Cigna, the insurance company, just came out with a report that reveals a startling level of loneliness in contemporary America. According to the survey, nearly half (46%) of the U.S. population reports feeling sometimes or always alone, while a full 47% feel “left out.”
27% rarely or never feel they are understood by anyone. Two in five sometimes or always feel their relationships lack meaning, while 43% say they are isolated from others. One in five say they rarely or never feel close to anyone; 18% say there’s simply no one they can talk to.
These numbers are not good. Yet why is this so? Why are we so isolated from one another?
Certainly, our current political polarization doesn’t help, but I don’t think that’s the real cause. Rather, as I see it, such polarization is merely the latest (and perhaps worst) manifestation of the inherent individualism of modernism, or liberalism. (Both words here are interchangeable.)
When speaking of liberalism, I don’t mean exclusively the kind of contemporary liberalism or progressivism you might find in the Democratic party. I’m talking instead about the movement born of the Enlightenment which, for roughly 500 years, has effectively replaced all pre-modern philosophy, theology, institutions, and communities. These changes are reflected in both the modern-day Democratic and Republican parties, be they liberal-progressive or conservative.
The main gist of the Enlightenment/liberal/modernist project was to eliminate the preexisting institutions of family, church, and community in favor of the radical, autonomous self.
The idea is that human beings are not intrinsically defined by the communities in which they live, either as members or as participants, but are free-floating selves imbued with certain natural, inalienable “rights.”
The sovereign impositions of family, church, and community were thought to diminish human flourishing, restricting the individual’s exercise of freedom and choice. The “natural man” of classic liberalism is thus not, as I say, a communal being, as the pre-moderns thought, but radically autonomous. Society, or so the argument goes, had robbed humanity of its basic dignity by means of superstition, prejudice, and ignorance.
The purpose of classic modernism, therefore, was to “liberate” the oppressed and constricted self, to free it from the narrow confines of family, faith, and community (along with their requisite norms and obligations). The liberated self was no longer bound by any of these things, but was now free to utilize for its own purposes the “objective” truths of science and reason.
Thus, classic liberalism, the earliest and most closely attuned to contemporary conservatism, sought to remove all impediments to the autonomous self, allowing it to pursue its own choices and desires, especially in economic matters. Freed from the oppression of “crown, altar, and guild,” along with their vested interests and biases, the “free market” would insure rational economic “laws” that allow for free, autonomous choice.
One of the curious ironies of this approach, however, was the need for a strong national government not only to establish the laws of the free market (economic, social, and moral), but to enforce them, serving as the only real mechanism for adjudicating relations among a collection of free, autonomous persons.
Without the guardrails of family, religion, and local community, and thus without self-governing moral agency, some sort of authoritative entity was required to play referee, to reign in the excesses of unfettered individualism. The law became, in effect, a powerful substitute for the earlier, pre-modern in-house structures that sought to insure morality and fairness.
One of the major changes also wrought by the Enlightenment/modernism/liberalism was its belief that the autonomous individual was free not only from society, but also from nature. Nature, like society, had the effect of unnecessarily binding and limiting the free exercise of human desire and ambition. With the newly-acquired tools of science and reason, humanity could finally subdue nature and make it submit to its beneficent will.
Later, in the 20th century, a new kind of liberalism arose, what we today call either liberal or progressive. Like classical liberalism, it too advances the cause of individuality, but in this case promotes an activist national government as the means of insuring equality and justice.
This newly-empowered government, guided and informed by “experts,” holds that the individual’s rights have been stolen by the rapacious excesses of classical liberalism’s freedoms, most particularly in the economic realm, which, it must be said, had produced wholesale inequities. The system had been rigged by the winners in the Darwinian, capitalist game, as had other dominating factors such as race, class, and gender.
This is perhaps an understandable, if not logical, consequence of classic liberalism’s unfettered individualism. But again, the irony is that progressive liberalism seeks the exact same objective as that which it seeks to replace – to free the autonomous individual to pursue his or her own personal desires. Only in progressive liberalism the modern state replaces the pre-modern family, church, and community in playing their erstwhile “nurturing” role.
Thus, curiously, today’s liberals and conservatives unwittingly seek the very same thing, despite their ongoing, bitter disputes. They’re flip sides of the same modernist coin. Both agree in rejecting all pre-modern notions of liberty, truth, and justice.
In pre-modern times, human beings by nature were thought to be communal beings. Human beings were not born free, in other words, as both classic and progressive liberalism assumes, but had to learn to be free. Only through the acquisition of virtue, and the self-control and self-governance it bequeaths, could genuine freedom be obtained. And this acquisition of virtue had to be learned in and through the very institutions modernism, both left and right, has rejected and superseded.
In pre-modern times, humans were, whether they liked it or not, a part not just of history and society, but of nature as well. They learned from the experience and practical wisdom of their ancestors, from the traditions of those who came before. And they learned what it meant to be human beings in and through the interpersonal connections and intimacies of family, church, and community.
Modernism has rejected society, history, and nature as impediments to human flourishing and the necessary liberation of human desire. The autonomous self, rather, must be freed from these arbitrary encumbrances in order to embrace progress and to become part of the wholly new (and perfect) world liberalism is creating.
With liberalism, time is meaningless. We only live in the now. We are divorced from family, religion, and community, not just in the present, but in the past and future as well. No wonder people feel alone. We’re homeless.
Above is a picture of St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts. While serving a church close by, Linda and I would often go there and pray in the visitors’ chapel inside its sanctuary. The abbey is a stark reminder of the pre-modern world, one where loyalty to time, place, and community lives on.
Whenever I go there I always drive down the hill upon which it sits at half the speed I went up it. And I always dread entering into the rushing traffic on the main road. The abbey is such a wonderful antidote to the entropy of a restless and relentless modernity.
While I don’t think we can turn the clock back and pretend modern liberalism never existed (nor should we necessarily wish to), it is perhaps helpful to consider ways in which we might tap into this now-lost wisdom of the ages, before, that is, the dawn of John Locke and John Dewey.
Perhaps we might seek to reclaim the place of family, church, and community wherever we can find them, and allow the beauty of their natural obligations, commitments, and wisdom to inform, guide, and renew us.