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.
This is rationalists we’re talking about, though. These are the folks who say their goal is to optimize the world. That makes it their self-imposed duty to ask not if atomization has worked for them, but if atomization has, on the whole, been good for everyone affected by it, and if not, ask what is to be done for those who are worse off because of it
This, and:
You’re making the assumption, again, that there are two different kinds of social connections whose strength is inverse:
“I’m well off, because the weakening of the thick, coercive social structures has strengthened the informal, choice based social structures that help me.”
Admittedly, Bowling Alone was written 20 years ago but personally I have strong doubts whether the trend has reversed, and in any case it demonstrates that there is no necessary inverse relationship between these two kinds of structures.
It is entirely possible that as it has become easier to flee an abusive church or family and more difficult to form voluntary, makeshift communities to replace them.
It is possible that “certain kinds of misfits who would have suffered greatly in old thick-obligatory tribes” are not “making out like bandits” but find themselves struggling not to feel like living ghosts in a world that doesn’t care.
A real underlying frustration thing I have is the tendency of people in rationalist or adjacent spaces to intensely drag things back towards the “competing needs” framework in a way that doesn’t feel evidence based to me.
I think I’ve said this before but when I watch old 50s sitcoms the thing that seems nostalgic isn’t that women and children knew their place, it’s that mom and dad are always having friends over to play cards. It looks fun, to have game nights that don’t have to be scheduled six weeks out only for 3 of the 4 people you invited to call an hour before and explain that they aren’t coming.
Bowling Alone was gratifying to me because it validated my underlying sense of, “Putting this stuff together feels really hard”.
I haven’t finished college because I was hit with a severe bout of depression of the “I can’t even get out of bed except to use the bathroom” variety and I just went home because all those great voluntary bonds I formed in college weren’t strong enough to support me through that or provide much other than “Gosh I sure hope things get better.”
Honestly, I’m only now starting to come to grips with how angry I am about that, but, like, do I come off as trad to you?
I don’t want to deny your experiences here, and I know that there are plenty of people writing on Tumblr who have had experiences similar to yours.
I can say: my experience was not like that. My experience was that I became part of a coagulating let’s-be-geeky-weirdos-together social scene in college, and almost fifteen years later my personal life – despite additions, subtractions, driftings-apart, fights, and one epic community-destroying disaster schism – is basically tied up in a descendant-group of that same social scene. I’m still hanging out numerous times every week with some of the very people I was hanging out with as a sophomore. This despite the fact that we’re upper-middle-class types dealing with metropolis rents, academic job placement, and similar issues. My experience is that occasionally we bump into, and even exchange membership with, comparable groups. My experience is that people are eager to play games together, to put in the effort to get cool holiday presents for each other, etc., and that most often such things happen as planned, even though often life stresses make it annoyingly difficult in some way. And my experience is that all this works specifically because we have social filters for compatibility, and when you play D&D every other week it’s with people whom you genuinely like, rather than with whatever randos got glued to you by social circumstance.
And the dude who says “my group house is awesome” is presumably saying something very similar. He’s not wrong, he’s not lying, he’s…working from a very different experience than yours.
I don’t know whose story is more representative. I don’t know whether this really comes down to “I got lucky and turned out to have natural immunity to the spreading plague.” I don’t know exactly how you replicate the social technologies that make things work well on this front (although I do have some thoughts).
But the people saying the things to which you object aren’t unaware of their own situations. If your argument is that things haven’t worked out so well for everyone, that’s an important point and one that has to be considered. If your argument is that they’re lying or mistaken about how well things have worked out for them, they are correctly going to tag you as a saboteur. If you’re saying that there are no “competing needs” here because gosh-darn-it they just don’t understand their own needs, well…