I have to be honest, at this point my stereotype of rationalists is people going,
“Man, modern atomized individualism is one of the most important social achievements of modern times, and the more we accelerate it, the better. On a completely unrelated note I sure am enjoying living in this group home with twelve other close friends who help me do chores and mitigate my mental illness.”
better than “man, i’m now destitute after my only support network threw me out because i’m queer”
the best feature of atomized individualism is the possibility to get a support network of twelve friends who are actually similar enough to you
you can’t get subculture society without atomized individualism
Yeah, the point I keep coming back to, and the reason I think the above referenced opinion isn’t self-contradictory, is that modern atomized individualism lets you choose your tribe/pack/family. They weren’t born into that group home, they weren’t assigned to it by state or clergy, they chose it because they felt the people, individually and collectively, fit well with them.
There are surely problems with that model: people sometimes make choices that are very bad for them, and it can sometimes requires painful choices from those who really would be fine where they started. Nevertheless, I think a lot of people ignore the extent to which modern individualism well-realized is not so much about dropping out of society as choosing your own, and the extent to which many communities (including, ironically, many communities formed around conservative and the more anti-modern flavors of liberal/anarchist principles) couldn’t exist without it.
I think what many critiques of atomized individualism are really grasping toward (as you allude to in your tags) is that more and more people are ending up with small or nonexistent support networks and sources of meaning in our current atomized environment, and it’s really difficult to build those up from scratch if you end up in such a situation. There’s nothing inherent to atomized individualism that would cause this, but our current society seems to push more people in that direction. See, for example, the data about how high schoolers today have fewer friends and socialize less with the friends they do have than high schoolers 10 years ago.
I’m not so much trying to gesture at it as to yell it at the top of my lungs.
The rationalist thing is to go “Atomization is great, because rather than being forced into coercive, restrictive social structures, we form our own by choice!”
Which is very pretty and an admirable goal but as evidence based rationalists it seems to me that the question of whether that’s actually what’s happening ought to matter to you.
If this is what was happening then… Well, like I was saying the book wouldn’t be called “Bowling Alone.”
If that was what was happening you’d expect the slow disintegration of churches, lodges and political organizations to be accompanied by rising participation in such indisputably non-coercive activities as hobby groups, sports leagues, and informal get-togethers to eat or play games, as those things would continue to be important for their own sake and begin to act as voluntary informal support networks.
But subjectively I don’t see that and according to Putnam that hasn’t happened. Instead all kinds of socializing have just gone “bleeeeagh” at the same time.
The last 75 years have seen a severe erosion of the specific kinds of social structures that everyone in this thread claims to value and I feel like that should matter more.
Bowling Alone, noteworthily, is a book whose last chapter basically says “…and there’s this Internet thing that seems to be on the horizon, maybe it’ll be relevant to people’s social patterns, we couldn’t say right now.” One way or another, there’s a lot that its analysis doesn’t capture.
Anyone saying “I am in a group house in Berkeley with twelve of my best friends who are supporting me in living my best life” is saying that atomization worked, that the new norms helped him to find a comfortable social milieu rather than robbing him of one. I would be inclined to say much the same thing, for myself, even though I live on the other side of the country and I have less than no desire to live in a group house.
It’s possible that this is flukey or rare, or that making it happen requires someone to have skills that aren’t widely cultivated. It’s also possible that this is a competing-interests thing, where (e.g.) certain kinds of misfits who would have suffered greatly in the old thickly-obligatory tribes and communities are making out like bandits even as many normal people are feeling the rug pulled out from under them. These are things worth hashing out. But if someone’s point is “I love atomization and freedom from community obligations, check out how it gave me this awesome social circle that wouldn’t otherwise have formed” – well, at least with regards to his own experience, you should probably listen.