If you’re in the mood for a journalistic dive into why we Americans—so long-lived on the top of the socioeconomic heap—are in such a tangle of anger and division, I recommend Derek Thompson’s cover story in the February 2025 edition of The Atlantic, “The Anti-Social Century.” As if it’s not bad enough that we’re likely screwed by nuclear war or environmental devastation, viral resistance or End Times revelations, it seems we may simply do ourselves in by being the most self-serving, narcissistic, inward-focused creatures this planet has every tolerated. And we’re getting worse.
I have long subscribed to the theorem that what we buy with our affluence is privacy. Mr. Thompson’s article reinforces our preference for privacy over interaction at every possible opportunity. Since the 1980’s, by every measure, we spend more time alone, at home, on our devices. The trend spiked during the pandemic, but has not abated since we’ve had the ‘all clear’ to breath collectively again. Accordingly, we enjoy/endure less face-to-face time than ever. We are less and less content, let alone happy. And yet we do basically nothing to break out of our isolation.
The article is rich in amusing factoids, like the way many restaurants have repurposed bars (formerly places of communal gathering) into take-out delivery counters as their take-out business explodes in direct proportion to the shrinking numbers in their dining rooms. To be fair, Mr. Thompson points out some positive aspects of our solitary existences. How our devices actually make connections among core family and friends deeper, more continuous. And how those devises also enable us to find affinity groups, no matter how esoteric. But on the whole, “The Anti-Social Century” is pretty much 2000’s Bowling Alone updated in accordance with the worst possible scenario.
The stats are gruesome, the outlook bleak, but I did find one potentially useful nugget. Not so much a germ of hope as a framework for understanding our increasingly isolated society. After all, the better we understand a phenomenon, the better positioned we are to address it.
Marc Dunkleman, author and professor, describes our social world as three rings. The inner ring is our family and close friends. Our ring of intimacy. It is where we learn love. The outer ring is our tribe. It’s where we find broad commonalties. Where we learn loyalty. Each of these rings is affected by our physical isolation and device-dependence, but they can still flourish.
The middle ring is the village: our neighbor; our PTA; our children’s little league team; our local church; our veteran’s group. It is the people who are physically proximate, yet not intimates. Folks we knew in abundance a hundred years ago, during the heyday of American civic organizations. But in our era of spiraling downward engagement in any kind of localized group activity, the village is the most frayed remnant of social fabric.
Since we live in a world where physical connection is less and less important, why do we care if the village gets lost? Because of the most fleeting quality that Dunkleman attributes to the social ring of the village. Tolerance. In the old days, we had to get along with the people near us. We needed to be able to depend on them (at the very least in emergencies), and so we learned how to hold our tongue, muffle our opinions, cool our jets. Because it was more important to get along with our neighbor, than to agree with them.
Way back, when Hillary Clinton was First Lady, and her biggest faults were whether to claim “Rodman” in her name or channel Tammy Wynette in, “Stand By Your Man,” Ms. Clinton wrote a book, “It Takes a Village.” A bit of pop philosophy every bit as cheesy and as it is true.
It takes a village to support human life, to learn the kind of ‘give along to get along’ cooperation that brought us to the apex of the food chain in the first place. And if we keep disregarding the qualities that make up a village: mutual tolerance, respect, forbearance; our humanity is doomed.
The Awkward Pose 