Writing in the New York Times today, David Brooks notes that a series of social indicators that are all moving in a positive direction:

The decline in family violence is part of a whole web of positive, mutually reinforcing social trends. To put it in old-fashioned terms, America is becoming more virtuous. Americans today hurt each other less than they did 13 years ago. They are more likely to resist selfish and shortsighted impulses. They are leading more responsible, more organized lives. A result is an improvement in social order across a range of behaviors…

In short, many of the indicators of social breakdown, which shot upward in the late 1960’s and 1970’s, and which plateaued at high levels in the 1980’s, have been declining since the early 1990’s.

I always thought it would be dramatic to live through a moral revival. Great leaders would emerge. There would be important books, speeches, marches and crusades. We’re in the middle of a moral revival now, and there has been very little of that. This revival has been a bottom-up, prosaic, un-self-conscious one, led by normal parents, normal neighbors and normal community activists.

Is this the post-Information Age social revival that Robert Putnam and Francis Fukuyama predicted? Though many people took issue with Putnam’s pessisism in his original “Bowling Alone” article, it’s less well known that he believes a major social revival is likely to occur as outdated social arrangements are replaced with more effective ones.

Here’s an excerpt from the background statement to the Saguaro Seminar, an effort to promote such a revival that Putnam co-chaired at Harvard (which led to the book Better Together):

History further tells us that we have the ability to bolster our civic connectedness. One hundred years ago, in 1897, the United States faced similar circumstances. Americans were not connecting with one another to the degree that was desirable, from 30 to 40 years of dramatic technological and social change rendering obsolete a whole stock of social capital. American society displayed classic symptoms of social-capital deficiency: huge problems in the cities, concerns about political corruption, and growing class antagonism.

Then, within the next two decades, American civil society righted itself in one of the nation’s greatest bursts of social innovation. Virtually all of the major civic institutions that endure to this day were created during these 20 years: the YWCA, the Boy Scouts, the American Red Cross, the League of Women Voters, the NAACP, the Urban League, trade unions, fraternal organizations, and many others. Almost all of these institutions were created in response to the decay and irrelevance of earlier forms of social connectedness.

The Saguaro Seminar is posited on the belief that we are poised on the threshold of a similarly innovative era. Society is different and the causes of a stagnant stock of social capital are different than they were in the 1890s. Thus, the solutions will be different. We need to determine what institutions, mechanisms, incentives, and approaches will significantly increase our stock of social capital and re-engage Americans with their communities.

Fukuyama made roughly the same argument in The Great Disruption. Back in the late 1990s, both predictions seemed optimistic, but if they turn out to be correct, it will mark a major turning point in American society.