The Pursuit of Loneliness

Tags:  book-reviews, non-fiction,

I found this book by chance while browsing the shelves of a used bookstore. The great value of used bookstores, beside preserving some very good books, is that they provide such moments of serendipity. Browsing online just isn’t the same as pulling an intriguing tome off the shelf, opening to a random page and having it grab you.

Though Slater’s The Pursuit of Loneliness was a bestseller when it was published back in 1970, I had never heard of it. Slater, a sociology professor, examines the new values and attitudes of the sixties counter-culture movement against the more established values and attitudes of earlier generations of Americans. That might make the book sound like a dated study of a bygone era, but it’s not. Slater’s insights and critique of American culture are as relevant today as when the book was published. Many of the tensions of the Nixon era, when this book was first published, have returned to the surface of American political discourse. But on a deeper level, the values underlying daily life in the US, and the stresses they cause, have not changed.

Slater says on page two:

One assumption underlying this book is that every morning all 200 million of us get out of bed and put a lot of energy into creating and re-creating the social calamities that oppress, infuriate and exhaust us.

The author examines America’s overvaluation of individualism at the expense of community as one major driver of our current social ills. We don’t know our neighbors, we don’t necessarily want to, and this comes at a cost.

Much of the unpleasantness, abrasiveness, and costliness of American life comes from the fact that we’re always dealing with strangers. This is what bureaucracy is: a mechanism for carrying on transactions between strangers. Who would need all those offices, all that paperwork, all those lawyers, contracts, rules and regulations if all economic transactions took place between lifelong neighbors? A huge and tedious machinery has evolved to cope with the fact that we prefer to carry on our activities among strangers. The preference is justified, as are most of the sicknesses in American society, by the alleged economic benefits of bigness, but like many economic arguments, it’s a con.

Slater notes that the atomization of American culture puts immense pressure on parents–mothers in particular–to provide for all of the emotional needs of their children. In earlier societies where child-rearing was more of a community effort, the care provided by adults outside the family could ameliorate the worst effects of a mother’s stress and anxiety on her children. In American society, with its isolated nuclear families, children absorb intense doses of their parents’ neuroses. This, coupled with the emotional indulgence and permissiveness of Spockian child-rearing practices, produces a generation of self-centered narcissists perfectly suited to excel in the me-first, take-all-you-can-get world of American capitalism.

Capitalists in America produce and sell technology without fully considering or caring about the long-term effects of that technology. They never ask themselves, “Will this be good for society?” They ask only, “Can I make money from this?” The common good and the quality of American public life never factor into their thinking.

Slater’s critique of the perverse assumptions and distorted world view of US economists is quite compelling:

Instead of starting with people and working from what people want, economists like to start with tasks: improving the condition of the corporations, or the market, or the interest rate, or the GNP [Gross National Product]. They talk of creating jobs, markets, demand. Economists assume that jobs must be created even for things that don’t need to be done so people can have money to spend on things they don’t need. And to get people to buy things they don’t need, we create a huge industry [advertising] to get them to want them. Meanwhile, the things people really need–food, shelter, safety, health, a pleasant environment–they can’t afford.

Money is supposed to be a tool–a means to some other end. But economists say things like, “What will be the effect of such-and-such a change on the Gross National Product, on employment, on the interest rate, on the stock market, on inventories, on new plant investment,” and so on. These are only measurements of means–what is the goal? What do we want to do with our work and our resources? Just make jobs? Just make money? A job does something. Money buys something. We keep forgetting what it is we want–what kind of environment, what kind of life. Do we work only to make more work, and get money only to accumulate more money?

The last thing we ever think about economically is what we need or want… In the long run no sound economy can be based on useless or destructive labor. The troubles we’re experiencing didn’t arise because someone made the wrong economic prediction, or used the wrong economic indicator or the wrong theory of corporate investment. They arose because we’ve been using our energies mindlessly for decades; we’ve put our labor and resources into activities that have brought us nothing back.

Slater notes that people work for many reasons: to improve the conditions of their home and surroundings, for personal growth and fulfillment, to be of service to others. American capitalism only counts work for money as real work, and money, the author notes, only motivates people to do work they wouldn’t otherwise want to do. That is, it motivates you to do things that don’t improve your conditions or surroundings, that don’t help you grow or find fulfillment, and that are not of service to others. There’s something inherently perverse about that.

This book is a good companion to Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone. Both books focus on the dissolution of American community life and our culture’s drift toward individual loneliness and isolation. Putnam’s book focuses on data and statistics, appealing to social scientists with exhaustively researched numbers and facts. Slater’s book omits evidence to focus on analysis and insight. His language is less clinical, more eloquent and compelling, and will appeal to literary readers, philosophers and people who like to wrestle with big ideas.

The final section of the book focuses on how social and political institutions thwart change. The author notes in particular how structured economic inequality in the US preserves the status quo. The rich write loopholes into the tax law that they can then exploit to their advantage. Corporations buy politicians and craft legislation to preserve their privilege and advantage. The result is that the system keeps funneling money to the rich that they did not work for or earn. This welfare for the rich, as Slater calls it, is far more costly to our society than welfare for the poor. The poor, meanwhile, are too overworked and stressed out to enjoy the luxury of long-term planning. How can you consider life five and ten years down the road when you’re always struggling to make it through the month?

This book is as timely today as it was when it was published. While a reader might find some joy in discovering a writer whose insights are still fresh fifty years after publication, he might just well find himself depressed to see that so little has changed in all that time.