(illustration credit 2.2)
2.
If we examine the causes of modern alienation in more detail, some of our sense of loneliness comes down to sheer numbers. The billions of people who live on the planet make the idea of talking to a stranger more threatening than it was in sparser days, because sociability seems to bear an inverse relationship to the density of population. We generally talk gladly to people only once we also have the option of avoiding them altogether. Whereas the Bedouin whose tent surveys a hundred kilometres of desolate sand has the psychological wherewithal to offer each stranger a warm welcome, his urban contemporaries, though at heart no less well meaning or generous, must — in order to preserve a modicum of inner serenity — give no sign of even noticing the millions of humans who are eating, sleeping, arguing, copulating and dying only centimetres away from them on all sides.
Then, too, there is the matter of how we are introduced. The public spaces in which we typically encounter others — the commuter trains, the jostling pavements, the airport concourses — conspire to project a demeaning picture of our identities, which undermines our capacity to hold on to the idea that every person is necessarily the centre of a complex and precious individuality. It can be hard to stay hopeful about human nature after a walk down Oxford Street or a transfer at O’Hare.
We used to feel more connected to our neighbours in part because they were also often our colleagues. Home was not always an anonymous dormitory to be reached late and left early. Neighbours became well acquainted not so much because they were adept conversationalists, but because they had to bring in the hay or put up the school roof together, such projects naturally and surreptitiously helping to foster connections. However, capitalism has little patience for local production and cottage industry. It may even prefer it if we have no contact with our neighbours at all, lest they detain us on our way to the office or discourage us from completing an online acquisition.
In the past, we got to know others because we had no option but to ask them for help — and were ourselves asked for help in turn. Charity was an integral part of premodern life. It was impossible to avoid moments when we would have to request money from a near-stranger or to hand it out to a vagabond beggar in a world without a health-care system, unemployment insurance, public housing or consumer banking. The approach on the street of a sick, frail, confused or homeless person did not immediately inspire passers-by to look away and assume that a government agency would take care of the problem.
We are from a purely financial point of view greatly more generous than our ancestors ever were, surrendering up to half of our income for the communal good. But we do this almost without realizing it, through the anonymous agency of the taxation system; and if we think about it at all, it is likely to be with resentment that our money is being used to support unnecessary bureaucracies or to buy missiles. We seldom feel a connection to those less fortunate members of the polity for whom our taxes also buy clean sheets, soup, shelter or a daily dose of insulin. Neither recipient nor donor feels the need to say ‘Please’ or ‘Thank you’. Our donations are never framed — as they were in the Christian era — as the lifeblood of an intricate tangle of mutually interdependent relationships, with practical benefits for the recipient and spiritual ones for the donor.
Locked away in our private cocoons, our chief way of imagining what other people are like has become the media, and as a consequence, we naturally expect that all strangers will be murderers, swindlers or paedophiles — which reinforces our impulse to trust only those few individuals who have been vetted for us by pre-existing family and class networks. On those rare occasions when circumstances (snowstorms, lightning strikes) succeed in rupturing our hermetic bubbles and throw us in with people we don’t know, we tend to marvel that our fellow citizens have shown surprisingly little interest in slicing us in half or molesting our children and may even be surprisingly good-natured and ready to help.
Solitary though we may have become, we haven’t of course given up all hope of forming relationships. In the lonely canyons of the modern city, there is no more honoured emotion than love. However, this is not the love of which religions speak, not the expansive, universal brotherhood of mankind; it is a more jealous, restricted and ultimately meaner variety. It is a romantic love which sends us on a maniacal quest for a single person with whom we hope to achieve a life-long and complete communion, one person in particular who will spare us any need for people in general.
Dreams of meeting one person who will spare us any need for other people. (illustration credit 2.3)
Insofar as modern society ever promises us access to a community, it is one centred around the worship of professional success. We sense that we are brushing up against its gates when the first question we are asked at a party is ‘What do you do?’, our answer to which will determine whether we are warmly welcomed or conclusively abandoned by the peanuts. In these competitive, pseudo-communal gatherings, only a few of our attributes count as currency with which to buy the goodwill of strangers. What matters above all is what is on our business cards, and those who have opted to spend their lives looking after children, writing poetry or nurturing orchards will be left in no doubt that they have run contrary to the dominant mores of the powerful and deserve to be marginalized accordingly.
Given this level of discrimination, it is no surprise that many of us choose to throw ourselves with a vengeance into our careers. Focusing on work to the exclusion of almost everything else is a plausible enough strategy in a world which accepts workplace achievements as the main tokens with which we can secure not just the financial means to survive physically, but also the attention that we require to thrive psychologically.
3.
Religions seem to know a great deal about our loneliness. Even if we believe very little of what they tell us about the afterlife or the supernatural origins of their doctrines, we can nevertheless admire their understanding of what separates us from strangers and their attempts to melt away one or two of the prejudices that normally prevent us from building connections with others.
A Catholic Mass is not, to be sure, the ideal habitat for an atheist. Much of the dialogue is either offensive to reason or simply incomprehensible. It goes on for a long time and rarely overrides a temptation to fall asleep. Nevertheless, the ceremony is replete with elements which subtly strengthen congregants’ bonds of affection, and which atheists would do well to study and on occasion learn to appropriate for reuse in the secular realm.
Catholicism starts to create a sense of community with a setting. It marks off a piece of the earth, puts walls up around it and declares that within their parameters there will reign values utterly unlike those which hold sway in the world beyond, in the offices, gyms and living rooms of the city. All buildings give their owners opportunities to recondition visitors’ expectations and to lay down rules of conduct specific to them. The art gallery legitimates the practice of peering silently at a canvas, the nightclub of swaying one’s hands to a musical score. And a church, with its massive timber doors and 300 stone angels carved around its porch, gives us rare permission to lean over and say hello to a stranger without any danger of being thought predatory or insane. We are promised that here (in the words of the Mass’s initial greeting) ‘the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit’ belong to all who have assembled. The Church lends its enormous prestige, accrued through age, learning and architectural grandeur, to our shy desire to open ourselves to someone new.