Martin van Creveld gives the answer to America’s alienation

Summary: Martin van Creveld discusses what is often described as one of America’s worst problem. A thousand solutions have been proposed, none convincingly. Van Creveld provides a very different answer.

Alienation

By Martin van Creveld. From his website, 11 October 2018.
Posted with his generous permission.

Alienation is in the news. Back in February 2017 no less a guru than Mark Zuckerberg started railing against it, arguing that “there has been a striking decline in the important social infrastructure of local communities over the past few decades {see his Manifesto}. Since the 1970s, membership in some local groups has declined by as much as one-quarter, cutting across all segments of the population.” The decline, he went on, “is related to the lack of community and connection to something greater than ourselves.” Even husbands and wives, parents and children, were paying more attention to what their smartphones said than to each other. How sad.

Like so many other American tycoons, past and present, Mr. Zuckerberg is an idealist at heart. Or at any rate that is how he wants to come through. That is why he promised to use Facebook to fight the trend, even if it meant that doing so required an entirely new business model. Instead of spending as much time as possible on the Net, people would look into each other’s eyes and embrace each other while saying soul full things like “you are great,” “I want to help you,” and “I love you.” How wonderful.

As is always the case when an exceptionally rich and exceptionally powerful person says this or that, the pronouncement was picked up by the media which spread it and by academia who provided it with the requisite number of footnotes.

Rich people’s words are golden, especially in the U.S. Far be it from me to doubt anything Mr. Zuckerberg has said. Instead, all I can do or want to do is point to a few elementary facts.

Google Ngram tells me that, between 1940 and 1973, the relative frequency with which the term alienation was used “in millions of books” grew sixfold. Since then, instead of increasing as per the Manifesto and as the ubiquity of electronic communications suggests should have happened, it has actually declined.

The Beatles’ sang about “all the lonely people” {in “Eleanor Rigby“) and “He’s a real nowhere man” in the 1960s, long before anyone had heard of either Zuckerberg (who was born in 1984!) or Facebook.

The Lonely Crowd came out in 1951. In it sociologist David Riesman and his fellow authors described the collapse of community and the rise a type, which according to them was becoming more and more common, whom they described as “other directed.” People whose main requirement in life was not the love of those they knew well but the esteem in which they were held by strangers; today, no doubt, they would measure that esteem by the number of hits they got on Google. A society dominated by such types was said to face profound deficiencies in leadership, individual self-knowledge, and human potential

As they say: “small place, big hell.” Living with a small number of people one knows very well is not necessarily better than being anonymous in a large city. Back in 1943 the French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre wrote a play with the title “No Exit“, which had the famous line “L’enfer c’est l’autre” (hell is the other). In it two women and one men, suffering from no particular discomfort but locked up in a single room, made each other’s lives as hellish as anything can be and kept at it as long as the performance lasted.

Long before caricatures started showing married couples lying in bed and communicating by email or SMS, they used to show couples sitting across from each other at breakfast with the husband’s face buried in his newspaper.

Charlie Chaplin’s film, Modern Times was made in 1936. It focused on a factory worker who, made to perform like a machine, was alienated to the point where he himself turned into a machine. Except in that it made people roar with laughter, there was little behind the film that was original. Before Chaplin there were Henry Ford and his assembly lines; and before Ford there were Frederick Taylor and scientific management.

When Karl Marx discussed alienation in The German Ideology (1844) he was not referring to Mr. Zuckerberg either. What he meant was the kind that resulted from the division of labor. Factories, Marx argued, created a situation where workers, instead of engaging in agriculture in the morning, fishing in the afternoon, and writing critical essays in the evening, only used a small part of their faculties all day long. Doing so they became alienated form their own nature; to put them together again, an entirely different kind of society using entirely different methods of production was required.

Finally, my dictionary tells me that, in nineteenth-century America, the phrase “alienation of affection” meant “falling in love with someone else” and was sometimes used by lawyers in divorce cases. The evolution of the term can be traced to Middle English and from there to Old French. In Latin, where it originated, it meant a transfer, surrender, or separation. As, for example, in alienatio amicitae (to be separated from one’s friends), alienatio sacrorum (to be separated from the sacred), and alienatio mentis (to go out of one’s mind).   {As of 2016, it was still a common law tort in 6 states.}

Do I have to point out, once again, that all this was long before anyone ever heard of the particularly alienating effect of modern means of communication?

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For More Information

Ideas! For shopping ideas see my recommended books and films at Amazon.

Please like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter. For more information see all posts about alienation, and especially these …

1. Diagnosing the Eagle: Alienation.
2. The bitter fruits of our alienation from America.
3. Vignettes of men and women in America, alienated from their true selves.
4. The Seattle Airplane Suicide is A Barometer of Our Culture.
5. America’s men and women, alienated from our true selves.
6. America’s rising tide of drug overdoses, a symptom of deeper problems.
7. We’re losing the war on drugs. It’s a symptom of worse ills.

A powerful book about a fragmented lonely America

Bowling Alone:
The Collapse and Revival of American Community

By Robert D. Putnam.

Putnam is a professor of public policy at Harvard (see Wikipedia). From the publisher …

“Once we bowled in leagues, usually after work – but no longer. This seemingly small phenomenon symbolizes a significant social change that Robert Putnam has identified in this brilliant volume, which The Economist hailed as “a prodigious achievement.”

“Drawing on vast new data that reveal Americans’ changing behavior, Putnam shows how we have become increasingly disconnected from one another and how social structures – whether they be PTA, church, or political parties – have disintegrated. Until the publication of this groundbreaking work, no one had so deftly diagnosed the harm that these broken bonds have wreaked on our physical and civic health, nor had anyone exalted their fundamental power in creating a society that is happy, healthy, and safe.

“Like defining works from the past, such as The Lonely Crowd and The Affluent Society, and like the works of C. Wright Mills and Betty Friedan, Putnam’s Bowling Alone has identified a central crisis at the heart of our society and suggests what we can do.”