At the tail end of this monster disguised as a year, I was lucky enough to have a few days to myself at home. I'm a single parent, and alone time is a treasure almost beyond imagining to my tribe. Ah, the unspeakable extravagances of sleeping late, no 3 am wake-up shake-ups because someone (and I'm not calling names here) is scared of the dark. No having to close the bathroom door.
Also, as any single parent will also tell you, the only thing more stressful than running after a child or children, is not having them around.
And sure enough, after a couple of days, I found myself pining for the arguments about not putting used socks in a pile of clean ones, un-finished (un-attempted!) homework, and too much internet time.
Solitude for a time is healthy; sustained loneliness is something else. And beneath the explosions and cataclysms, real and mental, of the last year, one theme seems to find itself in the large and small pictures: isolationism.
Enough of the US electorate signaled to the world they preferred to be alone and miserable with their prejudices rather than progress with the mongrel multitudes. Europe's isolationist turn has been long under way. The message on both sides of the Atlantic reverberates: buy our stuff, but stay out.
This is on the macro scale; nations and societies can collectively think and behave in self-defeating insular ways. It operates at the level of the individual as well.
Despite the much-vaunted interconnectedness within the contemporary world, and a whole genre of media for "social" purposes, people everywhere are more isolated and lonely than before. It's not a local phenomenon, but, as usual, there's a dearth of local data on the issue.
The NY Times on December 22, reported that social isolation was classified as a health condition and it's a growing epidemic afflicting 40 per cent of Americans. It increases risks of poor health, depression, inflammation, early death.
In T&T, social clues hint at its existence: widespread porn addiction; the anti-social violence in schools, streets, homes; the child abuse epidemic; the reflexive public endorsement of tribalism.
Group and individual isolation contribute to all these.
As to understanding the phenomenon, two books published in the last year looked at isolation and its effects on individuals and societies–Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me, and Sebastian Junger's Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging.
Coates' book was a paean to isolationism–in this instance, African American separation from American society.
Not that there isn't a strong argument for it. Growing up black in the US writes Coates: "Fear ruled everything around me." For him, the streets and school were "arms of the same beast" which were related because "fear and violence were the weaponry of both."
What allowed fear and its murderous consequences to thrive was the pursuit of "the Dream." The way to combat it was militancy, armouring-up, maintaining distance, ostensibly from the forces of violence, but really, from everything, since "hate gives identity" and "we name the hated strangers and are confirmed in the tribe."
Coates' tribalism, defined as the massing of similar hatreds, would make it attractive to many in these parts. It's also a losing strategy. Junger's view of tribalism is significantly different. In his schema, being a member of a tribe means having a meaningful part to play in a larger lifeworld, contributing and feeling needed. Its dynamic is the "social bond," which is dissolved by the individualism which fuels modern capitalist society, the field of Coates' Dream.
Junger's social bond was displayed in pre- and postcolonial America, when European emigrants, conscripts, and other settlers, once captured by the Native American nations, refused to leave them. When rescued, many absconded their rescuers and returned to the tribes. This attraction was equally strong for men and women. Quite different to what we're taught by John Wayne.
The appeal of that kind of tribalism is instructive. As Junger puts it, a feature of those societies was that individuals "would almost never have been alone." Whereas in contemporary society, people "can be surrounded by others, and yet feel deeply, dangerously alone." This because "the alienating effects of wealth and modernity on the human experience start virtually at birth and never let up."
None of this is unfamiliar to anyone living in T&T now. We've been eager acolytes of a wretched modernity, whose main characteristics are technology, status, and the worship of wealth. But the society has never evolved the psychic appendages groups of people living together and relying on each other evolve. These are mainly social technologies of egalitarianism, kinship, and compassion.
Junger's solution is not to revert to a pre-industrial tribal state; it requires the habits of compassion and reciprocity be widely disseminated. And it's not that societies haven't thought of this–institutions dedicated to the promotion of these values exist, and work with some success. It's just that the best efforts at retrieving or creating a social bond are defeated by modernity, wealth and individualism.
Big picture solutions aside, there's also a prescription for the individual isolation which is a by-product of modern capitalist democracy. It begins with individuals choosing to leave their isolated lives and make small efforts to re-engage those around them.
It's ironic to recognise that as this year, like every other year, ends on the cusp of a mass social ritual which claims to make "all o' we one." That might be a good time to start re-evaluating that ritual, and thinking about other things to save our collective bums, as the old year exits. The new one doesn't look any friendlier.