In 1985, when researchers asked a cross-section of the American people, “How many confidants do you have?” the most common response to the question was three. In 2004, when researchers asked again, the most common response—made by twenty-five percent of the respondents—was none. One-quarter of these twenty-first-century Americans said they had no one at all with whom to talk openly and intimately.1
Also published in 2004, a joint study by the World Health Organization and researchers from Harvard University found that almost ten percent of Americans suffer from depression or bipolar disorder. They also found that binge eating and drinking are up, and that our children are medicated for depression and attention deficit disorder to an alarming degree.2
When UNICEF surveyed twenty-one wealthy nations, the United States came in second to last in terms of the welfare of its children, with only the United Kingdom faring worse. The United States had the very worst record in terms of infant mortality rates, and second to worst in terms of exposure to violence and bullying, chaotic family structure, and troubled relationships with family and friends. Respondents to the survey from across the United States say that their families no longer have meals together. Children say that they don’t spend time talking to their parents, and that they generally don’t find their peers kind and helpful.3
For citizens of the twenty-first century, “the way things used to be”—being bound to your village, marrying someone chosen by your family, and otherwise doing whatever your priest or your parents or your tribal elders tell you to—is not a life plan with much appeal. However, the dismal statistics above suggest that our society may have gone overboard in its emphasis on standing alone. We pay the price, not just in terms of our mental and physical health, but in terms of the strain on social cohesion and sustainable economic progress. The corollary to being “obligatorily gregarious” is being interdependent. “Independence,” the biologist Lynn Margulis reminds us, “is a political, not a scientific term.”4
And yet independence is the rallying point for our culture. We have always prized vertical mobility and accepted “horizontal mobility” as the cost of doing business—you go where the opportunities are. By the middle of the twentieth century, however, that swashbuckling independence could be better described as rootless-ness. Executive transfers had become a staple of even the most routine and regimented corporate lives, turning managers into a new species of migrant worker. The triumph of the interstate highway system, tract housing, strip development, and the automobile encouraged the creation of interchangeable landscapes, with entire “communities” mass-produced as marketable commodities. Sales people, consultants, and even academics like me became road warriors, racking up the frequent-flyer miles.
Landscapes for Loneliness
In the 1950s the sociologist Robert Weiss began to explore the effect of new working patterns and living patterns on loneliness. He noted that “low population density and the loss of natural daily social gatherings on the porch, the street, or the corner drugstore made sharing experiences and insulating problems more difficult.”5 Residents of transient communities lacked not only long-term relationships with friends and neighbors but the benefits of living close to older generations of their own families.
Weiss’s colleague Mark Fried referred to the loneliness of working-class residents of Boston’s West End “grieving for a lost home” after their neighborhood was razed for what was then called urban renewal.6 This was a community of people rich in attachments, both to the place and to one another. Just a few years ago you could get a taste of what the West End had been like by walking through Boston’s North End—a chaotic jumble that seemed to operate as an extended family. But now gentrification threatens the established connections in that community as well.
In most industrialized nations, champions of modernism like New York’s “master builder” Robert Moses continued until very recently to bulldoze older neighborhoods to run expressways through cities, and urban planners built huge housing projects—“vertical slums”—to warehouse the poor. The apartheid government of South Africa went so far as to destroy a wide swath of Cape Town—a mixed-race area called District Six—precisely because of its rich sense of community. The harmony that had flourished among the district’s crowded mix of blacks and whites and Asian immigrants gave the lie to the ruling party’s agenda of racial separatism.
In the 1960s urbanists like Jane Jacobs launched a counteroffensive. Jacobs’s book The Death and Life of Great American Cities is her paean to her own “village”—Greenwich Village in New York City. In its pages she extols the vitality of life on a smaller, more compact scale, where people live and work on the same block. She writes about the greater trust and sense of connection, as well as the enriching, serendipitous encounters that result. I can attest to her insight, because my wife and I live in just such an urban village, a cluster of nineteenth-century row houses where neighbors know one another’s children and pets and keep up with the progress of one another’s plantings beside the doorsteps. My coauthor lives in a small New England town where members of the same families have rubbed shoulders since the 1630s, and where lobstermen and lawyers go to the same parties. As kids, each of us had bounced around in various places in the southwest, and so as adults we each made a choice about where to put down roots quite deliberately. But even though we have been lucky enough to find pockets where community flourishes, elsewhere the war on human scale and human bonds continues.
Bowling Alone
In a book entitled Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, the political scientist Robert Putnam explores the implications of our atomized culture in terms of lost “social capital,” a phrase he uses to refer to the reciprocity, cooperation, and collective goodwill derived from connection with the larger community. In recent years, Putnam notes, participation in all forms of civic engagement has sharply declined, from voter turnout to bridge clubs, from volunteer fire departments to marching bands, from alumni organizations to bowling leagues.
“Civic virtue is most powerful when embedded in a dense network of reciprocal social relations,” he writes. “A society of many virtuous but isolated individuals is not necessarily rich in social capital.” But many affluent towns no longer have housing that fits the budgets of nurses, teachers, and police officers—the kinds of workers who help stitch a community together. When vital services depend entirely on civic-mindedness, as is the case with volunteer fire departments, the problem is even more acute. Investment bankers may contribute mightily to a community’s tax rolls, but high earners with ridiculously demanding jobs tend to be less eager than others to commit themselves to come running when their neighbor’s house is on fire.7
Whether on the level of civic engagement or more intimate connection, the march toward atomization continues. Feelings of isolation engender depression and hostility and impair self-regulation. Nonetheless, many political leaders cut funds for community-building in favor of building larger prisons for those whose lack of self-regulation makes them hostile and out of control. The data tell us that loneliness seriously accelerates age-related declines in health and well-being, yet the idea of promoting connection is rarely discussed alongside the heated issues of the cost of pharmaceuticals and other medical interventions necessary to deal with an increasingly lonely, isolated, and aging population.
At long last our national consciousness may be awakening to the idea that protecting our natural environment, including the global climate, is not some harebrained idea from the Sixties. Given the statistical impact of loneliness, if its effects were caused by an impurity in our air or water, perhaps now there would be congressional hearings on how to reduce it. Perhaps we can hope for a similar awakening to the idea, grounded in rigorous science, that restoring bonds among people can be a cost-effective and practical point of leverage for solving some of our most pressing social problems, not the least of which is the looming crisis in health care and eldercare.
But given the world as it is today, what can we do to cope?
Lonesome No More
In the tougher neighborhoods of urban areas, today’s disaffected youth respond to the dangers of being alone by signing up with the Crips or the Latin Kings. In the hip coastal enclaves, the more affluent young try to create the kinds of surrogate families they see on reruns of Seinfeld or Friends. Couples with children consciously pursue togetherness, trying to combat the centrifugal force exerted by media that divert the attention of each family member into a separate room, or at least into a different portion of cyberspace. Yet absent a supportive, integrated community, or some natural bond such as shared work, these attempts sometimes appear forced. A “family first” preoccupation sustains life in kid-centric suburbs, but it deprives the adults of a broader range of social supports. As Weiss noted years ago, itinerant nuclear families, relocating in and out of faceless suburbs, necessarily focus inward, a situation that places intense emotional demands on family members to be “all” for one another. Stephanie Coontz, a sociologist and the author of Marriage: A History, decries the growing numbers of people who now depend on their spouse as their one and only source of companionship.8 Perhaps it should not be surprising that so many more Americans today than twenty years ago have no confidants. To whom can you speak in confidence when your most agonizing personal issues might have to do with your spouse?
In 1976 the novelist Kurt Vonnegut told the story of Wilbur Swain, a pediatrician who runs for president of the United States with the slogan “Lonesome No More.” Swain’s winning platform consists of a plan to create artificial families—designated by new, totemic middle names—so that every citizen would have ten thousand brothers and sisters.9
Twenty years before this fictional proposal for solving the problem of isolation, the Reverend Robert H. Schuller began a ministry in Orange County, California, that would have made Wilbur Swain proud. At first preaching from atop the snack bar at a drive-in movie theater on Sunday mornings, Schuller tailored his message to meet the needs of socially disconnected transplants from the Midwest. Five decades later, his pulpit (now usually filled by his son Robert A. Schuller) is The Hour of Power, a television program broadcast worldwide from the multimillion-dollar Crystal Cathedral, built on a fifteen-acre campus that draws visitors from every continent. The simple message that carried this ministry from a dusty drive-in to a global media empire is summed up in the signature line used in every broadcast: “God loves you and so do I.”10
In recent years the attempt to form more intense social bonds has helped drive the explosive growth of new megachurches, replicating Schuller’s model, from Kansas to Korea. In the modern exurban areas patterned on Orange County, large numbers of people appear more desperate than ever for a sense of community and meaning—and if God can be a part of it, adding even greater meaning and structure, so much the better. But a focus on the human need for connection and social support was a central part of Christianity long before its adherents came to be called Christians. The same concern is a key element of Confucianism, Buddhism, Islam, and Judaism—all the faiths that have large numbers of adherents.
In the early days of the Jesus movement, sects like the Gnostics who were mystical and inner-directed quickly faded out of existence. The type of Christianity that went on to become the primary structural element of the Western world focused on a simple message of self-esteem—“the kingdom of God is within you”—combined with communal meals and even communal living. Its streamlined theology set aside the complex cleansing rituals of Judaism, and it presented evil less in mystical terms and more as a question of the behavior of one person toward another. The church that survived and prospered extended the basic ethics of the Hebrew tradition—already a strong source of social support—explicitly into the individual’s inner life, creating prohibitions against mere thoughts that were harmful to social connection: anger, hatred, misdirected lust. It dispensed with the temple in Jerusalem as the center of religious life, but maintained rituals to sanctify the basic elements of ordinary human existence: reproduction (marriage), birth (baptism), illness (anointment), and death (last rites). By way of these ceremonies it provided guidelines for social connection throughout the life cycle, making this universal church a practical social convention: It offered self-worth, it buried the dead, and it provided for the poor. Like Judaism, Islam, Confucianism, and Buddhism, Christianity regulated all social transactions within the community, ranging from relationships within marriage and the family to standards for conducting business and dealing with neighbors.
Two thousand years along this path, we find Christian leaders like Joel Osteen, a member of a second generation of megapreachers, acquiring and refitting Houston’s Compaq Center, a professional basketball arena, in order to accommodate his growing congregation. We find Rick Warren, pastor of his own megachurch, reaching millions with the explicit chord of social connection in his book The Purpose Driven Life. One of the biggest bestsellers in recent years, the book outlines God’s supposed five directives for each of us. This is number two on the list: “We were formed for God’s family, so your second purpose is to enjoy real fellowship.”
The Christian megapreachers and their megachurches have been so successful that even some Jewish leaders, specifically a group called Synagogue 3000, have rigorously studied their methods, sending representatives to attend seminars on congregation-building at Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church.11 But the key element of their success seems to be that these new churches, set among the sprawling office parks, “big box” shopping destinations, and “planned communities” of exurbia, reflect the basic human need to gather, connect, and belong. In doing so they adventitiously address human loneliness in each of the three dimensions—intimate, relational, and collective. From education, to dating services, to daycare, to psychological and marital counseling, to basketball tournaments, they provide one-stop shopping for human connection in many different forms.12
The growth of the megachurches suggests that they serve a need, but they do so in ways that those of other faiths or those who are not overtly religious can find troubling. This is community with a specific worldview and a specific agenda, not community that can provide connection for anyone and everyone on the basis of simple, shared humanity. And yet in many parts of North America no other institutions exist to combat the oppressive feeling of being both physically and spiritually isolated.
In a similar way, a younger generation is finding connection of a sort in “virtual worlds”: massive multiplayer online communities with names like Second Life, There, and Active Worlds. These sites allow users to create avatars—physical representations of themselves on the screen—who then mix and mingle, buy real estate, furnish homes and other meeting places, and otherwise carry on the routine business of life, only in cyberspace. These meta-universes, or “metaverses,” are not games, exactly, because the participants have no specific objective, no way to “win.” The point of this online activity, as is the case with “theology lite” megachurches in the exurbs, is to experience a sense of community.
Global Disconnection
In many parts of the world, older societies are rushing to embrace the American commodity culture and the casual disregard for social bonds that gave rise to the exurb’s anomie.
In China a society built on Confucian regard for the collective has been suddenly thrust into the aggressive individualism of capitalism. The New York Times has reported on the growth of “instant” cities in China’s heartland that would make the transformation of Phoenix or Las Vegas seem sluggish. In Yinchuan, the capital of the Ningxia region, officials are spending over a billion dollars a year to create a huge government complex, a five-star hotel, and a residential compound for entrepreneurs, in the hope that the infrastructure will attract private real estate development. Dozens of other provincial towns have the same aspiration, hoping to turn peasant villagers into citizens of the global economy overnight. Lu Dadao, a Beijing expert on urban planning, told the Times reporter Jim Yardley: “They want it to happen fast, and they want it to be big. They have all taken up urbanization without considering what the natural speed of it should be.” In terms of health and well-being, science tells us that there are unintended negative consequences when, as Walter Lippmann put it a century ago, “we have changed our environment more quickly than we know how to change ourselves.”13
Here in the United States, progressive architects and developers have heeded Jane Jacobs’s call to take the imperatives of social connection more seriously. They try to replicate, in new communities such as Celebration, Florida, the physical aspects of small-town life—clustered housing, sidewalks, front porches for sitting—that facilitate social connection. Other communities, such as Treetops in Easthampton, Massachusetts, try to reintegrate older and younger people in a single living arrangement. In the United Kingdom, the Prince of Wales has championed attempts to mirror the traditional English village in contemporary housing. Unfortunately, these efforts remain noble islands of experimentation in a sea of sprawl. All over the world, globalization now threatens to make the anonymity and interchangeability of American places, if not the norm, at least distressingly familiar.
But the battle is not over. A landscape built for disconnection simply makes it even more urgent to work consciously and deliberately to build stronger human bonds at every opportunity, in every day-to-day exchange. It places an even greater premium on the kind of reaching out, as well as the “random acts of kindness,” that we discussed earlier. It also means that in our intimate relationships we need to be aware of what we’re up against. A commodity culture can foster a “consumer” mentality, encouraging us to apply concepts such as “trading up” and optimizing value in our romantic partnerships. As the psychologist Elaine Hatfield told a reporter, “People demand so much more. I don’t think that’s bad; it’s just a different problem. In the old days, there was not the notion that you were entitled to personal happiness. Now, people want it all: good looks, money, intelligence, status.”14 Perhaps the apotheosis of this kind of thinking was a billboard in Chicago (quickly removed after a flurry of protests) that showed two beautiful torsos, one male, one female. The advertising copy, promoting an attorney’s services, said, “Life is short; get a divorce.”
Most people don’t go to such extremes of crassness, but unrealistic (and superficial) expectations do lead to disappointment. As Hatfield commented, “I think that’s why women end up with pets and guys end up with computers.”15
Working with What We’ve Got
The kinds of connections—pets, computers—we substitute for human contact are called “parasocial relationships.” You can form a parasocial relationship with television characters, with people you “meet” online, or with your Yorkshire terrier. Is this an effective way to fill the void when connection with other humans, face to face, is thwarted?
The Greeks, specifically the pre-Socratic philosopher and poet Xenophanes, used the term “anthropomorphism” (combining anthropos, meaning human, and morphe, meaning form) to describe the projection of specifically human attributes onto nonhuman entities. Increasing the strength of anthropomorphic beliefs appears to be a useful tactic for coping with loneliness, divorce, widowhood, or merely being single.16 Pet owners project all sorts of human attributes onto their animal companions, and elderly people who have pets appear to be buffered somewhat from the negative impact of stressful life events. They visit their doctors less often than do their petless age-mates. Individuals diagnosed with AIDS are less likely to become depressed if they own a pet. In circumstances in which one is going to be evaluated, the presence of one’s pet can actually do more to reduce anxiety and psychophysiological responses to stress than the presence of one’s spouse.17
One of the lessons of Hurricane Katrina was that pet owners were so committed that many were willing to risk their lives to remain in the city to care for their animals. Was it the sense of being left alone with the elements—in a sense, rejected by those who fled the storm—that made their attachment so strong? Studies show that rejection by other humans can increase the tendency to anthropomorphize one’s pet.18 Perhaps many of these economically deprived people had felt rejected all along. All we know for sure is that the number of people who had to be forcibly removed from their homes (and were forced to leave their animals behind) led to the passage of the Pets Evacuation and Transportation Standards Act, signed into law in October 2006. This law requires local and state emergency-preparedness authorities to include in their evacuation plans ways to accommodate household pets and service animals in case of a disaster. It also authorizes federal funds to states to help establish pet-friendly emergency shelters.
In the movie Castaway, when the character played by Tom Hanks is stranded on a desert island, he forms an intense relationship with a volleyball named Wilson. Similarly, the retired academic who told me about her new social landscape once she returned to the Midwest also described how she had coped with loneliness during a semester spent doing research in Paris, an ocean away from her husband and her cats. She could see the Eiffel Tower from her bedroom window. In letters and phone calls to her husband she called the Tower her “pet.” Each evening as she turned out the light she would say goodnight to it.
Social rejection, even in fleeting episodes, can also increase people’s belief in anthropomorphized supernatural agents.19 The need to compensate for their late partners’ physical absence often leads widows or widowers to carry on “two-way” conversations with them. Loss of a husband or a wife may increase the survivor’s belief in devils and gremlins as well as kindly ghosts or angels, indicating that parasocial connection is not simply an attempt to soothe the mind with positive images and repair negative mood.20 But whether it’s a god, a devil, an animal, a machine (“Old Betsy”), a landmark, or a piece of cast-off sports equipment, the anthropomorphized being becomes a social surrogate, and the same neural systems that are activated when we make judgments about other humans are activated when we assess these parasocial relationships.21
For an experiment, my colleagues Adam Waytz, Nick Epley, and I collected photographs taken by the Hubble Telescope of dramatic celestial bodies such as starfish nebulae and “Bok” globules and showed them to people sitting on the lakefront and in city parks in Chicago. After the respondents viewed each photograph, we asked them a series of questions. Some were simple queries about function and appearance, but some delved into the realm of human attributes. Were these structures simply clouds of gasses floating in space, or did they have certain human characteristics? Was the celestial object, for instance, moving from here to there with a purpose? At the end of the survey we measured the respondents’ levels of loneliness. Responses from those who were high and low in loneliness were very similar except in one regard. The lonelier respondents showed a stronger tendency to see the celestial objects as having human characteristics, even as acting on the basis of lessons learned from past experience. Like our ancient ancestors who first named the constellations and gave them life stories, our lonely Chicagoans had anthropomorphized the objects we see in the distant sky.
Partners We Can’t See
Our parasocial relationships follow certain patterns based on aspects of our human relationships. People with insecure, anxious attachment styles are more likely than those with secure attachment styles to form perceived social bonds with television characters. They are also more likely than those with secure attachment styles to report an intensification of religious belief over a given time period, including sudden religious conversions later in life.22
In a Newsweek poll of religious beliefs in America, forty percent of respondents indicated that they felt closer to God when praying alone, while only two percent indicated feeling closer to God when praying with others.23 Nuns, monks, and mystics apply this intensifying effect of isolation as a positive when they remove themselves from other humans in order to “feel the presence of God” more powerfully. Again, the feeling of isolation promotes not only the drive to connect, but the intensity of anthropomorphism.
Many proponents of technology tell us that computer-mediated social encounters will fill the void left by the decline of community in the real world. The Lions Club, the Masons, the barbershop quartet, or the bowling league may be fading away, but that’s okay, these enthusiasts tell us, because everyone is busy texting each other or “connecting” in chat rooms. Email, however, is what communication theorists call a single-stranded interaction—words on a screen devoid of any other physical texture. Studies have shown that the richer the medium—the more physicality it has—the more it fosters social cohesion. This may be why, for those who do choose to connect electronically, multiplayer sites like Second Life are becoming popular meeting places. These virtual communities are at least enriched to the extent that each participant has an avatar, an animated physical representation that appears on the screen. Participants also build (or pay web designers to build for them) well-appointed meeting places. Thus the real people sitting at home in front of their computer screens can come together “avatar to avatar” in virtual bars and clubhouses and react to one another with animated gestures and facial expressions.
And yet, most face-to-face encounters in real life allow us to communicate through even more subliminal cues—body chemistry, body language, action semantics, mimicry—in addition to words and gestures. Once again, the mind that seeks to connect is first about the body, and leaving the body behind can make human connections less satisfying.
When being physically together is not possible, we try to satisfy our yearnings by speaking briefly on the telephone, sending an instant message, or gazing at a loved one’s photograph, practices that have been called “social snacking”—but a snack is not a meal.24 A military friend of mine described the problem created by the introduction of satellite phones to the modern war zone. During his tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, he and his comrades were eager at first for any chance to call home. They quickly learned, however, that the sudden juxtaposition of two such very different worlds—the battlefield and the family room—was not just unsatisfactory but emotionally upsetting, both to the men in the field and to the wives and children at home. He said you could always tell who had just called home by his empty, “thousand-yard stare.” The abstracted nature of electronic communication—the absence of physical context and forms of connection—may account in part for the finding that increased Internet use can increase social isolation as well as depression when it replaces more tangible forms of human contact.25
Again, forming connections with pets or online friends or even God is a noble attempt by an obligatorily gregarious creature to satisfy a compelling need. But surrogates can never make up completely for the absence of the real thing. In a culture built around disconnection, the better move is to work that much harder to reach out to those with whom we share even the most superficial contact in the everyday world.
Gatherings
As an obligatorily gregarious species, we humans have a need not just to belong in an abstract sense but to actually get together. Congregating physically may actually play a role in an association found between religious observance and decreased morbidity and mortality. The sociologists Lynda H. Powell, Leila Shahabi, and Carl E. Thoresen conducted a meta-analysis of the extensive literature on religion and health, exploring nine different hypotheses that might account for the purportedly positive effects. Do religious people live longer and healthier lives because of the more conservative and healthful lifestyle that religion promotes? Is it the power of prayer? Or is it something about spirituality in itself that is affecting us at the cellular level?26
After sorting through mountains of data, the three authors found no association between depth of spiritual feeling and health. Instead, what they found was a strong, consistent, prospective, and often graded reduction of mortality linked to individuals who actually attend religious services. In other words, people who regularly went to church or synagogue lived longer than those in similar situations who did not. In some studies there is even a “dose effect,” meaning that those who go to church more than once a week enjoy even better health than those who attend only once a week. Overall, the reduction in mortality attributable to churchgoing is twenty-five percent—a huge amount in epidemiological studies—even after discounting other effects, such as the fact that, yes, being religious generally leads to a more healthful lifestyle.
The authors cite the possibility that those who are sufficiently devout to attend services at least once a week may also practice calming techniques associated with religion, practices such as meditating or praying or saying the rosary. But as I mentioned earlier, people smile more when watching a film in a friend’s presence, even when they report that their actual enjoyment of the film is no greater. We are social mammals, and, all other things being equal, congregating among our fellows feels good, and that good feeling undoubtedly amplifies the benefits of other positive experiences.
Weekly attendance at the Rotary Club may also be good for you, but the findings by Powell and her colleagues indicate that there may be something unique about regular attendance at religious gatherings. Church attendance often has the added benefit of reinforcing family connections and providing trustworthy interactions with friends. Religions also tend to focus on helping others, rather than on being helped. This altruistic focus fosters feelings of self-worth and control while reducing feelings of depression. Attendance at religious services also affords social modeling—seeing others committed to compassionate helping, as well as prayer and meditation—that reinforces various positives, including a healthier lifestyle. The sense of community, the time spent in the presence of good friends, the reinforcement of the intimate connections of marriage and family, may all contribute to the boost in well-being. And yet there may be something operating that is more powerful still.
My colleague Nick Epley has found that people attribute to other people attitudes that are fairly similar to their own, but that believers attribute to God attitudes that are uniquely similar to their own. A country song called “Me and God,” written by Josh Turner, captures this idea with a line about the singer and God being like “two peas in a pod.” Anne Lamott’s variation on the same theme is, “You can safely assume you’ve created God in your image when it turns out God hates all the same people you do.”27
From the perspective of cognitive science, God can be a distinctive psychological projection in which people assign their own beliefs and prejudices to the author of the universe. The projection provides an intimacy, an affirmation of self—at least of an idealized self—that is not as evident or as powerful in any other parasocial relationship. God is uniquely self-affirming, because, in the eyes of the believer, God is uniquely “me.”
As social beings with a DNA-based interest in the future, we are driven to look beyond ourselves not just for connection but for meaning. The “selfish gene” led to a social brain. That social brain reinforced the aversive response to loneliness that reinforced human connection, thus improving our chances of survival, and thus the survival of our genes. Eventually, in a continuing progression, the same shaping forces of natural selection gave rise to the Third Adaptation, which involves seeing our genes’ long-term self-interest in the context of reciprocity and interdependence with other members of our species. This drive for meaning appears to have endowed us with a biological need to be linked with something greater than ourselves. It is only through some ultimate sense of connection that we can face our own mortality without despair. Knowing that our biological existence is transient, we yearn for the transcendent experience described by the astronaut Edgar Mitchell when he looked back at the earth from the moon and perceived that the universe was “intelligent, loving, harmonious.”28 Just as finding social connection is good for us, finding that transcendent something appears to be very good for us, whether it is a belief in a deity or a belief in the community of science. Of course, the danger in transcendent feelings is when the sense that I am at one with the universe becomes corrupted by the sense that the universe is at one with me. Too often throughout human history, when a strong parasocial relationship with its projection of self has replaced a respectful sense of awe, the feeling that “God is on my side” has led to the conclusion that “everyone else must do as I say.” This is still a source of human misery wherever there is not a firm separation between private faith and public life.
Once more, then, we come back to the urgency, no matter what our religious beliefs or lack thereof, of satisfying our psychological and physiological needs for connection, including our need for transcendent meaning, through contact with and concern for other people, by being open to and accepting of others, and by “feeding others,” in the everyday here and now.
Choosing Our Future
Throughout this book I have emphasized that much of our social reality is something over which we can exercise a certain degree of control. Even with regard to the forces that are outside our control, the way we interpret them, cope with them, and act in response to them can have dramatic effects on our future. This operates at a societal level as well as at an individual level. We as individuals and as groups can choose to make the most of the Third Adaptation—seeking solutions through committed actions that benefit the greater good well beyond ourselves or our tribe—or we can stay back with the chimps in remaining more narrowly focused and self-interested.
My hope is that understanding the biology of loneliness will allow us to see that ethical, humane behavior is a prescription for greater well-being, even economic well-being. This is a message worth heeding, because even in strict dollars-and-cents terms, the cost of social isolation is staggering.
The health consequences of loneliness that I described in Chapter Six carry a heavy price tag in and of themselves. But when we consider the degree to which growing older can contribute to loneliness, and the rate at which our population is aging, it is clear that we need to rethink many of our priorities.
The United States has experienced an enormous growth in wealth since the 1970s, but that rise in income has increasingly benefited those already at the top. Those in the middle or at the bottom have seen their economic condition remain the same or deteriorate. In just the past few years, the size of the disparity has exploded. From 1990 to 2004 the income of the poorest ninety percent of Americans grew by only two percent. During the same period, the income of the richest one percent grew by fifty-seven percent, and the income of the top one-tenth of one percent—the superrich—grew by eighty-five percent!29
Economic growth is accelerating elsewhere around the globe, particularly in China and India. The past twenty years have seen rapid economic expansion in Russia, and yet, today, Russians are dying younger than they were under Soviet oppression. Since the 1980s their longevity has declined by forty percent, putting them on a par with Bangladesh.30 A rising tide can indeed lift a variety of boats, but in a culture of social isolates, atomized by social and economic upheaval and separated by vast inequalities, it can also cause millions to drown.
The Economics of Isolation
Money appears to have a positive impact on people’s motivation, but a negative impact on their behavior toward others. There are data to suggest that merely having money on the periphery of consciousness is sufficient to skew us away from prosocial behavior. The psychologist Kathleen Vohs and her colleagues did a series of nine experiments that primed certain participants with thoughts of money. Some were asked to unjumble phrases that included mental images such as “high a salary desk paying” while the controls unscrambled neutral phrases such as “cold it desk outside is.” Other groups worked on computers which, after a few minutes, showed a screen saver that was either fish sparkling underwater or currency sparkling under water. In all nine tests, those who were given the subtle suggestions of money were not only less likely to ask for help, but also less likely to help others. When a lab assistant staged an accident by dropping a box of pencils, those primed with thoughts of money picked up far fewer. When the experimenter asked for help coding data sheets, the primed participants donated roughly half as much time as the non-primed participants did. When asked to choose activities from a list, the primed were far more likely to opt to work and play alone. And when they were given a chance to set up chairs for an interview, they chose to put greater physical distance between themselves and other people.31
In a similar vein, various studies have attempted to correlate income inequality with health statistics in each of the fifty U.S. states.32 Bruce Kennedy and his colleagues developed something called the Robin Hood Index, referring to the amount of wealth that would have to be redistributed to attain an equal distribution. They found that an increase of one percent in this measure of inequality was associated with additional mortality of 21.7 deaths per 100,000 people. Their analysis isolated three possible explanations for this finding: (1) relative deprivation (if wealthy people own three houses each, that increases price demand on all housing); (2) underinvestment in human capital (less spending on education and health care for the population at large); and (3) erosion of social cohesion, meaning a lack of trust and an increase in feelings of social isolation.
Providing support for the importance of this third explanation, other researchers have found that socially integrated societies have lower rates of crime and mortality and a better quality of life overall.33 In thirty-nine states, citizens were asked to list their group memberships. An increase in average per capita memberships by one unit was correlated with a decrease in mortality of 66.8 per 100,000. Lower levels of trust within the local culture were associated with higher rates of mortality for every cause of death, including cardiovascular disease, cancer, and infant mortality. One interpretation of such data: Social isolation, including social fragmentation, can kill.
Henry Melvill wrote of our causes returning to us as effects; complexity theorists have their Butterfly Effect. Whether we think in terms of “sympathetic threads” or of autonomous agents acting in a complex system, the fact remains that individual behaviors created both the peace and beauty of Middlebury, Vermont, and the tribal warfare of the Sunni triangle. Of course vast economic, political, and cultural forces are also at play, but ultimately, human beings shape their environment through individual, iterative behaviors. As a free agent within such a system, each of us has a certain degree of power, through our individual actions, to continuously adjust the social environment toward something slightly better or something slightly worse. Simply driving to work, you have the option of extending courtesy or road rage. And sooner or later you, or your spouse, or your children, will encounter the same fellow citizens who have been either goaded by your anger or inspired to their own acts of generosity by the example of your beneficence.
In the winning solution to Robert Axelrod’s Prisoner’s Dilemma tournament (described in Chapter Four), the computer program called Tit for Tat, we saw the benefits of cooperation as the default mode—albeit with sanctions held at the ready. In his book The Evolution of Cooperation, Axelrod offers an example of how similarly beneficial social compacts can self-organize in the real world. In World War I, in certain districts in which they were left in place long enough, soldiers who faced one another in the front-line trenches evolved an ad hoc policy of “live and let live.” On their own and in direct defiance of their officers, the enlisted men on the front lines said, in effect, “What’s the point in my shooting one of your buddies, if all it means is that you will retaliate and shoot me or one of my buddies?” Neither side was capable of launching a decisive attack for which wearing down the other side might yield an advantage. So the men acted spontaneously. The first step was an informal cease-fire at suppertime. Eventually, this extended round the clock, meaning that they fired only the minimum number of rounds necessary to placate their officers. Even at that, the men on both sides purposely fired off target. Snipers put on displays of marksmanship—firing patterns into the opposing ramparts—to demonstrate the degree to which they were holding back, thus encouraging the other side to appreciate their restraint and to follow suit. Officers from the command center had to offset this spontaneous reciprocity by continually rotating units along the front.34
As in Axelrod’s iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma tournament, in which each round of the competition consisted of hundreds of moves, this kind of socially benign strategy is the best way to go only if you are going to be dealing with the same people over time. But the friends, associates, neighbors, and opponents we confront today—unless we anticipate a life lived constantly on the lam—are more or less the same friends, associates, neighbors, and opponents we will confront tomorrow, and the day after that. This is true both on the level of our immediate community and on the level of the community of nations.
John Donne, the seventeenth-century poet who was also an Anglican priest, wrote: “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.” Many people (erroneously) consider Charles Darwin to be the antithesis of religious thinking, yet coming from his very different perspective, he arrived at a very similar formulation:
As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united in the larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races.35
Perhaps this similarity in thinking is evidence that there is a deeper truth about the human species waiting to be discovered by each of us. As evolutionary psychology and social neuroscience converge, more and more the scientific findings align with the most basic ethical teaching of the most enduring systems of belief, what we call the Golden Rule. It may be that variations on the command “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” appear in so many different traditions—from the Tao of ancient China, to the law of Moses, to the Sermon on the Mount, to the coldly rational philosophy of Emmanuel Kant—because that command was, in a sense, written by the hand of natural selection.36
The scientific data show that social cooperation is the most adaptive option, but, as we know all too well from what we often see around us, it is only one option among many. Which puts a premium on another behavioral admonition. Whether we are trying to break free from individual loneliness or trying to improve the world, we will do well to follow Gandhi’s advice to “be the change you want to see.”
But once more, societies do not achieve beneficial—and sustainable—levels of social connection and social harmony simply by offering warm hugs and unconditional love. According to the science of complexity, even self-organizing systems need a few simple rules. All civilizations have formal as well as informal rules to promote the adoption of adaptive behavior, including taboos, norms, moral codes, and laws. And this process sometimes requires the kind of “altruistic punishment” discussed in Chapter Eleven, meaning the enforcement of sanctions against others sometimes at a cost to the self. Even minor infractions matter because they set a negative tone that cascades into progressively more negative behavior. If it seems okay to throw trash here, more people will throw trash. If we think everyone cheats on his or her taxes, we are more likely to cheat. If we think everyone is paying his or her fair share, we are more likely to pay what we owe. If there is no social stigma attached to teenage drinking, more teenagers will drink. Without the co-regulatory function of social disapprobation, “things fall apart,” as Yeats told us, and “the centre cannot hold.”
Robert Putnam addresses “social capital” as a societal good. We address it as a personal and collective necessity, and as a major issue of personal, societal, and public health. Civic engagement is the chunk of ice we see floating above the surface; below the water line lurks the much deeper issue of individual feelings of isolation. If civic engagement is to contribute substantially to assuaging the problem of loneliness, then it cannot be something merely akin to networking at a trade show. What individuals need is meaningful connection, not superficial glad-handing.
As individuals, and as a society, we have everything to gain, and everything to lose, in how well or how poorly we manage our need for human connection. With new patterns of immigration changing established cultures throughout the world, the importance of transcending tribalism to find common ground has never been greater. We need to remember not only the ways in which loneliness heightens our threat surveillance and impairs our cognitive abilities, but also the ways in which the warmth of genuine connection frees our minds to focus on whatever challenges lie before us. Both as individuals and as a society, feelings of social isolation deprive us of vast reservoirs of creativity and energy. Connection adds more water to the well that nourishes our human potential.
Coming from the religious tradition of John Donne, C. S. Lewis wrote: “We are born helpless. As soon as we are fully conscious we discover loneliness. We need others physically, emotionally, intellectually; we need them if we are to know anything, even ourselves.”
Coming from the scientific tradition of Charles Darwin, E. O. Wilson wrote: “We are obliged by the deepest drives of the human spirit to make ourselves more than animated dust. We must have a story to tell about where we came from, and why we are here.”37