It’s a question that feels especially appropriate on Valentine’s Day, the holiday most linked to the lonely-hearted.

Over two decades since Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone sounded the alarm bell on social isolation, and almost three years since COVID lockdowns began, we regularly speak about an epidemic of loneliness in the U.S.

But for all its ubiquity, loneliness remains relatively taboo. As psychiatrists Jacqueline Olds and Richard S. Schwartz observed in 2010’s The Lonely American, this nation, especially—and its obsession with self-reliance—has created a culture of shame around what is an “ordinary human emotion.” So much so that they noted most of their patients “were more comfortable saying they were depressed than saying they were lonely.”

But what if we considered the other side of the loneliness coin?

“I’m quite fascinated by loneliness. It can be really beautiful when you turn it over,” the Canadian singer and songwriter Carly Rae Jepsen muses in the introduction to her latest album, The Loneliest Time, which samples different flavors of loneliness—from the breezy brutality of “Beach House” (a bop about trying to find a connection on dating apps, the hook goes: “I’ve got a beach house in Malibu, and I’m probably going to hurt your feelings”) to the lead single, “Western Wind,” which Jepsen wrote after losing her grandmother.

The album, born out of the global pandemic, was what first got me thinking about how narrow our cultural framing around the subject remains.

But that’s slowly changing. The Loneliest Time is part of an emerging body of art and scholarship that could help us imagine a wider story around loneliness in the U.S. and around the world.

Until recently, the origins of loneliness were not a major topic of inquiry. “The history of loneliness is fundamental to understanding its prevalence and meanings in the 21st century. And yet this history has been virtually neglected,” noted sociocultural historian Fay Bound Alberti in her 2019 work, A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion.

Bound Alberti dates the thing we call “loneliness” today back relatively recently, to the 1800s when the term “loneliness” shifted in use from referring to physical distance—like how far you lived from town—to the emotional state associated with a perceived lack of company.

This change in meaning was not just a linguistic quirk. Modern loneliness, Bound Alberti argues, could only arise within a certain set of conditions—its invention dependent on “the formation of a society that was less inclusive and communal and more grounded in the scientific, medicalized idea of an individual mind, set against the rest.” It was the “philosophical and spiritual framework” of the industrializing world, then, which allowed for the condition of loneliness to take off.

That being said, as Amherst College’s Amelia Worsley writes in the forthcoming Routledge History of Loneliness, while loneliness “could not have always signified what it does today” the “complexity of early references to loneliness” is also understudied. The more we learn about it, the more some scholars of earlier periods are starting to argue that throughout history “there has always been something like the experience that is today called loneliness.”

The Routledge History of Loneliness includes research from scholars like Hannah Yip and Thomas Clifton, experts in Renaissance-era British literature who recently held a digital conference exploring early modern loneliness. The online meeting examined how historical subjects’ views on the subject compare to our own today. Just like now, Yip and Clifton concluded after the panels wrapped, loneliness was “a symptom of a system which at times alienates, isolates, or side-lines individuals.” And just like now, the balms for it were “compassion and community,” they wrote, quoting the 17th-century poet and priest George Herbert’s poem “Denial”: “They and my minde may chime / And mend my ryme.”

Afer reading that, I thought about how Jepsen said something similar when promoting The Loneliest Time. Author and critic Hanif Abdurraqib had noted on his podcast that listening to the album “there wasn’t any shame around loneliness or the idea of loneliness or the realities of loneliness, but it also wasn’t some finger-waggy thing—‘You just got to be good at living alone.’”

“I don’t think loneliness, the cure for it, is being really good at being alone,” Jepsen agreed. Instead she found that experiencing loneliness was what pushed her to seek out connection. “Reaching for that is what I wanted from this album,” she said. “I think that’s why it has a hopeful spin on it. It’s not ‘Be OK on your own.’ It’s natural to want to reach for people; we should. That’s what life is about. So let your loneliness make you brave.”

The more we understand the history of loneliness, the more we can start to see loneliness as a force like any other—one that, if we let it, can push us toward introspection and action and community. Just like 500 years ago, when the balladeers sang about being alone, today in an even lonelier time, works like The Loneliest Time should be taken as an invitation: to embrace this tangle of emotions and let it help connect us to the larger human experience.

The post ‘Let Your Loneliness Make You Brave’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Perhaps it was the shift to fossil fuels and scientific medicine that led us to this place, a population of nearly 8 billion crowded onto a warming planet, a terrestrial species melting the ice caps so there is less and less land to inhabit or to grow food.

Or maybe it happened further back, with our jump down the food chain to become growers and eaters of grass (and maize, and rice, and sorghum). Agriculture started the slow demographic explosion of the last 10 millennia, pressing on biodiversity, and bringing on the sixth extinction. The anthropologist and political scientist James C. Scott makes a strong case in his book Against the Grain that the shift to agriculture also ushered in slavery, oppressive states, and social inequality.

But it would be a mistake to see life before agriculture as the answer to our problems. Proponents of the “Paleo diet” promise personal wellbeing if we only return to pre-agricultural gastronomy. They usually stop short of suggesting we go big on protein by scavenging on the kills of big cats and hyenas, an important food source in some periods of prehistory.

So how does city life fit into all this? Is urban life another wrong turn? Should we return to the countryside—ideally, a bit of it with decent broadband and a farmers market within cycling distance? Not quite.

The spread of cities over the last 6,000 years is one of the epic themes of human history. It is well documented, since so many societies that built cities also developed writing systems. It is a global phenomenon—not because cities originated in one place and spread out over the planet, but because people invented cities, out of nothing, so many times. Ancient humans congregated and built in the valleys of Mexico, Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus and north China, and also in the Sahel region south of the Sahara, in the Amazon Basin, in what are now the southeastern states of the U.S., in the Andes, in the forest of southeast Asia. People probably built cities in yet-unknown other places, too, where LiDAR and satellite imaging have not yet found them.

Cities followed agriculture in all these regions. At first, they varied widely from one place to another. There were low-density cities like those of the Maya, and tightly packed hill towns; instant cities built at the command of an Assyrian, Chinese, or Roman emperor, and others that grew slowly out of collective efforts like the settlements of the Etruscans. Modern cities, with their convergent architectures of steel and concrete, fiber optics and tarmac, are much more similar to each other than were the many seeds from which they have grown.

Today about a quarter of the people of the world live in cities of more than one million people: that share is growing faster than the global population. Growth has not been smooth, but it is now irreversible. The landscapes and biodiversity needed for gathering and hunting are long gone, and could never sustain today’s global population. We cannot turn our backs on farming or on cities. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine a human future that is not more urban than ours, unless it’s a dystopian world founded on some species-wide catastrophe, like the one that destroyed the dinosaurs. Is such a colossal cull plausible? Even a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, global deaths add up to less than 0.4 percent of the world’s population. Could anything less than an asteroid strike or a super volcano explosion derail our urban journey now?

These doomsday scenarios aside, an increasingly urban future seems assured. But there is no need to be alarmed by it. One reason not to consign cities to the trash can of some of our species’ worst ideas is that we have turned out to be very well adapted to live in them. Human beings move easily in cities’ complex three-dimensional topography. We are adept at building social groups with strangers as well as kith and kin, we are tolerant of the new (and often nutritionally impoverished) diets that cities impose on their inhabitants, and we combine a sense of local territory (our homes, our neighborhoods) with a capacity for exploring and mapping new spaces that is far superior to that of our nearest animal relatives. We might have been born to live in cities.

We were not, of course, designed for city life. Evolution is the opposite of movement by design—it’s a lurching blindly into the future, through one happy accident after another (or at least, by following paths that are less disastrous than the alternatives). Our species has been around for some 300 million years, and we owe most of our city-friendly features to evolutionary processes that go back even further. For instance, our sociality, linked to the development of our frontal cortex, is pure primate. Our dietary flexibility probably developed in environments where it was never certain exactly which foods would be available. All this added up to an awesome potential for living in cities. We are not the only species with this potential. Mice, rats, bats, and house sparrows also do pretty well in concrete jungles. The difference is, we build cities. They have colonized them.

The evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson pointed out, in The Social Conquest of Earth, that other species too have taken advantage of the chance to live in dense communities. Some (but not all) bees and wasps, coral polyps and termites, and even naked mole rats have come to live what Wilson called eusocial lives, in which social cooperation becomes central. These species are not closely related—not to each other, and not to us—but they have one crucial thing in common. They all make something like a nest. Getting the most out of a social existence, argues Wilson, required cohabitation. Big brains need crowds.

Cities are our nests, so natural to the human animal that we find it difficult to imagine how we ever got on without them. How did we look after our big-brained but slow-developing children when we had no homes, nor enough neighbors or grandparents to care for the kids when we went foraging? How did our astonishing capacity to make tools and artifacts operate when we were so often on the move? If we wanted to develop technologies that were not all small, light, and easy to carry) we had to have a base. Camps and temporary homes must have done some service, and villages were good nests for a while, but only cities have made it possible for human societies to specialize, so everyone lived near a smith or a doctor or a priest, and we could make the most out of our talent for cooperation.

Cities are a new experiment, in evolutionary terms. Probably in the first thousand years or so there were many failures; archaeologists are beginning to map more clearly the urban civilizations that collapsed like so many houses of cards. But we got better at it. Most ancient cities were small just because it was so difficult to provision large ones in time of crisis. The first city builders often concentrated their energy on the house of gods and kings, and on defensive walls. Later generations turned their attention to water supply and drainage, and to constructing roads and canals, granaries and reservoirs. Fire and earthquakes ravaged many ancient cities until architects learned to build in stone and brick, to plan cities for safety, to build resilient structures.

Some of those cities turned out to be so resilient they are still with us today. Athens is maybe 3,500 years old; Rome and Istanbul, nearly 3,000 years old. Even medieval capitals such as Cairo and Tunis are close by ancient predecessors in Memphis and Carthage. Once we found good places to nest, we often stayed.

Modern cities are far more elaborate of course. Few ancient cities had more than 100,000 inhabitants. Today there are more than 30 cities of more than 10 million. We have learned to pack our nests more densely, piling our homes high. Even more important have been improvements in our cities’ nervous and circulatory systems (electricity, gas, the internet)—the channels by which food and water enter the nest, and waste is removed from it. The modern megacity depends on fast transportation that allows citizens to live far from where they work. These technologies are different from those employed in Tenochtitlan, Alexandria and Baghdad, but the principles are the same.

For the last few thousand years, our societies have mostly been ruled from cities, and our key infrastructures have been designed for urban populations—a state of affairs that holds great promise for humanity and the natural world. Done properly, city life is the most environmentally friendly way to live. Waste disposal, sanitation and recycling is easier to organize in cities than in the countryside. Our generation will see the end of private cars powered by fossil fuels. Already many city dwellers use public transport for most of their travel needs. Electric cars and buses are city friendly as well as environmentally friendly.

Romantics have been calling for us to go back to nature ever since the Industrial Revolution began. But the sums don’t add up. There is not enough “nature” out there to support us all. The kinds of lives we want now—high tech, highly connected, materially rich—work better in cities. And it is better for the planet that we don’t try and live this way in what wilderness is left.

We have not arrived at the city of the future yet, but it’s early days. Each generation our nests get better and better. Cities will continue to be better connected, greener and healthier, and that is all good news. So, city life: not one of our worst ideas, then, after all.

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By giving first-hand accounts of what happened on the ground—or on the casting couch—before reporters arrived at the scene, citizen sources perform an important public service. But behind every citizen we see in the news is another story—about their interaction with journalists and the repercussions of their decision to go public—that audiences rarely know much about.

Occasional glimpses behind the scenes are telling—and troubling. A hurricane survivor bawls out a journalist in a video that goes viral. A sexual abuse survivor writes of losing every shred of privacy after deciding to go public. Student gun control advocates later face cyber-harassment and conspiracy theories.

I’ve spent the last 10 years interviewing ordinary people about what it feels like to become the focus of news attention. I spoke to victims, heroes, witnesses, criminals, voters, experts, and more. All were private citizens rather than politicians, celebrities, PR professionals, or professional journalists. Their stories raise important questions for journalists and audiences, and for anyone considering speaking to a reporter. They also hold important clues about media trust at a moment when online disinformation is a major concern, and public confidence in mainstream news—long in decline—has reached an alarming low.

Understanding how non-journalists see the news media is an essential step in rebuilding public trust. And in fact, one of the most striking lessons I learned from speaking to citizen news sources is how differently they tend to see journalists from how journalists tend to see themselves. My interviewees mostly thought of journalists not primarily as citizens´ defenders against powerful people and institutions, but as powerful people and institutions in their own right.

Journalists seem powerful to ordinary citizens for several interrelated reasons. The first is that journalists have a much larger audience than most people can reach through their social networks. Journalists can be gatekeepers to publicity and fame. But, most important, they control how people’s stories are told to the public: what is included, how it is framed, and who is cast as the hero or the bad guy.

Those decisions can have favorable or destructive consequences for the people they are reporting about—consequences that are magnified online. And yet, journalists seem to dole out those benefits or damages pretty cavalierly.

To many non-journalists, the news media’s relationship to the public seems fundamentally unequal, and potentially exploitative.

Ordinary people who make the news experience that inequality first-hand. Even when journalists are compassionate, friendly, and professional—which many of my interviewees found they were—the structure of the encounter usually feels lopsided.

News subjects are usually more deeply invested and involved in newsworthy events than journalists. That’s why journalists seek them out. Subjects were there when the shots rang out or were on intimate terms with the deceased. They feel these are their stories.

And yet, journalists swoop in, sometimes in packs and with intimidating equipment, to gather what they need in a process that feels both invasive and mysterious. Often people decide to speak to reporters because they see it as an opportunity to address the public about an important issue, or enjoy the benefits of publicity. But the price of inclusion in the news product is control over how their story is told. Journalists quickly move on to the next story. Subjects stay on the ground to clean up the rubble and bury the dead—and manage the impact of the news coverage on their lives.

At a time when everything is Google-able, that impact is exacerbated by online publication in two main ways. The first is that mainstream news articles perform very well in online searches. Old articles, once relegated to basement archives, now pop right up when you search for someone´s name, often at the top of their search results, and stay there possibly forever. Speaking to the press about sexual harassment, for example, was always risky. Today it brings with it the prospect that anyone Googling you in the future—employers, landlords, students, dates—will know about that episode in your life.

Cyberabuse is the other big problem. Studies find online harassment is increasingly common, with women and minorities reporting more serious cases. The controversial issues and breaking news events that thrust ordinary citizens into the media spotlight tend to trigger strong sentiment. That has long been true, but, before the internet, it took more effort to contact people named in news stories. Today we consume news on the same devices we can use to contact those people. Many of my interviewees reported receiving social media messages from strangers—some supportive, some abusive—as well as seeing themselves become fodder for online commentary. Not all news stories trigger digital blowback, but I have found that controversial stories, like those challenging gender norms, almost always do.

Despite the sometimes unforeseen consequences of their news appearances, most of my interviewees liked the reporters who wrote about them and felt they had benefited from the experience overall. But in most cases that one positive experience appeared to do little to shake their negative attitudes toward the news media as a whole.

For example, a woman I’ll call Ruby, who had survived a gang shooting in Harlem, described the newspaper reporter who had interviewed her as “gutsy, friendly, honest.” But she thought he was the exception to the rule. Ruby had seen reporters on TV, and knew they usually ask demeaning questions designed to make their subjects “look like assholes.”

That reporters don’t always take unethical advantage of their position was a welcome discovery to some interviewees, but it was not nearly as salient as the feeling that they always could.

Caty (another pseudonym) summed up the sentiment well. A New York City restaurant owner, she believed her business, threatened with closure, had been saved by a sympathetic news article. On the surface, hers was a classic story of a journalist defending a citizen against an oppressive bureaucracy. Caty was grateful to the newspaper, and the reporter. But our interview ended like this:

Q: Is there anything else you think I should know?

CATY: My biggest thing is, the press has so much power. They should know the power they hold, and they should be ethical. The doctor is there to take care of a patient, over anything else. The press is there to tell the truth. And that’s been lost.

To many of the people I have interviewed, like Caty, the news media was a powerful entity that hulked over the citizenry. It was supposed to look out for citizens, but often took advantage of them instead.

In short, it was a bully.

That helps explain why, shocking as it may seem, people may find it cathartic to see a news subject lash out at a reporter, whether it’s a hurricane survivor, a congressional candidate … or even the President of the United States.

The idea that many citizens feel like David to the news media’s Goliath may be hard for journalists to stomach or believe. It is the exact opposite of how journalists normally think of themselves. In their view, the news media works and fights on behalf of the people. Journalists are David, facing down the powers that be in the name of the citizens.

And yet, if news institutions want to regain long-waning public trust, they need to address the widespread perception that the news media is more interested in serving itself than the public. They would do well to highlight not just their accuracy, but their care, empathy, and ability to listen to the little guy.

The post Why Americans Are Afraid to Talk to Reporters appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

We began working through Taylor’s dense argument, and I worried that we’d soon lose each other in the dark forest of his prose. Reading Taylor requires that, like Hansel and Gretel, you bring breadcrumbs to trace an argument that has you bouncing from late medieval monasticism to German philosophy to lyrics from torch singer Peggy Lee.

But to my students’ astonishment (and mine), as they made their way through the book, lights went on for them, illuminating the world they live in in a new way. “It’s like he’s reading our mail,” one student said. If you’ve grown up in post-1960s North America, A Secular Age, which was published in 2007, is like an episode of “This is Your Life” or “Finding Your Roots”: It’s the backstory to the fractured world in which we find ourselves. For people who have strong beliefs, as many of my students do, living in a world that is secular is to experience belief haunted by doubt, almost daily. And then that doubt is itself haunted by an enduring longing for something more—what Taylor, a practicing Roman Catholic, calls a “fullness,” a sense of significance that has the punch of transcendence about it, even if we believe this world is all we’ve got.

What did this octogenarian philosopher help my millennial students see, and what did they see in him?

Well, for starters, he helped explain why their generation considers “authenticity” the predominant virtue. In Taylor’s telling, the way humans see and imagine the world—what he calls our “social imaginary”—shifted in modernity from being religious and largely Christian to become “the modern moral order.” Rather than being obligated to God or “higher” eternal norms, today our obligations are for the mutual benefit of society. My moral obligations are to my neighbor, and everyone is my neighbor—so my obligations are universal. While we might no longer be haunted by God or eternity, in a sense the stakes are raised even higher: I’m responsible for everyone, all the time. There is no end to my obligation, no parameters for my responsibility. In a sense, we have to fill the vacuum left by God’s death. Those are big shoes to fill.

But there is a flip side to this: If we’re all we’ve got, Taylor says, it means we’re always “on” not only because we are always responsible but also because everybody’s watching. So we live in what Taylor calls an age of “mutual display” in which we show our individualism and virtue by making sure others see it. If God is dead, the only audience left to confirm our virtue is one another. David Foster Wallace got at this dynamic in a famous essay on television that is only more true in our internet age. What television did to us, Wallace argued, was turn us into watchers who expected to be watched. He, too, told a philosophical story about this, asking readers to imagine a “universe in which God is Nielsen.” Today, as my students explained, everyone is Nielsen, rating you.

Taylor helped them make sense of the almost paralyzing self-consciousness that has descended upon them with the constant display/watch dynamic that attends social media. They know the exhaustion of what it means to always be “on,” and they are well aware of the judgmentalism they experience when they don’t “display” the right things in the right way. And they start to wonder if the all-seeing God might not have been a little more forgiving than the non-stop monitoring of Snapchat and Instagram.

But Taylor also helped them understand a spiritual dynamic they experience. What makes ours a “secular” age, writes Taylor, is not that it is defined by unbelief but rather that belief is contestable and contested. Belief of every sort is “fragilized,” as Taylor puts it, destabilized by rival accounts and doubts. For more traditional “believers,” this means their faith is attended by doubt as a constant companion. “Lord I believe, help thou my unbelief” (Mark 9:24) is a prayer they understand well.

But Taylor explains that it’s not only believers who suffer from doubt. In our secular age the unbeliever can find herself tempted to believe. She may take up yoga, or sacrificially devote herself to causes of justice, or find herself strangely attracted to the Dominican nuns down the street who keep inviting her to spiritual retreats. The doubter’s doubt is faith. (As the novelist Julian Barnes admitted in his memoir, Nothing to Be Frightened Of: “I don’t believe in God, but I miss him.”)

Unlike the world described to my students by religious fundamentalists, this is a world that they recognize. Taylor did justice to the complexity of their experience and the messiness of their spiritual lives, giving voice to their doubts, to be sure, but also giving them permission to admit they also still wanted to believe something more. There is a kind of sincerity about Taylor’s philosophical analysis that allowed them to step out of the cage of ironic cynicism.

Taylor is the first to admit that A Secular Age is an heir to Romanticism: He is trying to offer a philosophy that gives due attention to what it feels like to live in the world—a theoretical account that acknowledges the importance of our affections, our embodiment, all the visceral ways that we grope through the dizzying existence of our late modern world.

My students found in Taylor’s work a kind of “hitchhiker’s guide” to a secular age. But not everyone has the luxury of spending four months working through it. Which is why I decided, after that semester, to write a book about a book in an attempt at bringing Taylor’s insights to a wider audience. The response has been quite overwhelming—people from all sorts of walks of life have told me that Taylor’s analysis gave them their bearings in the confusion of a secular age. Some religious believers told me it gave them permission to voice their doubts, to be honest about how hard it is to believe. Skeptics and atheists tell me Taylor puts a finger on the rumbling spirituality they can’t shake. So this big philosophical tome ends up doing what David Foster Wallace used to say a good novel is supposed to do: Give us a sense that we aren’t alone. Someone understands us and has given names to the landscape we live in.

Taylor’s book makes me think of an image by the Romantic German painter Caspar David Friedrich called Monastery Graveyard in the Snow. Stark, skeleton-like trees frame the ruins of a cloistered community. You can feel the chill of north winds blowing across the scene like the gales of enlightened disbelief blowing across Europe. The gravestones point to the dead who used to believe. (Fittingly, all we have is a black-and-white image of the painting, which was destroyed during World War II.)

But then, when I look closer at this image, I notice that amidst those grave markers is a tiny band of monks, obstinate but haunted, still looking for something. Is it force of habit that propels them? Or has the enlightenment they were promised proven unfulfilling? Better to pray in the ruins than settle for disenchantment. Charles Taylor suggests that many of us are like this band of seekers: We see the ruins, we know the world has changed, we know there’s no going back. But we also can’t shake a hunger, a longing, a haunting that we welcome.

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