Solitude Part 2: Aloneness as Social Responsibility

Health authorities have been issuing stark injunctions to citizen across the world.  Stay home.  Bend the curve.  Contain the spread.  Here in British Columbia, Health Minister Adrian Dix has been emphatic in his daily press conferences: “We all have to do 100 percent and we have to do it now.”  Rarely has isolation been so crucial to the welfare of togetherness.

The requirement to stay isolated in our homes in order to save others calls on our sense of duty.  “Our lives are in one another’s hands,” writes Lynn Ungar.  Yet, this call of duty seems odd.  Save lives by lounging on the couch, watching Netflix, chatting on Facetime, and taking multiple naps a day? This directive to become homebodies confounds prevailing notions of social responsibility, which in various forms imply activism and engagement.  Suddenly, I am saving lives simply by staying in bed.  The call for physical isolation throws into relief something I have questioned for a long time.  What if our default mode of togetherness is more harmful than we realize?  What if our impulse to associate, assimilate, and conform is distorting our vision and warping our identities?  Modern culture, aggravated by rampant activity and frantic torrents of information, induces a ubiquitous pressure to accumulate material and social capital, to garner approval and acclaim, to meet the standards that measure a good life. These goods are not necessarily odious in themselves; but in a world where such pressures insert themselves into our mental spaces, the result can lead to anxiety and insecurity.  The compulsion to acquire something (status, power, wealth, repute) is replaced by the fear of losing that thing once I have it.  With the benefits provided by society (cooperation, community, and exchange) also comes competition, conformity, and the erosion of autonomy.

I don’t think modern Western society is inherently pernicious.  However, there is a persistent cultural undercurrent that looks upon solitude with suspicion.  Under this cultural regime, togetherness is the default mode of human existence, and those who prefer to be alone are viewed with pity and hesitation.  Certain tropes cast a dubious light on those who like to be alone; “loner”, for example, is a descriptor with pejorative overtones that cast aspersions on someone’s personality.  People who are single are often seen with sympathy and regret.  Something must have happened or else he wouldn’t be aloneperhaps there is something wrong with him.  I call this pervasive weariness against aloneness the orthodoxy of togetherness, based on tacit assumptions about sociality and companionship as the unquestionable norm of human life.

I am not arguing that every person is meant to be alone, nor that we are better off alone.  Rather, I submit that togetherness carries risks that cannot be mitigated by rigid and anxious adherence to social expectations. Solitude offers a cool space of reflection to sooth the feverish and blind acquiescence to mass opinion and collective mania.  The solitary person does not repudiate society, but rather moderates her participation in collective life so as not to exacerbate society’s excesses, or diminish her own spirit in the thick of social life.  She simply reserves to herself the choice to participate or to withdraw, to engage or retreat.  By keeping these options open, she maintains the possibility of a more perceptive and mindful participation.  Solitude is not against multitude, but is rather multitude coming to terms with itself.

 Society can suffer if we yield to sweeping trends and prevailing opinions.  Conversely, community at large stands to benefit from conscientious individuals who refuse to lend strength to a frantic and disordered togetherness.  My willingness to stand apart from the frenzies that reduce the human spirit can be an act of service to society rather than a self-righteous rebellion against the establishment.

 This brings me back to our present predicament. Physical isolation is serving the good of society.  The pandemic makes visible the possibility that our blind involvement in the paces of togetherness and the sanctioned activities of daily life, might be detrimental to our collective wellbeing.  Consanguinity reveals itself in its ambiguity, both terrifying and sacred. What is true of a physical contagion that infects bodies finds an analog in the life of the mind, and the circuits of culture.  What we think and believe are also products of a shared climate of ideas, opinions, beliefs, and values. Having realized this corrosive effect of an obligatory and impulsive togetherness, responsibility demands the ability to step back, away from the unspoken imperatives of social life and re-evaluate the merits of our participation.  By developing spaces of solitude, I come to possess my faculties more fully, and can then participate more authentically in the public square.

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