No man is an island.

Can the communitarian ethos that has been a backbone of American democracy for centuries survive Survivor and all its clones? Or has the old-fashioned notion of community been voted off the island?

JUST IN CASE THE RECENT PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN AND aftermath didn't provide you with a lifetime supply of name-calling, backstabbing, and Machiavellian ethics, you'll be happy to know that Survivor is back on prime time. Though I had hoped the folks at CBS might drop the Bush and Gore legal teams into the Australian outback to fight over sunblock and locusts, it looks like fans of last summer's surprise hit will once again be watching 16 fairly ordinary humans battle and betray one another in hopes of winning a pot of gold the size of Ayer's Rock.

If you missed its first appearance, Survivor--the game show version of Lord of the Flies--relied on a mixture of greed and ambition to transform the cast of Gilligan's Island or Swiss Family Robinson into a gang of sharks on a feeding frenzy. Imagine Family Feud being played by the Medicis, or musical chairs among members of the politburo, and you get the general idea. Promise anything. Trust nobody. Take no prisoners. Win at all costs. This is definitely the game for the inner id in all of us, especially if we're not likely to get a chance to run for elected office. Most of us haven't been able to act with this sort of crass disregard for the feelings of others since junior high.

Not too surprisingly, a couple of pundits and TV commentators bemoaned that Survivor marked the end of Western civilization, or at least a new low in our popular entertainments. What does it mean, they asked, that over 40 million Americans tuned in last summer to watch the real-life squabblings and byzantine machinations of a group of increasingly venal and nasty roommates? Have we come to a point where treachery is now a virtue, and where our favorite form of entertainment is watching the bad behavior of other people?

Still, while I'm not a big fan of the show, the news is probably not all that dire. After all, Western civilization has survived the Circus Maximus, the Colosseum, and The Jerry Springer Show. We'll probably survive Survivor. As everybody has known for a long time, one of TV's guilty little pleasures is the opportunity it provides millions of us to watch other people behaving outlandishly. That's why soaps from Peyton Place to Dallas and Dynasty were

such runaway hits, why vent-your-spleen talk shows like Jerry Springer and Maury Povich are still hot, and why pro wrestling will always have a bigger audience than golf. As much as we might not like to hear it, it can be quite entertaining to watch folks slug it out for a big prize--and it's even more entertaining if they're willing to behave a little badly in front of the camera.

But the truth is, we also like to see people behaving well. We like to see them pull together, work for a common cause, make sacrifices for something bigger, nobler, and greater than themselves. We like to be challenged and inspired by their courage, compassion, and commitment. That's probably just as true today as it's ever been. In movies from John Ford's Stagecoach (1939) to Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1944) to James Cameron's Titanic (1997), our heroes and heroines have been the folks who overcame class differences and self-interest, who made sacrifices for the good of others, who forged new friendships and communities. And in sports films like Hoosiers (1986), A League of Their Own (1992), and Remember the Titans (2000), the constant, overarching lesson, time and time again, has been that the real victory is in learning to pull together, to work as a team. We may be fascinated by bad behavior or poor sportsmanship, but we don't admire it.

EVEN IN THE MONTHS WHEN SURVIVOR WAS TURNING INTO the surprise TV hit of the season, one of the movies packing them in at the local cineplex was Ridley Scott's tale of a Gladiator (2000) who teaches other slaves to stand together for their freedom and ends up giving his own life to save the republic from a tyrant. We haven't seen that sort of virtue in the public arena since Kirk Douglas laid down his life in Spartacus (1960). And as the year drew to a close, Tom Hanks gave us a Castaway cut from a decidedly nobler bolt of cloth than the crew of Survivor. Here's a guy who figures out that people and community are more important than time or money.

So it's probably not too likely that Survivor represents some deep cultural shift to narcissism or abandonment of community. And yet Robert Putnam's new book, Bowling Alone (Simon & Schuster, 2000), does raise some unsettling questions in this area and may deserve more attention than a game show about venal castaways.

In 1995, Putnam, a political scientist at Harvard, published an article in the Journal of Democracy titled "Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital." The essay, which caught a lot of people's attention and made Putnam something of a minor celebrity on the talk show circuit, pointed out that baby boomers and Gen Xers are not nearly as big joiners as members of our parents' generation were. Now, five years later, Putnam is back with a book and even more evidence of what he calls America's declining "social capital."

As in: Between the 1960s and 1990s, voter turnout across the U.S. dropped about 25 percent, and participation in local party politics declined by nearly a third. People today go to fewer public meetings, attend fewer political rallies or speeches, and serve on fewer committees. "By almost every measure," Putnam reports, "Americans' direct engagement in politics and government has fallen steadily and sharply over the past generation."

AND IT'S NOT JUST GOVERNMENT AND politics that Americans are less engaged in. Participation in religious services and church-related groups has dropped by about a sixth since the 1960s, union membership is way down from its peak in the mid-1950s, and the rolls of the PTA have dropped from 12 to 7 million since 1964.

What's more, Putnam notes, membership in civic and fraternal organizations has declined steadily over the past generation. By the mid-1990s the Boy Scouts were attracting 26 percent fewer volunteers than they had in 1970, and the Red Cross had 61 percent fewer folks signing up to lend a hand or pass out cookies. The evidence indicates that serious volunteering dropped by about a sixth between 1974 and 1989. Meanwhile, over the last two decades membership in the Lions, the Shriners, the Elks, the Masons, and the Jaycees have all dropped between 12 and 44 percent.

Indeed, as Putnam points out, we even socialize less with one another. A generation ago, Americans had friends over about 14 times a year, now it's down to about eight. In our parents' day Americans tended to bowl in leagues; now we bowl mostly by ourselves.

Admittedly, we still belong to (or at least get mailings from) a lot of groups, but the difference, Putnam argues, is that Greenpeace, Oxfam, and the AARP don't ask us to come to meetings, work on committees, or show up at a local shelter to lend a hand. We just need to send an annual check and occasionally drop an e-mail or postcard to our representative in Washington. Membership means a lot less than it used to.

As a result, Putnam argues that civic life in America is weaker today than it was in the 1960s. In spite of better education and improved technologies like the Web, there are ways in which we are less connected to one another, have less real experience working with each other, and thus less skill and experience in building community and resolving problems. This is what Putnam means by our loss of social capital.

There is some reason to hope, however, for even with recent reductions in our social capital, Americans are still a nation of joiners. Two centuries ago the French writer Alexis de Tocqueville was astounded by the readiness of Americans to form clubs and organizations, and thought that this propensity for associations of every sort went a long way to explain the success of our democracy. Even in our present weakened condition we are still more likely to join voluntary organizations, sign petitions, work for political parties and election campaigns than folks in almost any other modern society.

Perhaps we just need to turn off Survivor this week and go to a PTA meeting, or volunteer a couple of hours at the local shelter, or go to a dance at the Elks. We'd certainly meet a nicer class of folks.

PATRICK MCCORMICK, an associate professor of Christian ethics at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington.