What Are We Building?

Civic society is floundering. But what if we rebuilt it?

Two weeks ago I got married (actually I was already married, but my wife and I had a second ceremony for everyone who couldn't make the middle-of-the-mountains-in-midwinter first ceremony). As I looked out over everyone who had come, two things struck me.

First, the event was in-person; and I was struck by the enormous power of that kind of social connection. I had family members email me or even call me to say congratulations and that they wish they could have been there; and while I treasure and appreciate those messages, it wasn't the same as seeing those family members face-to-face would have been.

This is something I've been noticing a lot lately. It's not that virtual connection is a contradiction in terms; it's not. But I think it exists on a continuum, which I didn't fully appreciate when I was younger and which I think a lot of other people my age and younger (I'm 33) may also struggle to appreciate. On one end of the spectrum is electronic written communication. Then there's phone calls (which give us essential cues about the person's tone, pauses, etc), then video chats (which give us essential cues about their facial expressions, etc). Then, way on the other end of the spectrum, is in-person connection. As much as I love video chats with my family, only when they were finally there in person did it sink in for me that video chats aren't remotely the same as in-person contact.

Second, the ceremony was the biggest gathering I've ever been to of people who were just there because they loved me and my wife. It was awe-inspiring, and it touched something deep inside of me. Our pastor said that it takes a village to make a marriage work, and it struck me for the first time that this might be true. We are not made to live atomistically individualistic lives. I don't even think we're made to live in small nuclear families scattered across the globe, cut off by distance and sometimes even desire from our extended families. I think we were made to live in tribes.

In his book Tribe, Sebastian Junger points out that humans are drawn to dense interlocking social circles. He documents how when Englishmen and Native Americans raided each other, they would often take prisoners. The Native Americans who were taken prisoner couldn't wait to be released and go back to their tribes. But when the English negotiated for the return of their prisoners from the Native Americans, they discovered something odd: a lot of their countrymen didn't want to come home. They preferred life with the Native Americans. As Junger writes, even after they were returned to New English civilization, "white captives who were liberated from the Indians were almost impossible to keep at home."

As Hector de Crèvecoeur, a French émigré to the New World, complained in 1782, "Thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those Aborigines having from choice become European." He continued, "There must be in their social bond something singularly captivating and far superior to anything to be boasted of among us."

Why was Native life so much more appealing than colonial life? Junger argues that one reason was that Native American life represented a dense community. As he writes, "the intensely communal nature of an Indian tribe held an appeal that the material benefits of Western civilization couldn’t necessarily compete with….They would have practiced extremely close and involved childcare. And they would have done almost everything in the company of others. They would have almost never been alone."

Contrast this with modern life. Junger again:

"...as society modernized, people found themselves able to live independently from any communal group. A person living in a modern city or a suburb can, for the first time in history, go through an entire day—or an entire life—mostly encountering complete strangers. They can be surrounded by others and yet feel deeply, dangerously alone."

For most of human history, we lived in close-knit tribes chock full of social capital. This is what we evolved for. It's only in the past few hundred years that we shifted from a life of tribes and small villages to a life of industrialization and atomistic individualism. And as that shift has accelerated, we have become more and more lonely.

I wonder if this loneliness might be driving a lot of our social problems. Maybe this is part of why we're all so depressed and anxious. In his landmark book Bowling Alone, Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam suggests there's a connection:

"Much research has shown that social connections inhibit depression. Low levels of social support directly predict depression, even controlling for other risk factors, and high levels of social support lessen the severity of symptoms and speed recovery. Social support buffers us from the stresses of daily life. Face-to-face ties seem to be more therapeutic than ties that are geographically distant. In short, even within the single domain of depression, we pay a very high price for our slackening social connectedness."

Why does social isolation lead to depression? One reason is that social connections provide some comfort when things inevitably don't turn out the way that we expect. As psychologist Martin Seligman explains:

"Individualism need not lead to depression as long as we can fall back on large institutions—religion, country, family. When you fail to reach some of your personal goals, as we all must, you can turn to these larger institutions for hope…. But in a self standing alone without the buffer of larger beliefs, helplessness and failure can all too easily become hopelessness and despair."

But there's another factor too. Because we seem to have been built for social connection, loneliness is difficult to bear. Harvard epidemiologist Lisa Berman speculates that social isolation is “a chronically stressful condition to which the organism respond[s] by aging faster.”

I wonder if the loneliness of modern life might also explain why so many of us have an anti-system bias. On left and right, more and more people are dissatisfied with the life that liberalism has offered them, and are turning to illiberal alternatives. I would argue that this is not liberalism's fault; but when people are lonely and depressed, it's hard to fault them for blaming the current system or for looking for solutions beyond what the current system offers.

The size of this anti-system bias is hard to overstate. In The Constitution of Knowledge, Jonathan Rauch summarizes a study on the topic this way:

"Almost a fourth of Americans either agreed with or were neutral about the statement, 'I think society should be burned to the ground'—and 40 percent likewise did not reject the statement, 'When I think about our political and social institutions, I cannot help thinking, ‘Just let them all burn.’'"

I think a lot of us have an aching sense that we're missing something; something that we touch when we come together for rare big-family events like weddings, but that we know we want to touch a lot more often. I think we also have a sense that the distractions that modern society affords us–Netflix, phones, video games, etc–aren't filling that hole.

So what can we do about it?

In Bowling Alone, Putnam documents a half-century decline in connectedness in the United States that should worry us all. But he also offers a powerful silver lining: we've been here before. Social connection and community come and go, and there was another period in our history when both were at a low ebb. At the end of the 19th century, Americans were grappling with rapid industrialization and undreampt-of material prosperity; but also the systematic gutting of small towns and rural villages. They were becoming more atomistic, more lonely, and more disengaged. But they recognized the problem and did something about it. They founded new organizations, started new clubs, began new churches. They looked up and out, seeking and finding and creating ways to knit their communities back together. As historian Richard McCormick put it:

"Amid hard times, many Americans questioned the adequacy of their institutions and wondered whether democracy and economic equality were possible in an industrial society. Answering these questions with hope and hard work, some men and women began to experiment with new methods for solving the problems at hand. Hundreds poured their energies into settlement houses where they lived and worked among the urban poor. From their pulpits a new generation of ministers sought to make Christianity relevant to this world, not only the next, by aligning their churches actively on the side of the disadvantaged. Across the country the movement for municipal reform entered a new phase as businessmen and professionals tried to reach beyond their own ranks and enlist broad support for varied programs of urban improvement. Women’s clubs increasingly turned their attention from discussing literature to addressing social problems."

This burst of activity ushered in a renaissance of connection and community. As McCormick writes, "Although these middle- and upper-class endeavors would not reach a peak of strength for another decade, the seeds of Progressivism were planted during the depression of the 1890s."

So here's our action item this week, as a community of practice. Let's not look down and in. Instead, let's look up and out. Rebuilding our sense of community and connection will require a broad-based grassroots effort from each and every one of us.

You have something that you want to build. An idea to make the world a better place, to add an essential and beautiful note to the grand symphony of the human experience. Your idea could be large or small. It doesn't matter (as an aside, it is my opinion that there are no small ideas).

Whatever your idea is, commit in the next week to taking the next step on it. That could mean committing to spending a few more hours in the ideation phase to get clear on a central piece. It could mean putting another piece on something in process. It could mean taking the leap from planning to starting building; or to launching what you've built out into the world. But whatever the next step is, commit to taking it.

And then, if you're comfortable, let us know how it went.

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