Covid-19
is accompanied by a dramatic increase in the amount of time people spend alone.
“People last year spent far less waking time—an hour and a half less [per day],
on average—with people outside their own household,” write Ben Casselman and
Ella Koeze in N.Y. Times (7/29/21), summarizing
a report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (www.bls.gov).
Time spent all alone increased by about one hour per day. Of course, Covid-19
restrictions on visitors increased the loneliness of those in nursing homes. In general, seniors spent the most time
alone,” says N.Y. Times. But
teenagers too were alone: One and a half hours more each day than before
Covid-19.
Covid-19 is not the cause of aloneness; it only accelerated a
50-year societal trend. Robert Putnam of Harvard University tracks the loss of
social capital, of togetherness. His 2000 book, Bowling Alone (Simon & Schuster) exhaustively crunches all the numbers to conclusively
prove the steady depletion of community life in our society since about 1970. His
latest report with Shaylyn Romney Garrett is titled The Upswing
(Simon & Schuster, 2020). The two discover that our current separateness is
not brand new, yet isolation has not always been so. In a parallel to today, our
society was individualistic from the late 1800s into the early 20th
century (the Gilded Age). Inequality was extreme; culture was polarized.
However, our society gradually became more cooperative as the 20th century
evolved. Bowling leagues, clubs, denominations, veterans groups, civic
endeavors, associations, school boards, neighborhood organizations and like
attracted members and enriched society. But then, starting in about 1970, there
was a major relapse.
Sustained isolation harms individuals. We become pessimistic. We
are prone to scammers—those soliciting over the phone and those peddling
conspiracies on cable TV. It is worth recognizing that loneliness and isolation
can just as readily occur in big cities with crowded events as it can in rural
towns.
Sustained isolation harms society. A sense of victimhood can
overwhelm any impulse for the improvement of institutions, neighborhoods and
culture at large. Collective virtue, which is acquired and practiced in social
interaction, gives way to collective apathy or at times to narrow, one-off
outbursts of fragmented dissatisfaction. A healthy give-and-take over
differences is replaced by uncivil culture wars over abortion, same-gender
unions, a woman’s place in society, the status of science and other issues. In
fact, as the affliction of loneliness grows, individuals grasp for identity in
an affiliation with extreme factions.
This
analysis is totally wrong, some say. The boring social groups of the past are
replaced by lively social media. That’s where today’s young adults meet and
interact.
Facebook,
which owns the other major social platforms, pitches community in all of its
reports, its publicity and its Congressional testimony. Nonsense, writes John
Miller in America magazine (8/21).
Facebook is selling community but it can’t really build it. Some of its
executives and engineers have so little experience of real community that they
half-believe the company’s line. Other Facebook leaders are fully aware that the
“company’s business model relies on making money by selling advertising to
companies based on information it has gathered about its users.”
The
presumption that healthy connectivity is aided by computers is backward.
Computer-aided connections are a symptom of the loneliness epidemic. By design,
they turn up the volume of disagreement and accentuate slights. They add to the
widening polarization of isolated factions from the common square of democratic
conversation. Technology, by nature, individuates. Policing the content of
Facebook and other sites is not the remedy.
What can
be done? To be continued…
Droel
edits a printed newsletter on faith and work, INITIATIVES (PO Box 291102,
Chicago, IL 60629)
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