Necessity
I have an old Walther League ring that is basically a permanent fixture om my right hand. My great grandfather was very into walther league, or so the family stories go. This is not his ring. I wish I had it, and hope that some other son of the extended family wears it from time to time.
The ring is beautiful, but that is not the main reason that I bought it. I bought it partly because I had become troubled by the problem of loneliness, and I had looked back to see if there was anything we could draw from our grandparents to help with our present evils.
The real driving reason to buy it was that it was going for less than the melt value, and it seemed to me the boomer smelters have given enough of the artifacts of our traditions to the fire.
The epidemic of loneliness and the boomers/greatest generation melting down traditions to make new forms have the same root, in my mind. Both find their root in a loss of necessity.
I've long held the conjecture that the loss of our traditions is tied to the loss of immediate consequences of deviating from them. It turns out that many of our traditions and mores were actually fine tuned social technology that helped people to survive together in times where the margins were razor thin.
I think that if the souls that lived in the 1800s could look at us today, they would almost certainly conclude that we lived in a post scarcity society. They would be shocked by the amount of clothes in our closets, the plentitude and quality of our food, and that precious few of our children get taken by illness.
Strict codes of conduct, ostracism of shirkers, and the assumption of shared responsibility for the people around you are necessary when everyone is one bad harvest from hunger.
In the same way, the sexual revolution was only possible because we became rich. The consequences of needing to raise a child alone still exist, but women in that position are no longer facing nearly the same level of hardship as before, and men who subject women to raising a child alone do not have their consciences pricked in the same way, when society is rich and the state can step in to make sure their child is provided for. Not to mention the ready abundance of contraceptives, etc.
But that is still a harder life for the mother. And it is a less rich life for those children. The home is broken before they ever come into the world. Now, I know that there are still plenty of broken homes where both mom and dad are present, but loss of father or mother lowers the ceiling. It is not as good as it could be, but because we live in such wealth, such license, society does not find it intolerable. Society does not find it grounds for stigma against the father, who is clearly shirking his half of the bargain.
Morality is social techology, revealed to men by scripture, and written on our hearts in form of conscience, because God knows what is good, and he wants it for us.
It is only recently, thanks to Dave, that I had a puzzle piece click into place about loneliness.
He said the loneliness epidemic was because of the luxury/plenty of our lives, and now that I have heard him say it I cannot see why I was blind to it before.
I'll steal his example, which ties right in with my "mores are social technology" yarn. CFW Walther did not need to go to the Gym, because he worked on his farm, and thus was fit by default. In the same way, he did not need to seek out community, because the reality was that he was dependent on his neighbors, and they were dependent on him, because they needed one another in a way we don't anymore.
You can sit in your apartment and doomscroll twitter, work from a remote work station, have plenty to eat, enough money to pay people to fix your stuff, 7 streaming subscriptions, and more than enough time to post on reddit about how hard it is to meet people.
People used to meet, because they used to need to meet. The economics of necessity forced people together.
I think this phenomenon has been grossly excaerbated by the American pride in and emphasis on individuality. We feel like it is to trespass against the personhood of another to ask them to help us. Who are we to create an obligation for another person?? That is basically slavery, and even telling us 'no' will be emotional labor for the other person.
Don't be silly. By refusing to share your burdens you are robbing your brothers and sisters in Christ of the opportunity to do a good work for you. I admit to being a little bit of a hypocrite here, as I'm always the first to feel guilty about 'foisting my work onto other people', but this is not the way I should be looking at it. I should be better about admitting that I cannot and should not try to do everything alone, when I have brothers of greater capacity who never seem guilty about asking me for help.
Also, I always love the chance to work with them. To work together to do something good, and to enjoy their company as we work together. Those are great days. The best kinds of days. The satisfaction and the brotherhood that flows from it.
So here is the point; the necessity is still there.
The social technology of our elders is still necessary to live the good life. The life of working together, of opening ourselves to being responsible for, and being answerable to, one another is necessary for the good life. The good life is not just one with a full belly. The good life is one full of people you can depend on, and who know they can depend on you.
Speaking solely of your historical analysis, while there is certainly some truth to what you say, I think it is, on balance, more false than true, at least if you restrict your frame of reference to the past 200 years. The truth is that it would have been very possible to live a solitary life, devoid of friends, devoid of family, devoid of any kind of social life, for several centuries now. In fact, one of the more interesting and underappreciated type of character during America's great movement west was that of the solitary frontiersman, who moved to the wilderness, cleared a small spot for himself, then moved on to do it again when the area became unbearably crowded (i.e., when more than a dozen families moved in per township).
ReplyDeleteThe difference is that most people back then knew that they wanted community, and they took proactive steps to achieve it. Women formed sewing circles and quilting societies not because they needed anyone else around in order to accomplish their work, but because they enjoyed the company. Men held barn raisings not chiefly because it was necessary to have extra sets of hands to do the work, but because it helped build a sense of community (this is why the Amish still do it to this day). Dances, bazaars, small town bands and orchestras, parades, rallies, secret societies like the Masons and the Elks, political and moral campaign organizations, athletic clubs, sporting organizations, informal gatherings at the swimming hole or the local tavern, the YMCA, and the Walther League—none of these were necessary for daily life. Any able-bodied man (and some able-bodied women) could decide at any point to become a Silas Marner-like hermit.
Dave's example was mostly wrong, by the way. People in the mid-1800s did need gyms (though whether Walther himself went to one probably isn't known). Gymnastics were introduced as part of the educational curriculum in Berlin in 1811 and at Harvard in 1826. Calisthenics became popular in the mid-19th century, Turnvereine sprang up all over after the failed 1848 revolution, purpose-built gymnasiums sprang up on college campuses across the country, breathing exercises and singing were heavily promoted for health reasons, swimming and athletic leagues were started to keep people fit, etc. By the time of Walther's death, 35% of the country lived in a city, and an ever-increasing proportion of those urbanites didn't have physically demanding jobs.
Other than historical accuracy, why does any of this matter? Because without it, I think that people tend to identify the wrong cause of the problem. The problem isn't that people needed each other for survival back then, but they don't now. The problem is that people are no longer willing to make sacrifices in order to accomplish something good—in this case, in order to build up a community. Hauling your spinning wheel to your neighbor's house was work, but people did it anyway because they wanted community. Giving up every Tuesday night for the horseshoe league infringed on chores and family life, but people found the sacrifice acceptable in order to keep alive their old friendships. Even hosting people at your own house can be quite a burden, as you point out in your "Patrick's Pub" post. Community didn't come naturally then, and it won't come naturally now. It takes real work.
Thank you for a lovely and well reasoned reply.
DeleteSo let me try out refining my hypothesis in the light of your exellent points, because I see them less as a refutation than as an instance where I overstated.
So if I restate and say that it is not a matter of survival perse, but rather where the sacrifice required to live outside of community began to exceed the sacrifice required to live with in. Would you entertain that thought?
I think that's a lot closer to the truth, but I'm still not entirely sold on it.
DeleteI'll admit to being of at least two minds on this question myself. It certainly seems obvious and intuitive that modern society results naturally, through some of the forces you mentioned, in a more atomized collection of individuals than societies in the past. It just makes sense that a poorer society would require greater cooperation and foster a greater sense of community than our society today (but then, how much of that is due to plenty and how much is due to the fact that we live in a lower-trust society is probably difficult to determine; see Haiti for an example of a society that is simultaneously poor and low-trust). It's also obvious that incentives matter in shaping human behavior.
And yet I cannot help but see the massive, overwhelming amount of *Effort* that went into keeping healthy societies alive back in the day. It required the sort of total commitment that seems quite rare today, for one reason or another. There's definitely something to the path-of-least-resistance hypothesis, but I'm still not really sold on it. I instead tend to think we're all just complacent and slothful today (myself included).
There seems to be a similar conversation to this one when people talk about church membership back in the day. "Oh, well, you see, back then, if you were German, you just went to the Lutheran church, so the church grew naturally. Now we have to compete with other churches and the culture at large, so it's no wonder we're shrinking." My arse! Look up what percentage of the population belonged to a church back in the day. Look at the number of Norwegian and Swedish immigrants who came to America and compare to the church memberships of the Norwegian and Swedish synods during that period of immigration. Read the lives of the great missionaries and church leaders both clerical and lay, and see the work they did, the despair they often felt, and the failures they plowed through. Scratch the surface even a little, and you'll realize that the church survived back then because the people were zealous and totally committed to its growth. It's a comforting fiction that we're just up against greater challenges today, so of course we're seeing worse results, but it is just that—a fiction. I think something similar is true about a healthy society. All those dinner parties, bowling leagues, festivals, card nights, dances, ice cream socials, excursions, singing societies, field days, etc., all took a lot of work. Who nowadays is willing to put forth the work?
So yes, it would be good if we could lower the sacrifices necessary to have a healthy community, because it would incentivize people to build those communities. But at the same time, people have to realize that sacrifice will still be necessary. Which, at the end of the day, is something I think we can both agree on.
Incidentally, are you familiar with Joseph Henrich's "The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Pecular and Particularly Prosperous"? It's been quite a while since I've read it, but my mind went to it several times when composing that last reply.
DeleteSpeaking to your first example, Little House on the Prairie (while not a formal chronicle but a children's book, it is based on the author's childhood) is about a frontiersman who moves to Kansas as the woods of Wisconsin feel overcrowded to him. Right away he travels about two miles to find the closest neighbor so he can get some help putting up a roof. Soon after he finds another neighbor to help build a well. He could not do those activities solo, and he couldn't hire them out. Even Thoreau was less alone at Walden Pond than he seemed.
DeleteOptional community naturally sprang out of the required community—Pa and Ma invited the first neighbor over for dinner and some fiddle playing after the work was done. I think where the intentionality comes into play thats different now than it was then, is basically everyone has a better, easier, more dopamine-full option. Just like healthy food is cheaper today than ever, and we're fatter and fuller of worse food. We want the cheap, easy, delicious stuff. We don't want to haul a sewing machine to a sewing circle, we have the ability to watch the best movies ever made, the best video games, read social media feeds full of interesting discussions, all at our house.
Sorry all my examples are from media, but I think this when I watch All Creatures Great and Small and they're playing some dumb parlor game that probably isn't that fun. But what else is there to do??? Your options for fun are mostly social. Our options for fun now are over the top fun /and/ comfortable. That's where the intentionality comes in. We have to choose to *not* do the absolute most super fun amazing stuff that costs very little money, and instead leave your house, go into the cold, and spend time with people who are not as smart or funny as the people in your phone. But it's better for the long term health of your community so you do it.