Ironically, an article by Daniel Akst in the summer issue of Wilson
Quarterly -- "America: Land of Loners?" -- produced a veritable cataract of
comments from readers. As largely a loner myself for most of my life since
teenage years, I found this article particularly interesting -- as also the
comments, most of those also coming from seemingly lonely people.
What Akst doesn't mention, however, is that some loners can be very
dangerous people. Whenever there have been serial murders or particularly
gruesome crimes, the practitioner almost inevitably turns out to have been
a loner. But these individuals have usually been those who have never been
able to establish good friendships in their childhood and youth. Most
loners -- far more numerous -- are well able to socialize but have tended
to become loners for all sorts of other reasons.
Also, what is not discussed in the article is the main reason for most
loneliness in modern times, although, strangely, it is hinted at in the
sub-heading: "Americans, plugged in and on the move, are confiding in their
pets, their computers and their spouses. What they need is to rediscover
the value of friendship." I can only think that this must have been added
by the editor.
Given that, like all social mammals, our genes have shaped us to become
naturally gregarious, what has done the most damage has been the rise of
specialization. There has been no conspiracy but the plethora of consumer
goods and specializations that have grown enormously over the past 200
years or so has meant that the other, equally natural, part of us -- our
individual selfishness -- has been catered to and emphasized beyond
anything that happened before in history.
Unlike in previous hunter-gatherer or agricultural eras, very few
individuals spend their time in a permanent social group in which
individual selfishness is constantly modified by social responsibilities
and transactions. Most of us are to be found somewhere on a spectrum
between (sane) loneliness at one end and being members of a succession of
different social groups in the course of a day -- family, work, leisure,
etc. Especially ambitious individuals -- usually males -- network
themselves into as many social groups as possible in which they can give
and receive favours.
In an age of increasing automation in which value-adding skills
increasingly require high educational attainments, more and more of the
population in advanced countries are being left behind. For the past 30
years the average wages of most jobs have been steadily declining in real
purchasing terms. It has only been disguised as a false prosperity by means
of ever-cheapening, increasingly mass-produced consumer goods.
At the same time, more of the young are being left behind, unable to find
jobs -- not helped, more recently, by retired people now resuming
employment, often of lower-paid jobs which, otherwise, the NEETs (Not in
Education, Employment or Training) might have had. Even more recently --
and which is also likely to become a permanent trend from now onwards --
increasing numbers of graduates are also likely to be unemployed when they
leave university.
Politicians in advanced countries are becoming increasingly desperate about
this accumulation of the jobless young and have tried all sorts of policies
to counteract it. But none has worked so far. Nor are they ever likely to.
The totally new circumstances of the increasingly automated age require
totally new ideas, and totally new ideas never occur to middle-aged brains
whose frontal lobes have long since become full of past ideas and past
solutions. History shows us clearly that really innovative ideas which
change events significantly -- militarily, culturally, artistically,
scientifically -- almost exclusively occur to frontal lobes which are still
in the process of growing millions of new neurons and establishing
thousands of new creative networks.
In short, the really significant new ideas which change history almost
always occur to young people between the ages of puberty and maturity at
around 30 years of age when their frontal lobes finally become densely
occupied and developed. What's more, significant new ideas almost always
occur in single minds. What's even more to the point, history also shows us
that individual innovators also need support groups of others who support
the new ideas and help to develop them.
All this is potentially available to us today as never before in history.
In all the advanced countries there are now millions of jobless young
people and there must be at least some nascent ideas which could change
their world. Note, "their" world, not ours. Furthermore, they have taken to
a new consumer good -- the mobile phone (soon to be mobile computers as
powerful as any of the static ones we have now) -- which enables them to
communicate as never before.
There is little doubt in my old-fashioned brain which can see no solution
to the plight of growing joblessness and poverty in the advanced countries
that, if there are any new ideas that will lead to a new post-urbanized
culture, they will occur, and be developed, somewhere in specialist groups
within the communication network of the young.
Whatever will be the new ideas of the future, then the oldies will be in
denial about them, or will pour scorn on them, or might even persecute
their original proponents. I suspect that the future will involve vastly
reduced populations in the advanced countries, that the new culture will be
much more akin to the permanent group nature of hunter-gatherers but that
also it will be extremely high-tech -- principally involving the most
complex of all the sciences so far, biology. But apart from that vague
outline I wouldn't begin to guess.
Keith
Keith Hudson, Saltford, England
_______________________________________________
Futurework mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
