Is Loneliness a Necessary Reality of the Modern World?
According to Hannah Arendt, loneliness is the marker of the modern condition. She traced its rise to the Industrial Revolution in which workers abandoned small communities for jobs in big, anonymous cities, where loneliness is the default state. With the onset of the Covid pandemic, this sense of communal loneliness has only increased in many areas of the country. Additionally, political polarization and widening wealth inequality exacerbate these feelings. Ian Marcus Corbin has studied these trends in loneliness, exploring the intricacies of human interconnectedness and advocating for a more communal, less individualistic understanding of the human person. He sees the need for “a better, deeper, richer understanding of what it means to belong and what it means to be lonely.” While there may not be one perfect model for human society, Ian argues that a healthy social network will “make sense” of all the aspects of the human person, providing both a call to greatness and a safety net for failure.
In this episode, Ian Corbin explains why the current definition of loneliness is insufficient and why he would define loneliness as the decay of one’s internal, coherent world. Ian relates a child’s need for evaluative judgments and facts to form an internal world to an adult’s need for continued sociality. He discusses the difference between solitude, isolation, and loneliness. He notes that high levels of loneliness are often reported after national tragedies and suggests political polarization is endemic in societies where the public loses its clear sense of the world. Ian and Grant dive into social media, social class, the Weimar Republic, the freedom of teenagers, Simone Biles, and more. Ian Marcus Corbin co-directs the Human Network Initiative at Harvard Medical School where he is a postdoctoral fellow. In addition to studying loneliness, he also writes about a wide range of topics related to philosophy and culture.
Artists are often canaries in the coal mine
Liberalism relies on critique and “disdains to advance big, serious, bold spiritual visions of human flourishing”
Artists can either live on the periphery and starve or play the game that’s being played
Loneliness is actually worse for you than isolation is
“We need a better, deeper, richer understanding of what it means to belong and what it means to be lonely”
Those who choose solitude for religious reasons leave human society “in pursuit of a better sociality”
Quakers in Philadelphia were early proponents of solitary confinement
We need other people around us to keep our sense of reality stable, coherent, and harmonious
“Loneliness is a world decay where a person’s sense of what's true, what's important, what's valuable, and what's false doesn't really hold anymore”
Common symptoms of loneliness are an inability to focus and an inability to self-regulate
Subterranean value judgments are what allow us to function as humans
Two major spikes in loneliness in the past seventy-five years in America: after JFK’s assassination and post 9/11
Wealth is growing for a few elites while the majority are left out of the American dream
If the social community of the 1950s was so great, the Boomers wouldn’t have fled
“It's hard to see white and black people without seeing class read into their racial makeup.”
America is a winner-take-all, success-and-status-obsessed society
Anyone who achieves a world-historical level of excellence must warp or destroy some parts of themselves
There’s no Platonic form of a human society, but we hope for a society where everything makes sense
Links:
“Solitary Confinement: A Brief History”
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Lurching Toward Happiness in America by Claude Fisher
War and the American Difference by Stanley Hauerwas
Leonard Cohen on Hydra, Greece
Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher
The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt
“Simone Biles opens up about her mental health post-Olympics: ‘I'm still scared to do gymnastics’”
“Simone Biles prioritized her health. Kerri Strug never had the chance to.”