America is Suffering a “Social Recession,” the Root of Our Biggest, Most Intractable Problems
Rebuilding Authentic Community Is the Place to Start
By Jim Miller
In Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the ‘80’s, Hunter S. Thompson sagely noted that:
There are times, however, and this is one of them, when even being right feels wrong. What do you say, for instance, about a generation that has been taught that rain is poison and sex is death? If making love might be fatal and if a cool spring breeze on any summer afternoon can turn a crystal blue lake into a puddle of black poison right in front of your eyes, there is not much left except TV and relentless masturbation. It’s a strange world. Some people get rich and others eat shit and die.
However hyperbolic this may have seemed to some in the eighties, it is sadly resonant today, and we have plenty of social science to back it up. Americans are having less sex, have fewer friends, and have withdrawn from nearly every sphere of social life to a remarkable degree. Our life expectancy has fallen, largely due to diseases of despair, and we are suffering a continuing national mental health crisis that is persisting well past the days of pandemic lockdown.
As Anton Cebalo wrote last week in his excellent Guardian piece, “Is America suffering a ‘social recession’?”
“We have no clear, comparative basis on which to judge what will emerge from the growing number of people who feel lost, lonely or invisible.”
Cebalo goes on to note that the erosion of social life, which David Putnam documented in his seminal study, Bowling Alone: The Decline and Revival of Community, has gotten much worse in the world of the internet that became all-consuming after his book was published back in 2000:
Rather than bowling alone, Americans are instead browsing alone – over seven hours daily, on average, with the number rising every year. As of 2021, 31% of Americans claimed to be online “almost constantly”.
If we are browsing alone rather than bowling alone, the real metric to look at is friendships themselves. The past few decades have recorded a steep decline in people’s reported number of friends. The number of Americans who claim to have “no close friends at all” across all age groups now stands at around 12%, according to the Survey Center on American Life. By comparison, only 2% of Americans said they had no close friends in 2003, according to Gallup. Friendlessness is more common for men, but it is nonetheless affecting everyone.
Our move toward a new ethos of friendlessness corresponds to the pervasive lack of trust in American society, which, riding a 50-year trend, reached a new low in 2022.
This lack of trust in one another and, consequently, all American institutions combined with the historic explosion of unfiltered information from a variety of sources is fertile ground for conspiracy theories, misdirected rage, and a politics increasingly ungrounded in any real sense of community. In fact, it is an incubator for a radically atomized sense of self divorced from many of the community ties that have traditionally bound us.
This all raises the question of who we are becoming and what kind of society will be born as a consequence of our lonely discontent.
Cebalo wisely observes that, “We cannot expect the new individual to simply be contained to just his or her own alienation, pacified and alone. That alienation will inform beliefs on how society should be organized and will be the substance of some future worldview, whatever it may be.”
With this in mind, it would seem that any kind of politics with progressive aims would be naïve to proceed as if the solution to what ails us can be solved by better talking points or simply focusing on the right demographic to win a temporary majority.
The real work of genuinely progressive politics needs to be healing and rebuilding authentic community. If we fail to do this, there will be no quick fixes for our broken body politic any time soon.
Lead image via Strawberry on Flickr