Sea Change
In a time of destruction, create something. - Maxine Kingston
1. Starving for Connection
During much of our nation’s history our primary source of belonging was found in small local communities: neighborhoods; churches, mosques or synagogues; workplaces or workout locales. But, in the last half century our transient, remote-worker world has dissolved many of these community structures or at least made them less cohesive. Even in the early 2000’s Author of the book Loneliness, John Cacioppo notes:
The reasons for the rise in social isolation are multiple and well documented: contemporary American life is less rooted, more hectic, more scattered. Jobs and friendships are transitory; divorce rates are high, as is the number of single-parent households. More people move away from home, and more people live alone.i
Cacioppo cites a study in which sociologists asked respondents to list the number of confidants in their lives; in 1985 the most common response was three, but in a 2004 a repetition of the survey found the most common answer was zero. Fully 25% of the respondents, drawn from a cross-section of the American public, reported having no one to communicate with on the level of an intimate friend. Moreover, in the last twenty years, researchers have found increasing rates of social isolation.ii
Ironically, in our ongoing loneliness, what has come to school us in community are the ultimate forces of destruction. Consider how, when in the fall of 2017 Hurricane Harvey wreaked havoc on the Texas shoreline, not all residents chose to leave with those who were fleeing to safety. News footage of the chaos showed a mass of cars driving toward the rising floodwaters, private boats in tow, to rescue strangers. The New York Times describes: “Alongside a huge local, state and federal disaster response was an equally giant volunteer rescue effort….It was hard to tell, in the darkness, who was being paid to be there and who was not.”iii
An increasing number of natural disasters in the last five years have been met with the triumphant gathering of resources and volunteer efforts.iv In fires, floods, and hurricanes we have responded neighbor to neighbor, given the last generator away to a daughter needing power for her father’s oxygen supply,v opened extra rooms to families rendered homelessvi and gotten into our own boats to search the watery night for those trapped by flood. Our homegrown heroism has surprised us, spotlighted by the unprecedented ability of social media to catch selfless acts in real time. Injected into otherwise grim newsreels, tweets of rescue moments were reposted and shared by journalistic outlets, lightening the national mood in the face of otherwise unqualified Tragedy.
These sweet fledgling experiences have brought to the surface our nostalgia for old fashioned community—for chats over dusky back porch railings while borrowing a cup of sugar, barn-raisings, and living side-by-side with those who can be counted on to step forward when disaster arises. Our appetites have been whetted for lasting community to surround us in its coherent webbing. We have begun to grasp at any encompassing event as an opportunity for shared meaning and communal significance. We begin to long for a collective self-understanding—of ourselves as the people-cells of a corporate embryo, nurtured in its womb.
But despite our longing for community, our thought-life about how to build a communal identity and grow our unity is nearly non-existent. In our present experience, each of us is at the hub of our own circle of a community flung far and wide, accessed primarily via technology. Meanwhile in our actual locality we are often isolated, warmed only by our screens. As the research shows, our COVID experience reinforced our trend toward isolation, but more importantly the pandemic brought us a perspective shift in the way we view ourselves. Gone is our turn-of-the-century hubris and trust in the systems and supply chains we have built. In its place is a more humble understanding that all we have established can be upended in a moment.
In fact, the evident lack of systemic preparation for the pandemic layered together with our polarized responses to government edicts on masking and vaccines only grew our felt sense of inadequacy to meet global challenges. Shock violence, civic mayhem, and political turmoil (VUCA) have also contributed to a heightened awareness of how insubstantial our guardianship of self has been and how incomplete our training for calamity. Of course the call to coordinated response is not new. We have been asked it repeatedly by poverty, hunger, degradation, and injustice throughout history, but now the demand is made urgent, today the edge is sharpened to an unbearable point.
Twenty years ago, Cacioppo wrote: “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.”vii And his words ring even more true today. We now have a hunger to concretize world-unity—an idea that only existed in the abstract before the internet. Our scale of awareness has grown planet-sized, but our ability to coordinate a shared response has not. Being technologically connected has awakened a longing to move past mere awareness of global struggles to using that information for real substantive community that holds together when called upon. An unfulfilled inner urgency pulls us now toward greater involvement with our shared humanity and being enfolded into a more resilient and interwoven life.
We want more than what we have had in the past, a vision that surpasses our experience to aptly encompass both unity and diversity, both community and multiplicity, with equal importance given to the individual and the collective. We are seeking endorsement to maintain our individuality within a group experience resilient enough to allow each person a genuine self-actualization. To do so, we must decipher how the health of the individual can feed, nurture, and be sheltered by a larger community entity, rather than be at odds with it. Long resident in our subconscious, this pulsing ache asserts itself: that we move beyond hyper-individualism and yield ourselves to our corporate development until division’s threats grow impotent, and the gateway to deeper unity swings wide open.
2. ReLanguaging Unity
So we find ourselves at a crossroads in our sociological history. To be honest, though, many of us guard our lone experience for good reason. We have endured group experiences that promised community but delivered only pretense and conformity, only a new and different type of isolation. We want neither to return to hierarchical power structures of the past when local petty despots dictated societal roles, and individualism staggered in fear of a group norms toward erased selfhood. For many of us, our past attempts at community have surfaced this conviction: if the cost for belonging is the loss of our individual voice, we are unwilling to pay. So we are suspended in a pause between having jettisoned past structures of community and cultivating a new brand of unity. We want to move past our present hyper-individualism bordering on narcissism, but we are working toward something we don’t fully grock. We know little about unity’s source, and less about where it tends once established.
Not only is unity somewhat formless in our minds, but our conception of it is hampered by vague and shallow languaging. When trying to grasp a new definition, words run from us, teasing and laughing. We find ourselves mumbling about “world peace,” and “one-ness of consciousness,” employing flimsy phrases long ago emptied of meaning. Love, hope, faith, unity—all the most vital concepts of life defy the use of words as their common transport. We have tried to clothe these ineffable topics in our pale language of weeds, borrowing the concrete adjectives of this elemental plane for intangible principals of eternity and found ourselves inarticulate.
Additionally we’ve allowed the words we do have—such as community and solidarity—to be appropriated as cover ups for selfish ambition. Once the province of tribal enclaves, common location or spirituality, community is now orphaned to the gym or yoga studio—to a widespread group that has a common interest, but otherwise rarely meets. Columnist Anand Giridharadas writes in the New York Times online of the word community itself being hijacked and grown meaningless:
Place and shared experiences have fallen away from the modern understanding of “community.” When people speak of the “medical community” or the “venture capital community,” they’re really describing people with common interests and not common values, history or memory. Community in this sense is less about having one another’s back, more about lobbying for the same things….about networking and dealmaking, under the cover of a word that makes such endeavors sound less crass.viii
Giant sales are now “Friend and Family Events,” materialism having been co-opted for commercial uses in a one-way transference of meaning from sublime to vulgar. Because it no longer substantively exists as something strong and deep and pervasive in our lives, the word community once meaning something closer to its roots of the many coalescing into one,(melding communis, meaning “joint” and unitas, meaning “oneness,”) has been put up for sale and given to the highest bidder. Similarly harmony, fellowship, and brotherhood now can evoke the fear of being taken advantage of by a consuming collective.
Because language informs idea through usage, we must endeavor to develop a more complex definition of unity robust enough to grow our understanding of unity beyond synchrony. Socrates taught us, “The beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms.” If the loss of meaning in a word like community mirrors the larger movement away from its concept, perhaps language can also help us find our way back to it.
In the history of every race and of humanity as a whole, we find times ripe for a sea change. Now is such a time—one that beckons us to unravel our heritage of mutual distrust and alienation—a time when unspoken ideas roll about underneath the tongue, and we long to speak to one another in fresh sentences. And philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” Rather than trying to create new discourse with old words bled of meaning we must open up a new primer on unity, add rich definitions, and retake complexity of meaning. Then perhaps we can leverage this new vocabulary to push our currently shallow thought-life about developing the collective nature of our humanity into deeper waters.
*We are starving for substantive connection
*A new definition of unity is arising
*Let’s harness our anger at injustice into collective action
i. http://magazine.uchicago.edu/1012/features/the-nature-of-loneliness.shtml
ii. The prevailing trend for most social connectedness measures was exacerbated by the pandemic. However, household family social engagement and companionship showed signs of progressive decline years prior to the pandemic, at a pace not eclipsed by the pandemic. Social connectedness may be affected by the pandemic for years to come. However, since social connectedness trends were declining even before the pandemic started, simply ‘getting back to normal’ is insufficient. A limitation of note is that, for 52 days during the height of social distancing (March 18, 2020–May 9, 2020), no data was collected. Thus, the uptick in social isolation and social engagement with household family and the decline in all other forms of social engagement are likely underestimated for 2020. Our ability to accurately assess the impact of the pandemic on social connectedness will require re-examining these trends over the next several years.
The most dramatic trends in social connectedness were seen in the plummeting social engagement with friends, ‘others’, and companionship for the youngest group (15-24-years) relative to all other ages. Previous studies suggest that adolescents and young adults may be substituting online, digital social interaction for in-person, face-to-face social engagement (Twenge et al., 2019; Twenge & Spitzberg, 2020). Recent cohorts of adolescents and young adults will age with having experienced less peer social engagement and companionship in their youth than previous cohorts. The decline in social engagement with friends and ‘others’ was not replaced by more social engagement with family. Youth is when people tend to be more socially engaged with friends, ‘others’, and in companionship than at any other time in life as evident in our data. If, as research indicates, adolescence and young adulthood are sensitive life-stages for socializing with non-family (Blakemore & Mills, 2014), then the current youth cohort is experiencing substantial loss in socialization experiences. Since social experiences in older adulthood are a function of relational histories over the life-course (Antonucci, Fiori, Birditt, & Jackey, 2010), reductions in friend and ‘other’ social engagement and in companionship for young people may have health and longevity implications for this cohort in future years as they age.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9811250/
iii. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/29/us/volunteer-rescue-crews-hurricane-harveyhouston.html
iv. According to the UN’s disaster-monitoring system, America sits alongside China and India in suffering the greatest number of natural disasters globally between 1995 and 2015. These include earthquakes, storms, floods and heatwaves that either cause at least ten deaths, affect more than 100 people or prompt the declaration of a national emergency. Since 1970, the number of disasters worldwide has more than quadrupled to around 400 a year.
https://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2017/08/daily-chart-19
vii. Cacciopo Page 269 Loneliness
viii. Anand Giridharadas, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/21/us/draining-the-life-fromcommunity.html?_r=1
ix. Antoine Leiris, Open Letter To Terrorists, http://abcnews.go.com/International/paris-manwrites-powerful-letter-defiance-terrorists-killed/story?id=35256304
x. "A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent Conflict" by Peter Ackerman and JackDuVall. It is attributed to Dan Ellsberg.