We don't know how to live in an atomized age
We're all fumbling through this new stage of history together, so let's be patient with each other
I recently saw an old work friend for the first time since the pandemic started. She invited me to her birthday party, which was a pleasant surprise to me, since we hadn’t communicated in years, but I had enjoyed her company when we worked together. It saddened me a bit to realize that her social circle was probably pretty small, since she only invited about ten people to her party, and I hadn’t considered her among my ten closest local friends.
I was reluctant to write the previous sentence, because it probably makes me sound like a cruel middle school queen bee1 carefully curating her top 8 list of friends on MySpace2. But the reason I bring it up is because I’d already been thinking about community, especially as I finish Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind3. Haidt argues (convincingly in my view) that humans have been shaped by group selection as well as selection on the individual level, and that one effect of our group selection is a sort of “hive switch” that allows us to come together into what sociologist Emile Durkheim called the realm of the sacred. In this realm, we care more about the other members of our group, and we feel a sense of transcendence. Haidt claims that ‘we achieve our greatest joys in those brief moments of transit to the sacred world, in which we become “simply a part of the whole.4”’
Haidt mentions a few ways one can trigger this “hive switch,” and two of those ways (awe in nature and use of psychedelic drugs) are accessible totally solo5. But not everyone has easy access to either of those options, and even people who can obtain psychedelics probably don’t want to use them too often. Additionally, Haidt describes the hive switch as a kind of binary thing, but I think it’s more continuous. Though I’ve felt a sense of awe while immersed alone in beautiful nature, this feeling is noticeably stronger for me when I’m recreating in nature in a group. I’m skeptical that most people can live off solo outings in nature alone for meeting their needs for transcendence.
I couldn’t help but think that my friend was lacking in this feeling of group transcendence. She’s happily married with children and has a good job, but my wife and I could tell during our visit that she and her husband rarely have guests over. This realization joined in my head with another discussion I was having with two friends who, like me, were previously religious and lamenting the lack of transcendent community in American secular culture. None of us could find a church with the combination of doctrine we felt confident espousing and congregational culture that we liked, but we also couldn’t find secular communities with the sense of rootedness and interleaved personal ties that we wanted. Some of us have found bits and pieces of these deeper ties in hobby groups, but they still haven’t brought us the sense of trust and closeness we’re looking for.
I’ve spent the last year or more feeling socially isolated. This feeling isn’t a unique one in the age of COVID, but somehow we’ve gotten to a state where we’re all together in our loneliness, yet the isolation has gone on for so long that we can’t even take solace in this communal experience anymore. Though I’ve made some new and strengthened some old one-on-one friendships in the last year, and my sense of isolation has improved somewhat, I’d still been feeling a bit stumped before this weekend. I partially attributed these feelings to having relatively few local friends with whom I could be open about my political views, which is still an issue. But now I think the bigger problem is that I haven’t figured out how to extend these individual relationships into something like a community.
How have we gotten to such a state? Haidt claims that historically, religion has been the glue that holds human groups together. He argues that even though organized religion is a relatively recent development, it’s difficult for humans to give up what he defines as the core of religion: a set of completely intertwined relationships between believing, doing, and belonging. In his words,
Asking people to give up all forms of sacralized belonging and live in a world of purely “rational” beliefs might be like asking people to give up the Earth and live in colonies orbiting the moon. It can be done, but it would take a great deal of careful engineering, and even after ten generations, the descendants of those colonists might find themselves with inchoate longings for gravity and greenery.6
I think most people reading this7 are like the hypothetical moon orbiters longing for gravity and greenery. True, we haven’t been forced to give up all religious beliefs, but in my social milieu, anyone seriously following most major religions is considered strange at best and bigoted at worst. And there are the two matters that my two friends and I were discussing. First, nearly every Christian church8 where we live is either dogmatically woke or so strict about matters of sexual behavior (generally in terms of accepting gay relationships) that we don’t want to be a member. Second, all three of us can’t really summon a consistent belief in a deity.
To make things worse, the secular social fabric is also fraying. We spent so long being encouraged to avoid human contact, and even in the pre-COVID era, community ties were declining. Just between 2011 and 2017, Pew found that9:
The percentage of Americans active in a charitable or volunteer organization dropped from 22% to 18%
The percentage of Americans active in community groups or neighborhood associations dropped from 19% to 15%
These declines might not seem huge on their face, but volunteer groups losing 18% of their members and community groups losing 21% of theirs in six years seems like a big deal to me.
I don’t yet have a solution to this problem, but it’s something I’m thinking about and will probably write more about in the future, and I’d love to hear from anyone who has any ideas. In the meantime, I think we should all try to be kinder to each other and remember that we’re living in an environment suddenly different from the one to which our psyches are adapted. Maybe we can support each other when we have some surprise longings for the sacred equivalent of greenery.
I’m not sure if this makes me come across any more positively, but I’ve never been popular or particularly socially graceful. If I’m socially richer than this friend, it’s probably because my wife has a lot of coworkers who are friends with both of us, and I’ve had more time to proactively socialize in the last few years, since she has young children and I don’t.
To any Zoomers/other people unfamiliar with teenage social media culture in the mid 2000s reading this: MySpace had a feature where a user could display his/her top 8 friends prominently on his/her profile. There was much angst endured over which friends put you in their top 8 and whom you chose for your own top 8.
Haidt, Jonathan. (2012, p 244). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Pantheon Books.
That said, the traditional cultures that Haidt mentions as using psychedelics all incorporated them as part of sacred rituals within a societal context. I do wonder how differently they feel in such an environment compared to using them by yourself.
Haidt, Jonathan. (2012, p 264). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Pantheon Books.
Sure, there may be only three of you, but if that’s the case, then I’m even more confident that the rest of this sentence is true!
Yes, there are other religions in my area, but since I can’t really summon consistent belief in a deity, it feels even weirder to convert to a religion far afield from the one I was raised in. And from what I can tell, all of those other religions also fall into one of those two camps.
Even more surprisingly, the percentage of Americans “active in church groups or other religious or spiritual organizations” dropped from 40% from 19%.