ROBERT PUTNAM WROTE the book on loneliness. More precisely he
wrote the latest book on the latest version of American loneliness,
following David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1961), William
Whyte’s The Organization Man (1956), and Thorstein
Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). Putnam’s
contribution is called Bowling Alone; it came along six years
ago, and it was covered in glory this month when a Duke University
study proved by sociological research that we
all are increasingly cut off from true fellowship and real
community.
This unpleasant vision has been mined outside of sociology — in
literature, like Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel
Suit, and theatrically, where Death of a Salesman is
the standard. Later, the corporate loneliness of the late '50s made
way for the postmodern anomie of Christopher Lasch and Jonathan
Franzen. The failure of modern man and his descendants to keep the
basic bonds of society together has in fact been the central
subject of the humanities since the old culture first began
crumbling in Europe around 1850. The names change, the story
progresses and worsens, but the plot is singular, and it has led us
to the understanding that neither email nor MySpace nor
Blackberries has brought us closer to durable communion.
This is astounding because we live in a West where more people
have their grubby mitts on one another than ever before. Privacy —
that thing we thought we Americans thought we’d been fighting for
— is dead; publicity is king. It is our leviathan, and within it
encurl a multitude of labyrinths, social networks that close the
distances of culture, geography, and propriety to create an
unprecedented society of hookups. How, so close, can we stay so
lonely?
THE QUESTION IS on everyone’s lips in the public prints: The
New York Times, Washington Post, USA
Today, Chicago Tribune, and Boston Globe, to
take a representative sample, ran major stories. Putnam got
interviewed. A lot. The news of Duke’s study was not lost on the
Concerned Women for America, whose Dr. Janice Crouse remarked in Human Events the other week
that
the self-centeredness that results from a culture
dominated by the values of radical individualism is not a pretty
thing; it does not contribute to the maturing of individuals, the
strengthening of family, the growth of friendship or the
development of communities.
It is too easy a mark to pin our embarrassment of empty riches on
the rise of an unfettered individualism where it’s every man,
woman, and child for him or herself. The same undoing of local
community that sweeps America has been replicated in the
individual: our interiors are often a mania of multiple and even
contradicting identities, and our serial intimacies often mirror
broken spirits and incoherent souls. We want to have our cake and
eat it too, and in the process we become legion. Then we charge
ourselves off of cliffs.
Why? Three vast forces of publicity are at work. “All your life
you live so close to the truth it becomes a permanent blur in the
corner of your eye,” Tom Stoppard wrote. “And when something nudges
it into outline it is like being ambushed by a grotesque.” May I
present our grotesques.
First, Community. Since Robert Nisbet we have
spoken overtly of Western man’s quest for community. Community endures as the
anchor of the catchphrase of our times. No one wishes to be without
a community — black, gay, retired, handicapped, gun-toting,
transgendered, undocumented, medical, business, ad
infinitum. But the nature of these communities is often
virtual. Often only such efforts as the sending of regular checks
to a national interest group result in access to that other
catchphrase, a “sense of community.” Because we live in a time when
feelings matter more than facts or faith, no one wants to be
without a sense of community — even more than they wish to be
without a real community. This is not to denigrate the very real
questing for meaning among others that surely propels AIDS Walks as
much as church fundraisers. But we are learning to settle for less
than the real thing. We lead busy lives. We work to afford the
pleasures we have learned to need; there is little time to spare.
For efficiency’s sake, we have nationalized community, privileged
it over the local organisms that once ordered the pace of lives
lived in consensual real proximity. And we have permitted
professional advocates to set the agenda of these so-called
communities, and in the process we have allowed the
quintessentially frontier mentality of America to turn inward.
Second, Identity. Since the triumph of the
therapeutic in America, the self has become an open system, an
amusement park and haunted house within which we wander endlessly,
searching. We search for a string of satisfactions, arrayed like
bread crumbs to take us nowhere further than from one to the next.
We have taught ourselves how to follow several paths at once; in
our supposed freedom, we can take on cultivated schizophrenia and
call it freedom of identity or personal choice. We pile on
lifestyles, shifting when it suits us. This makes us both more open
to any lifestyle and more incapable of constancy and consistency in
any particular lifestyle. We can touch anyone but endure with no
one. In the vanguard, right at this moment, is the hegemonic and
utterly revolting spectacle of a huge Vegas sex
party, where the one commandment is stated succinctly by one of the
orgiasts. “I like to participate in life as much as possible,”
Reuters reports her as saying “with a broad smile.” All distances
must be closed, because now distance is oppression.
Third, Propriety. One reason why some people
may find themselves, despite their strongest hopes, in a headlong
retreat from community is that all around them propriety is in
retreat, too. Divorcees are everywhere, but so too are married
couples with vague or sham fidelity, people in knowingly and
unknowingly “open” marriages, ditto people in “open” relationships.
The propensity toward kink puts everyone into potential play. The
fevered sexual imagination opens intimate friendships between
couples to even more dangerous possibility than human nature makes
standard. Nothing — that is, no one — is good enough, because
someone could be better, at the drop and for the duration of a
whim. It is very difficult to convince someone not to hit on your
significant other without causing a scene. Secondhand impropriety,
too, is everywhere. The frankest and most banal conversations about
former lovers and passionate possibilities become inescapable. The
soundtrack of our lives is thick with the sex-obsessed of every
race and class. The drumbeat makes the titillation of the civilized
so hard that general nausea turns the refined into the antisocial.
In spite of themselves, such people turn against community along
with publicity. In a world where proper social distances cannot be
observed, what recourse is there?
The statistics now at our fingertips are the details of the
symptoms of our disease. They are not diagnoses. They are certainly
not prescriptions. But it is not too late to learn quickly and well
to restore the rituals of distance that make the closing of
distances a ceremony of social order. When eventually closed,
uniquely and sacredly, it is loneliness that is lost, and true
intimacy refashioned again.
