The Reason Why Americans Are So Lonely, and Why Prosperity Means Socializing with Your Neighbors

[marmar]

via AlterNet:



Henry Holt / By Bill McKibben

The Surprising Reason Why Americans Are So Lonely, and Why Future Prosperity Means Socializing with Your Neighbors
Access to cheap energy made us rich, wrecked our climate, and made us the first people on earth who had no practical need of our neighbors -- that has to change.

April 27, 2010 |


Excerpted from the book EAARTH: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet by Bill McKibben. Reprinted by arrangement with Henry Holt and Company, LLC. All rights reserved. Copyright (c) 2010 by Bill McKibben.

Community may suffer from overuse more sorely than any word in the dictionary. Politicians left and right sprinkle it through their remarks the way a bad Chinese restaurant uses MSG, to mask the lack of wholesome ingredients. But we need to rescue it; we need to make sure that community will become, on this tougher planet, one of the most prosaic terms in the lexicon, like hoe or bicycle or computer. Access to endless amounts of cheap energy made us rich, and wrecked our climate, and it also made us the first people on earth who had no practical need of our neighbors.

In the halcyon days of the final economic booms, everyone on your cul de sac could have died overnight from some mysterious plague, and while you might have been sad, you wouldn't have been inconvenienced. Our economy, unlike any that came before it, is designed to work without the input of your neighbors. Borne on cheap oil, our food arrives as if by magic from a great distance (typically, two thousand miles). If you have a credit card and an Internet connection, you can order most of what you need and have it left anonymously at your door. We've evolved a neighborless lifestyle; on average an American eats half as many meals with family and friends as she did fifty years ago. On average, we have half as many close friends.

I've written extensively, in a book called Deep Economy, about the psychological implications of our hyperindividualism. In short, we're less happy than we used to be, and no wonder -- we are, after all, highly evolved social animals. There aren't enough iPods on earth to compensate for those missing friendships. But I'm determined to be relentlessly practical -- to talk about surviving, not thriving. And so it heartens me that around the world people are starting to purposefully rebuild communities as functioning economic entities, in the hope that they'll be able to buffer some of the effects of peak oil and climate change.

The Transition Town movement began in England and has spread to North America and Asia; in one city after another, people are building barter networks, expanding community gardens. And they've paid equal, or even greater, attention to suburbia; in the developed world, after all, that's where most people live. Though our sprawl is designed for the car, the sunk costs of those tens of millions of houses mean they're not going to disappear just because the price of gas rises. They'll have to change instead. "Suburbia, not as a model for material consumption, but as a legal and social lattice of decentralized and more uniformly distributed production land ownership, has the potential to serve as the foundation for just such a pioneering adaptation," writes Jeff Vail, a widely read economic theorist who envisions "a Resilient Suburbia." ........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/vision/146623/the_surprising_reason_why_americans_are_so_lonely%2C_and_why_future_prosperity_means_socializing_with_your_neighbors

[xchrom]

1. Recommend

[elleng]

2. The New Grand Tour

Greetings from twenty-first-century Europe, where new ideas, new technologies, and better ways of living are flourishing.

http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2010.05-environment-the-new-grand-tour/

[Ghost Dog]

12. Yes.

But now look what's going on: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x532400

Powerful anti-progressive forces have been unleashed.

[Captain Hilts]

3. Cars disperse people, trains being them together. nt

[elleng]

4. Right, Cap'n, but gotta drive to Shady Grove to get on train!!!

:hi:

[Captain Hilts]

5. ...and pay to park! A friend of mine who lives near Clopper Road

would take a Metro bus in not far from Shady Grove, can still park for free, but the bus fare was raised from $1.30 to $3!!!

Oddly enough, fewer people are taking that bus to Bethesda! But the parking is free, which is a great deal.

[Sanity Claws]

6. Community is important

for emotional and financial health.

[Klukie]

7. Sounds like we need a community organizer .

[tanyev]

8. But all my neighbors are teabaggers.

:(

[FiveGoodMen]

9. That was going to be my answer!

Almost all of my relatives lean that way, too.

It's much better to be lonely than to be a friend of the devil.

[JoeyT]

10. Mine too.

Hanging out with people around here would see me dead or in jail inside of a month. They're all teabaggers.

[caraher]

13. But that's what makes teabaggers possible

If people of different politics actually had to live with each other, it would be harder for the teabaggers to take themselves seriously. They'd see Obama supporters - heck, sane people - aren't part of some grand socialistNaziCommunistIslamoFascist conspiracy.

[FiveGoodMen]

15. I don't know... I play in a band with a right-winger. See him every week.

We get along well enough to get business done by avoiding the topic of politics as much as possible.

He still thinks I'm wrong about all of it.

[Tsiyu]

11. I've been trying to get people to see this

but they just stare at me blankly when I say the answer to all of your problems is in other people.


My philosophy has been formed by 10+ years of living in the guts of Appalachia.


I'm so poor I can't even pay attention, but I'm probably happier, with more meaningful friendships and people to help me, than I ever was with the seven bedroom house and the Suburban.

We're all so vain, myself included, if you ask me.

One thing that always bugs me: If rugged individualism means you just go out and buy the same shit as everybody else, and practice the same ragged ethics as everyone else, and watch the same shows as everyone else and live in the same kind of house as everyone else, how much of an individualist are you, really?

Good people are everywhere if you get up off your ass and look for them.

[Igel]

14. Fukuyama stood on his head.

Of course, the prosperity Fukuyama talked about was the prosperity of the 1940s, '50s, and '60s, not the 1640s, '50s, and '60s.

Good insight. At least 15 years old, of course, and probably predating that by 80 years. Still, it's one that is typically not just overlooked but squelched in the US.

It's the kind of insight that makes a lot of ostensibly pro-community politics suddenly be seen to be anti-community, of course, esp. when there's personal political or economic gain. Or only pro-certain-communities--again, usually for personal or political gain. Take the study from last year that showed less community cohesion in diverse neighborhoods. We could only see this through the prism of self-serving political views, and came up with explanations devoid of any basis in fact (and by "we" I mean pretty much 99.999% of Americans that seem to have said anything about it); it was all race, even though you can get communities that are just as racially diverse that pull together quite nicely. Quite a conundrum, just one that's dependent entirely on the set of filters you consider explanations and data through.

Properly done, you don't need community organizers. That rather defeats the point. Moreover, the economic gain is usually derivative, not the goal. Economics needs the fertile soil of community but by and large doesn't do a good job of producing that soil.

Not that Fukuyama necessarily got everything right. But the core idea--probably not new with him, but nicely argued and exemplified--is probably spot on.