ROBERT Putnam, an American political scientist, has done more than anyone in our time to document the loss, in contemporary America, of social capital, the bonds that join us to one another in relationships of mutual responsibility and trust. In a famous 2000 book he gave the phenomenon a name. Noting that more people than ever were going ten-pin bowling, but fewer than ever were joining teams, he called it Bowling Alone. This became a metaphor for the decline in membership of clubs, movements, and voluntary associations, the attenuation of community life, and the decline of marriage as an institution. In many areas of life, what people used to do together, they now do alone.
As part of my radio series on morality for the BBC, I sought his opinions on current trends. In his office in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, he spoke with passion about how society had moved since the 1960s from the “We” society of “We’re all in this together” to the “I” society of “I’m free to be myself.” The loss of community has many consequences, one of which is social isolation. As we will see, this has proved deeply damaging for our physical and psychological health.
One of the hypotheses he has tested is that the use of language, measured over time, shows that we have moved in the past half-century from a “We” culture to an “I” culture.1 As his full findings have not yet been published, I asked Dan Sacker, who helped me with research for this book, to use a Google Ngram search to chart the frequencies of the words “We” and “I” in all English and American books, year by year, from 1900 to 2008. The two graphs are quite different. The use of “We” is relatively stable over time, but the use of “I” falls steadily from 1900 to 1965, at which point it begins a precipitate rise. From then on, the first-person singular dominates.
A similar, though more restricted, test was carried out in 2011 by Nathan DeWall of the University of Kentucky. He studied the lyrics of top-ten pop songs between 1980 and 2007, and discovered that the use of first-person plural pronouns—we, us, our—had declined, while first-person singular—I, me, mine—had increased. Words that expressed anger or aggression—hate, kill, damn—also increased, while words for social interactions—talking, sharing—became less common, as did those conveying positive emotions.2 DeWall’s view is that pop lyrics are a mirror of social and attitudinal change, and that the shift from “We” to “I” is reflective of the wider culture.
In another context, Prospect magazine commissioned a linguistic analysis of the angry Brexit debate in the House of Commons on September 25, 2019, during which Prime Minister Boris Johnson used terms like “traitors,” “betrayal,” and “surrender” of his opponents. The analysis noted that, on average, the Prime Minister used a word from Harvard University’s list of semantically hostile terms every twenty-eight words, roughly every one and a half sentences—an unusual level of aggression. More relevant here is the fact that he used the word “I” 340 times—far more frequently than normal.3 Political discourse, especially when used by prime ministers and presidents, has historically tended to the inclusive, even royal, “We.” Increased use of the word “I” suggests that politics has become more about personalities than policies, and about the leader rather than the nation he or she seeks to lead.
Admittedly, there are limits to what you can infer from pronouns.4 But the linguistic shift does seem to reflect this deep move from the structures of togetherness to the solitary self, the assertive “I”: cultural climate change. The whole of this book will be about the consequences in different areas, but this chapter is about the disastrous impact on our sense of connectedness to others. When “I” prevails over “We,” loneliness follows.
For any social institution to exist, we must be prepared to make sacrifices for the sake of the relationship or the group. That is true of marriage, parenthood, membership in a community, or citizenship in a nation. In these environments we enter a world of We-consciousness in which we ask not what is best for me, but what is best for “all of us together.”
A soccer team of the most brilliant players in the world will not succeed if each acts like a diva. An orchestra of dazzling musicians, each of whom feels entitled to give their own interpretation of a symphony, will produce not music but noise. A political party in which each member publicly delivers his or her judgment as to what policy should be will be a shambles. A government in which representatives publicly contradict one another will be a disgrace.
A Jewish joke puts it nicely. One year, the Yeshiva University rowing team lost all of its races. To find out what they were doing wrong, they sent an observer to watch the Harvard University team in action. Three days later, he came back shell-shocked. “You won’t believe it,” he said. “You know what we do. They do the exact opposite. They have eight people rowing and only one person shouting instructions!” British and American politics these days can sometimes seem like the Yeshiva University rowing crew.
Those are nonmoral examples. The moral ones touch on more fundamental relationships. A marriage in which one or both partners act selfishly is unlikely to last. A parent indifferent to the needs of his or her child will damage the child. A community in which the members are not willing to bear their share of the burden of keeping it going—a group of free riders—will cease to exist. A nation without a sense of collective identity and responsibility will split apart, as the United States and Britain have split apart since 2016. You cannot build a social world out of a multiplicity of I’s.
Simultaneously with the rise of “I” over “We” since the mid-1960s, marriages, families, and communities have all atrophied. Fewer people are marrying. They are marrying later. They are having fewer children. More marriages are ending in divorce. The result is that more people are living alone. In the United States, the proportion of single-person households has more than doubled in the past fifty years.5 This is particularly so in large cities, where they represent 40 percent of households. In Britain, in the twenty years between 1997 and 2017, there was a 16 percent increase in the number of people living on their own.6
In the mid-1990s, the Secretary of State for the Environment invited the then Archbishop of Canterbury (George Carey), the leader of the Catholics in England (Cardinal Hume), and me (as Chief Rabbi) to come and meet him. He told us that because of the breakdown of marriage, more people were living alone. The result was pressure on the supply of housing. Four hundred thousand new units needed to be built, he said, in southeast England alone. Could we not do something about it? Could we not make marriage attractive again? I thought this showed spectacular faith in the power of prayer, but even were a miracle to happen, it would take more than a generation to reverse the decline.
To be sure, there is a difference between living alone and feeling lonely. Not everyone who chooses the first feels the second. But there is a connection. Genetically we are social animals. Our ancestors, in the hunter-gatherer stage of humanity, could not survive alone, and they have left a trace of this deeply ingrained in our emotional setup. Separated from others, we experience stress. Many prisoners have testified that solitary confinement is as terrifying as physical torture. John McCain said of the five and a half years he was a prisoner of war in Vietnam that being kept solitary “crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment.”7 Obviously, social isolation is mild in comparison, but the body nonetheless responds by heightened awareness of potential threats in the environment, and the resultant stress eventually weakens the immune system.8 That is one reason why most people seek company, the presence of others, the touch of another soul. The less there is of “We,” the more there is of loneliness.
A CARTOON in the November 4, 2019, issue of New Yorker magazine showed Humphrey Bogart, wearing an ivory dinner jacket and black bow tie, sitting alone at a bar, a glass of bourbon in his hand. In front of him is an electronic device. He is turning to it and saying, “Alexa, play ‘As Time Goes By.’”9 A poignant image for an age in which communication technology is smarter and faster than ever before, but in which human interaction, direct, face to face, other-focused, I–Thou, is all too rare. We are becoming a lonely crowd.
So serious has the problem become that, in January 2018, Tracey Crouch was given the task of becoming what the press dubbed Britain’s first ever “Minister for Loneliness.” The appointment struck a chord. Loneliness is hardly new—it makes its first appearance in the second chapter of the Bible, when Adam finds himself without a partner and God says, “It is not good for a person to be alone” (Gen. 2:18). But not until relatively recently has it been seen as a major health hazard. One of the factors prompting the appointment of a minister was a 2017 research report by the Jo Cox Commission on Loneliness that showed that more than nine million people in Britain feel lonely. Two hundred thousand older Britons had not had a conversation with a friend or relative in more than a month.10
A similar state of affairs exists in the United States. A 2018 Cigna survey showed that 46 percent of Americans always or sometimes feel alone, and 47 percent feel left out. One in four rarely or never feel that there are people who really understand them. Forty-three percent feel that their relationships are not meaningful and that they are isolated from others. Fifty-four percent feel that no one knows them well. Those most distressed by loneliness were young people between eighteen and twenty-two years of age.11 The phenomenon is not confined to the West. In Ukraine, Russia, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Latvia, 34 percent of the population declared themselves lonely.12 In Japan, meanwhile, there is an entire subpopulation known as the hikikomori, numbering more than a million, people who shut themselves up in their homes, seldom if ever venturing out, and living in hermit-like seclusion.
As noted above, more people than ever in the West are living alone. Only half of American adults are married, down from 72 percent in 1960.13 More than half of those between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four do not have a steady partner.14 More people are cohabiting rather than getting married, and the average length of a cohabitation is less than a third as long as the average marriage.15 Fewer children are living as adults in close proximity to their parents. Corporations often call on individual workers to move to a different region or country, which further disrupts relationships. Isolation particularly affects the elderly. One-third of Britons and Americans over the age of sixty-five live alone, as do more than half of those over eighty-five.
Then there is the phenomenon charted by Robert Putnam, the marked decline in membership of the kind of associations that used to bring people together on a regular basis—sports teams, local charities, religious congregations, and so on. Increasingly, people are using electronic means of communication rather than face-to-face contact, which itself is potentially dangerous, as the health benefits of relationships are quite often associated with actual physical presence.
Loneliness has serious health implications.16 It has long been associated with psychiatric conditions such as anxiety, depression, and schizophrenia. Recently, strong connections have also been established with physical conditions, such as cardiovascular disease, stroke, cancer, dementia, and Alzheimer’s disease.17
There is a difference between loneliness and social isolation. The first is a subjective, self-reported state, whereas social isolation is an objective condition, usually defined as a lack of contact with family, friends, community, and society. Social isolation is itself as harmful to health as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day and more harmful than obesity.18 A 2015 study tracking 3.4 million people over seven years showed that individuals judged to be isolated had a 26 percent greater risk of dying. If they lived alone, the risk was 32 percent higher.19
Chronic loneliness is associated with raised levels of cortisol, a stress hormone, and high vascular resistance, which can raise blood pressure. It can also lead to a reduced capacity on the part of the body’s immune system to fight infections. A 2012 study of patients over the age of sixty, in which 43 percent reported feelings of loneliness, showed that they had higher rates of declining mobility and inability to perform routine daily activities.20 The evidence by now is compelling that loneliness and isolation are significant health hazards, physically and psychologically.
Simply playing cards with friends once a week, or getting together over a cup of coffee, adds as many years to life expectancy as giving up a pack-a-day smoking habit.21 People with active social lives recover faster after illness. A study done by the University of California in 2006 showed that of three thousand women with breast cancer, those with a large network of friends were four times as likely to survive as women with few social connections.22
To be sure, not everyone likes company. There are people who find solace in solitude. They are alone without being lonely. But for the most part, life is about relationships. That is why loneliness can be depressing and dangerous.
ONE unexpected consequence of the loss of close connections has been described by the distinguished war correspondent Sebastian Junger in his poignant book on belonging, Tribe.23 The question he sought to answer was why levels of posttraumatic stress disorder are so high among American servicemen today—the highest in history and possibly the highest in the world. His hypothesis is that when they return home, they are moving from the intense comradeship of the unit to the relative isolation of contemporary society. A soldier returning from combat today “goes from the kind of close-knit group that humans evolved for, back into a society where most people work outside the home, children are educated by strangers, families are isolated from wider communities, and personal gain almost completely eclipses collective good.” The close bonds of belonging that would allow psychological wounds to heal are not there.
Loneliness, the sensed lack of human connection, touches on our essence as social animals. We are not the only such animals, but it is our ability to form extensive networks that differentiates us from other species. Our sociability is our humanity and this is deeply rooted in our evolutionary past. That is what morality represents: our commitment to others, our capacity to form bonds of belonging and care. Our sense of wellness depends on being part of one or several networks of relationship in which we are prepared to act for the benefit of others, knowing that they are prepared to do likewise for us.
So individualism comes at a high cost: the breakdown of marriage, the fragility of families, the strength of communities, the sense of identity that comes with both of these things, and the equally important sense that we are part of something that preceded us and will continue after we are no longer here. Edmund Burke said that a culture that broke the connection between past and future would have the result that “the whole chain and continuity of the commonwealth would be broken. No one generation could link with the other. Men would become little better than the flies of summer.” The move from “We” to “I” has devastating consequences.
By contrast, strong family ties are life-giving in the most literal sense. Susan Pinker tells the story of a cluster of villages in Sardinia, where, uniquely, men lived to be as old as women—usually there is a difference of between five and seven years of life expectancy between the sexes—and where there are ten times as many centenarians as the average elsewhere. These villages, including the one she visited in Villagrande Strisaili in the Gennargentu mountains, are places where no one lives alone, where the elderly live with their children, where people are constantly popping in to see one another, social contact is high, and people keep working in the fields as long as they can, not retiring until they reach their eighties or nineties.24
It turns out that one of the greatest aids to longevity is to live in a place where people honor old age. The people of these Sardinian villages, Susan Pinker writes, considered their centenarians communal property and were fiercely protective of their “treasures”—the word one woman used to describe her 102-year-old uncle.
The elderly were respected, honored, and constantly visited by members of their family, especially by the young. They were never left alone. Pinker calls this “the village effect.” It’s a striking example of the power of social connectedness. A close connection to friends and family is part of mental and physical health and a sense of a life that matters.
This sense of community is something religion has provided at important junctures in history. This was particularly so during the first half of the nineteenth century in Britain and America, when there were great social dislocations as people moved from villages to cities during the Industrial Revolution. This was a traumatic experience for many. Sociologists describe it as the move from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft, from the face-to-face relationships that predominate in small communities to the anonymous encounters of strangers that make up much of city life. It took a sustained effort of outreach by the churches in both countries to recreate communities in urban environments, and this enabled them to combat some of the negative consequences of the social dislocation, from drunkenness to child abuse.
Judaism performed a similar role for immigrant Jewish families in America and Britain, who had known wrenching dislocation, fleeing from persecution, and finding themselves strangers in a strange land. Almost immediately, they organized themselves into landsmanshaft organizations, mutual aid societies based on town or city of origin. These gave support to new arrivals, helping them to find places to live and work, assisting them through some of the cultural and bureaucratic challenges, and providing financial support when people were ill or out of work.
I saw this myself. My early years were spent among first-generation immigrant Jews who had come to Britain from Eastern or Central Europe before, or in some cases after, the war. They arrived with nothing, yet within one generation almost all of them had moved out of the inner-city ghettoes and had begun to make a life for themselves and their families. Working class in themselves, tailors, shopkeepers, or street traders, their children mostly went to university and entered the professions.
Jews like my parents were poor, but they were rich in social capital. They had strong families and immensely supportive communities. They had an almost Calvinist ethic of hard work, together with a strong respect for scholarship and study. These values were embodied in the communities they made or joined. People helped one another.
Judaism tends to have a strong communal dimension. As one famous joke has it, Levy, the atheist, is asked why, when he does not believe, does he go regularly to synagogue? His reply: “I go with Markowitz. Markowitz goes to talk to God, and I go to talk to Markowitz.” This may be true generally of minority faiths, and especially of immigrant communities. In a profound way, religion is the consecration of community, the place where our togetherness under God is given shape and strength.
In practical terms, our human connections shape us in ways of which we are not always consciously aware. Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler have documented the enormous impact social networks have.25 If our friends are overweight, so probably will we be. If they don’t smoke, the likelihood is that neither will we. We are affected not only by our close friends but also to a surprising extent by our friends’ friends.26 Indeed, most job opportunities come our way through these second-order networks, which are vastly more extensive than our close friends. Community plays an important role in the way our lives unfold, and is the living face of a shared moral order. All of which makes the breakdown of community deeply problematic at both a personal and societal level. Once we feel that we are really alone and cannot call on neighbors for help, then we are part of a new social poverty, which can be demoralizing and debilitating.
So our current individualism is liberating. We are free as never before to be as we wish and live as we choose. But there is a cost. The distinguished Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor put this well when he spoke of “the spread of an outlook that makes self-fulfillment the major value in life and that seems to recognize few external moral demands or serious commitments to others.”27 We can do things of which our ancestors could hardly dream, but what they found simple we find extremely hard. Getting married. Staying married. Being part of a community. Having a strong sense of identity. Feeling continuity with the past before we were born and the future after we are no longer here. More of us live alone, and loneliness means increased risk of chronic disease, dementia, and mortality rates.
We are not made to live alone. Not only is the unprecedented atomization of modern life bad for our health and happiness. It is also dangerous because it makes us vulnerable to the dangers that lie ahead: turbulence, change, unpredictability. When the environment changes, people who are members of strong and diverse groups are at a huge advantage. They contain people with different strengths, variegated knowledge, and diverse skills, and by working together they can negotiate their situation with effectiveness and speed. They have collective resilience. A crowd of disconnected individuals does not have that strength. Loneliness is the single greatest fear of Millennials, according to a 2016 Viceland UK census. It ranks higher than the fear of losing a home or a job. Forty-two percent of millennial women are more afraid of loneliness than a cancer diagnosis.28
Tip O’Neill used to say, “All politics is local.” Morality is likewise. That, at any rate, is where it begins, among families and friends and neighbors. Morality places a limit on individualism. Those who seek the benefit of the group must pay the price. That is the meaning of the “reciprocal” in reciprocal altruism. Those who try to take the benefit without paying the price are called free riders, and they will sooner or later find themselves shunned by the group and left to survive on their own. This is a phenomenon that can be witnessed among all social animals, not just humans.
Morality, at its core, is about strengthening the bonds between us, helping others, engaging in reciprocal altruism, and understanding the demands of group loyalty, which are the price of group belonging. A sense of morality safeguards something deeply engraved within us, a legacy from the distant life’s past, when we lived together in small groups. Then, as now, the ability to rely on the help of others when facing life’s challenges is a powerful source of resilience. Sebastian Junger, whom we mentioned earlier, puts it starkly. Early humans were distinguished, he says, by two things that they did effectively: the systematic sharing of food and the altruistic defense of the group. These launched Homo sapiens on its evolutionary path, and they remain human needs:
The earliest and most basic definition of community—of tribe—would be the group of people that you would both help feed and help defend. A society that doesn’t offer its members the chance to work selflessly in these ways isn’t a society in any tribal sense of the word; it’s just a political entity that, lacking enemies, will probably fall apart on its own.29
One significant contribution of religion today is that it preserves what society as a whole has begun to lose: that strong sense of being there for one another, of being ready to exercise mutual aid, to help people in need, to comfort the distressed and bereaved, to welcome the lonely, to share in other people’s sadnesses and celebrations. These moral responses have not disappeared: we see them whenever there is a communal tragedy, a shooting, a terrorist incident, or a major accident. People come together to give help and support. Our wellsprings of altruism have not run dry. They are a large part of what makes us human. But we tend not to exercise them on a day-to-day basis. That is what we have lost in society at large, but what can still be found in religious congregations. These remain, as Robert Putnam went on to demonstrate in American Grace, our strongest living embodiments of social capital.30
That availability of collective strength that we find in strong communities held together by moral bonds is an important source of resilience that we will need as we face the kind of uncertainty that seems to be the mark of the twenty-first century thus far. It is easier to face the future without fear when we know we do not do so alone.
We have lived through an extended period during which the “I” has grown stronger at the expense of the “We.” The result, as American sociologist Robert Bellah put it, is that our “social ecology” has been damaged by “the destruction of the subtle ties that bind human beings to one another, leaving them frightened and alone.”31 In the long run, that is unsustainable. The human condition is overwhelmingly about relationships—about faithfulness: staying true, loyal, and committed to one another despite all the tensions, setbacks, misunderstandings, backslidings, and all the multiple ways in which we fall short. It is about consecrating the bonds between us. It is about transcending our solitude.
The overemphasis on “I” and the loss of “We” leaves us isolated and vulnerable. It is not good to be alone.