A couple weeks ago, I was on the plane with my copy of Bowling Alone reading a prescient chapter about how the decline of American civic culture and social involvement includes increased mistrust among neighbors and decreased tolerance for talking about differing opinions on political matters. Putnam suggests that this decreased tolerance would imperil democracy, leading to the more shrill and extreme views taking a larger and larger role in American politics. As it happened, sitting next to me was a man reading a book called The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America.
He glanced at the chapter title on my book. “The dark side of social capital?” he asked aloud. Younger me would have awkwardly tried to avoid any conversation whatsoever, but I felt thoroughly called out by the chapter I had just finished, and realized now was the time to practice.
I closed the book to show him the title: Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. “I think we’re reading about similar things.”
He chuckled and showed me his, and then his wife showed me her book, whose title I didn’t quite retain but had a similar theme around the collapse of America.
“A lot of doom!” I said, and for a moment we could laugh together, and share some of our observations and concerns from our own perspectives. What struck me in the moment was the very shared moment of alarm as Americans, the sense that we are in decline, that whatever once united us is dissolving, that it scares and angers us to live through this dissolution, and that we very understandably are looking for something to blame. Having something to blame gives the illusion of control, the possibility that this process could be averted or undone.
Within the same month, these three books became available to me through my local inter-library loan program, so I read them all close together, and they could speak to each other:
- Reeves, Richard. 2022. Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It. Washington, DC, USA: Brookings Institution Press.
- Putnam, Robert. 2001. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. London, England: Simon & Schuster.
- Harari, Yuval Noah. 2015. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. New York, NY: Harper.
Harari’s Sapiens does not appear, from the title, to be a book of doom, and the cover features Bill Gates’s enthusiastic endorsement of what an entertaining book it is, but I found it the most depressing of the three. Putnam and Reeves both trace increased sense of alienation and discontent among American men specifically but also American citizens more broadly, yet they come with a sociological analysis and offer ideas for change.
Harari tells a story of a species—our species—who has throughout its existence managed to decrease biodiversity, damage environments, and become increasingly dependent upon technologies and structures that have extended our lifespans and yet may well continue to decrease the overall quality of those lives. He tells the story of how credit, empire, and capitalism have become the ruling political and economic paradigms and have liberated the individual from the bonds of community, family, religion with a clarity that that I think more Marxists should aspire to emulate. His tone does not struck me as bitter or antagonistic toward these developments, though he’s willing to share the losses and risks of these changes along with the benefits and opportunities they have created.
So the depression came from inside the house, so to speak. Loneliness and the deep need for belonging and connection have become so core to my interests and my life’s work, and each of these books speak to both how hard it is to have those experiences and how our modern life actively works against them without offering anything of substance to replace them with. And I am part of the problem. I see how the conservative drive to protect family, small towns, religious communities are all efforts to hold on to what has given us belonging for centuries. It is also what gave men a role and an identity. Reeves’s Of Boys and Men offers a rather striking suggestion that it has long been understood that a lonely man is a danger to society, because he has nothing motivating him toward prosocial investments of his strengths and energies. It was marriage and children that tamed men, gave them emotional bonds that turned them into good citizens. When that role becomes increasingly unnecessary, we get lonely, angry, violent men.
Neoliberalism offers us a world based on what Harari describes as the state and market liberating the individual. We are free to live our own lives in accordance with our inner sense of self, our identities, and form relationships based on our values and sexual and gender identity. We have the possibility of forsaking the support of family in pursuit of this freedom of self-expression—we can cut off our parents or demand they get on board with loving us, because we have the possibility of existing outside of their support. (Some of us, anyway.) The stability of empire and capitalism, per Harari, further decreases the risk that we will suffer violence at the hands of each other. But suicide, the death of loneliness and despair, continues to rise.
I cannot help but think it’s the absence of human connection, the absence of a role in the world, the absence of stable community that contributes to that suicidality. Putnam speaks about a time in which the workplace attempted to become a social center to encourage their workers to be more productive, more connected to each other, and to feel that sense of belonging. But we all know that’s bullshit. I mean, we have to all know that’s bullshit. The first time I got a job at a place that had a video game console and a pool table I inwardly thought, “If they see me playing either of these they’re going to think I’m slacking and I’ll be out the door.” And indeed I never saw anyone blowing off steam with a first-person shooter or talking about a project over a game of billiards. There is no stability in a workplace community. Loyalty is not incentivized, it is in fact a liability.
Having been in queer, left-wing, activist, and religious spaces for much of my adult life, I often hear about the role these play in giving people a chosen family, a community to offer the belonging they couldn’t get at home. And yet even these communities, we know, are not guaranteed havens of belonging. Community of shared values and shared identity feels really wonderful, there can be profound connection and care, and I continue to marvel at all the ways people come together and support each other. And it can also feel quite precarious. One day, I feel completely on board with my friends’ beliefs. And then something happens, suddenly there’s a new polarization or a shift in attention, and before you know it, it seems like there has been a collective decision on what the right moral stance is today, and if you aren’t already on board it can feel like that belonging is at risk.
Mostly this is true of Internet communities. When you have in-person relationships with people, when you share resources or take care of each other in tangible ways, it becomes a lot harder to discard people with different opinions. We tend to have a more natural inhibition not to get into black-or-white thinking to each other’s faces, but we sure go to all of our friends who agree with us to vent and wonder how we’re going to fix this problem. The phrase I’ve really grown to hate in these communities is “educate.” Like, “I’m going to educate you” or “Don’t make me educate you.” It’s such a power move to basically imply that the other person’s view is coming from ignorance rather than their own principled examination of the situation and arriving at a different conclusion. Then you’ve set yourself up as the beleaguered expert who has to educate and doesn’t have to listen.
But these are all symptoms of the separation that already exists, not the cause. Those educators also have thoughtful perspectives and want to be understood and included in this culture. We’re all trying to create spaces of belonging for ourselves and protect against being exiled and harmed. The couple next to me on the plane had very different politics than I do, and I don’t know what they’d think of my personal life, but for a moment we could connect on a couple things—our shared citizenship of this country, our shared experiences of having lived in Indiana and spent time in Seattle, our shared experiences of being concerned about the future.
All of these, per Harari, are fictitious mythologies that bind us together, and they’re the bedrock of civilization while having no substance whatsoever. Harari is quite dismissive of religion and imaginal communities except insofar as he sees their value in binding people together. But he seems to argue there’s really nothing better or worse between feminism and capitalism, christianity or neoliberalism, so long as enough people buy into the system and the armed gang running their lives. Harari is less of a prescriptivist and more a historian, more curious about how people did things than whether it was the moral thing for them to do.
Reeves, on the other hand, might be considered one of those progressive elites excoriated by my plane companion’s book. Reeves both identifies how cultural and economic changes have disenfranchised men and considers what sociological, political, and economic projects need to be instituted to help men stay a part of the future. He argues that the brains of boys do develop differently from girls’, in ways less overblown than reactionary gender politics would have us see, but also more significantly than left-wing gender blindness would acknowledge. Boys’ well-documented lack of maturity relative to girls is less cultural than biological, he argues, and actually means that boys are doing increasingly worse in school because they cannot keep up with their more mature girl peers. He offers an ambitious, dare I say technocratic intervention to start boys in school a year later than girls, a discrimination that would engender more equality.
What I appreciate most about Reeves’s argument is that he is addressing a hole in progressive politics that he identifies very explicitly: in our efforts to create greater equity, we look to systemic and sociological causes for inequality among marginalized and oppressive groups. We look at how economic and cultural conditions lead to criminality, for example, or how giving girls and women greater economic support and freedom decreases the need for abortions. We avoid blaming the individual and look more at the conditions that cause the behavior. But when it comes to men, they’re just blamed. They just need to do better and stop being toxic. Reeves tries to step back and ask, what if men are just as subject to sociological conditions, and what if we could intervene on a systemic level to change individual behavior?
Putnam speaks to the golden age of American civic culture as being a product of such progressive technocratic innovations, though he is not wholly celebratory of these and acknowledges the skepticism many of us have of data-driven, top-down programs meant to change our behaviors. They’re the same programs that, per Harari, partner with markets to dislocate the individual from our traditional sources of meaning and belonging. The progressive goal may well be to free us from the need for tribal belonging, but as we’ve seen since most of these books were published, the instinct to return to tribe and deep belonging remains. We cannot legislate that out of existence. We cannot shame it out of existence. This instinct may well be the bond of collective care and meaning that we complain are missing from our individualistic modern lives.
When I started reading these books, I thought it might be worth trying to write more responses like these, as a way of generating the all-important content and as a way of helping me engage. Writing is how I engage, digest, and process information. Obviously I think often about doom, loneliness, social disconnection, and culture change. What reading these books together has challenged in me is my nostalgia for an imagined history of hunter-gatherer tribalism or agricultural communalism. Whether the past was better or not, Harari makes a surprisingly persuasive case that it does not matter because it is now impossible to return to an earlier stage of development. All we can do is work with the spirit of the time as it is today, seeing both its gifts and its pains, and find ways to adapt.
