that crime tends to occur among racial or ethnic minorities. This is because environments that are too diverse culturally, linguistically, religiously, or ethnically can never come together as a community capable of enforcing informal norms among its members.

Other explanations that are being explored are related to the increasingly widespread distrust of institutions and other people. Robert Putnam believes that there is a possibility that the emergence of television limits a person's opportunities to carry out activities. face to face. This condition results in an increasingly individualistic pattern of community interaction. Moreover, in this current era, people are often busy with their own gadgets rather than chatting directly with each other.

Trying to examine more deeply, Fukuyama sees that violence and at least, distrust can arise due to changes that occur in the family structure. That the family has undergone dramatic changes due to two upheavals in the 1960s and 1970s due to the sexual and feminist revolutions (p. 155). This can also be linked to technological and economic developments related to the end of the industrial era. Crime, family breakdown, and the loss of trust are negative measures of social capital and influences people's ability to associate for cooperative purposes, and their level of trust.

Fukuyama once again expressed a contradictory view regarding the impact of the declining birth rate on family life and social capital(p. 183). He says that a declining birth rate should improve social order, since social disorder is typically the product of hot-blooded youth, but on the other hand social security is reduced.

The decline of the nuclear family in the West has had a very strong negative impact on social capital and is associated with increasing poverty for the lower classes in the social hierarchy. One of the most important consequences of the decline social capital in the family is the decline human capital in the following generations. Meanwhile, the increasing crime rate reflects the increasing absence of social capital. Fukuyama analogizes it with a high crime rate, on the other hand, it can cause members of a community who uphold the law to become distrustful of each other. There is a tendency for people to be reluctant to socialize, even just to go out of the house due to high anxiety about becoming victims of crime, which ultimately has an impact on the level of community of residents.

Great disruption is an updated transitional version of communitygoing to community that occurred during the 19th century, only now is it happening as we move from an industrial economy to an information economy (p. 211). When talking about how to stem great disruption, the key remains in the rebuilding efforts. social capital in the future. The fact that culture and public policy give society some control over the speed and extent of destruction is ultimately not the answer to the question of how social order should be established at the beginning of the 21st century.

Hacking Hope

Social capital is a message that Fukuyama tries to convey as the key to facing the transition from an industrial society to an information society. After all, a social order is very dependent on the communal structure that can be realized by a civilization. No matter how individualistic a person is in fighting and upholding his personal interests, he still needs new communities that are in the same breath as his struggle. In creating health civil society, is very much needed. To achieve all that, trust is needed to bring up what ultimately becomes an important supplement in the lives of people in countries that implement a democratic system.
It's just that the theses presented by Fukuyama related to the causes of the collapse of the communal order and the chaos that arose in various countries in the era of transition to the information society have a weak basis of validity. Moreover, he tried to raise it in a large scope by forcing himself to photograph the phenomena in many countries. It is very possible that what was conveyed is spurious or pseudo, when other studies really examine cases in each country. Especially when talking about the causal relationship of the emergence of a phenomenon and linking it to other events in the same time span.

Bibliography

Fukuyama, Francis. 2014. The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order (Translation). Jakarta: Qalam.