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Loneliness and the End of Learning
As is my wont, my mind is connecting a bunch of things this morning: Paul Mirengoff of PowerLine blog is providing a critique of one of Sen. Ben Sasse’s theses in his book: that there is an epidemic of loneliness. Paul pulls a couple of quotes from Yuval Levin’s piece in the National Review, “All the Lonely People?” Here is the key quote:
[W]e talk about loneliness as we do because we lack the vocabulary to describe the kinds of problems that arise when institutions grow weak and communities unravel. Those problems are very real and they are near the heart of what is happening in America now, but maybe they are not the same thing as loneliness—and maybe seeing that can help us better understand them.
So how and why are our institutions unraveling? As I read all of this I was put in mind of George Gilder’s appearance this past Sunday on “Life, Liberty and Levin.” George spoke of how “learning is the heart of capitalism.” In contrast socialism assumes the end of learning, that everything that can or must be known is known by experts and thus society can be organized around this static body of knowledge. This is why capitalism promotes innovation and progress while socialism promotes stagnation and decline.
But it also explains the enduring appeal of socialism even in the face of a history of failure and disaster — it’s easy. It is not for nothing that the expression persists about “the school of hard knocks”. Life is hard not because few of us lack the financial wherewithal to acquire every labor-saving device, but because it presents us with an unending set of challenges, large and small. For those of us who are retired, we can recall our pining in our younger years for the respite of retirement. And now that we have arrived we realize that one set of challenges is simply exchanged for a different set of challenges.
The failure of our institutions is directly related to a broader rejection by our society that life not only is hard but must be hard. That we must accept the challenge of living rather than seeking to avoid or diminish the challenge. Our (illegal) immigration challenge is not simply that so many people are coming, but that their expectation is that by coming here their life will be easier by taking advantage of the economic safety net we offer. Thus if they do not accept the challenge of life they will not contribute to our economic well being. Our debt problem is due to us not currently shouldering the burden of the government costs we have incurred. Our spiritual problem is that we must resist rather than give in to temptations, that we must live disciplined lives of high character. We want virtue on the cheap.
We become “lonely” when we give up and are secretly ashamed of our cowardice.
Published in General
That was an odd piece by Meringoff. He didn’t come at Sasse’s book directly, but rather through George Will’s commentary on the book. Meringoff’s post didn’t quite hang together for me, and I suspect that’s because he didn’t actually read Sasse’s book. I normally like Meringoff, but this felt sloppy. I know he just returned from a short sabbatical, so maybe he was rushing to get something up quick upon his return.
In any case, I wanted to ask about this:
Is the bolded section your assertion or Gilder’s? Because while I agree with the thrust of your post, I’m wondering whether that particular assertion is true. I don’t recall anyone with a socialist bent claiming that we know everything we need to know or that there is nothing else to learn, and I can’t imagine them doing so. I’m wondering if you, or Gilder, can site a source. (I don’t mean this as a challenge. It may well be true. I’m curious.)
So true! I watched my father disappear into his retirement, because he said openly that he couldn’t wait to retire and not have to do anything. He led a humdrum, unsatisfying life. I know that I must seek out new challenges in retirement–or it seems they find me!–to make life a rewarding, growing experience. Thanks, @rodin!
Thanks. I really like the Sasse quote and the Gilder clip.
Human institutions come apart, just like physical things. The same behavioral assumptions we use in economic theory, rational self interest, give rise to entropy, always everywhere. That’s why institutions have to reward and punish members to get them to adhere to institutional goals. Firms have managers and incentives, unions have rewards and punishments, guilds have rules and norms of behavior affecting everything in a communities life, professional associations always have restrictions, rewards and punishments. All human institutions must have what Mancur Olslen called selective sanctions and rewards or they come apart. This is why economic growth, creative destruction is destabilizing. It’s why some groups, especially anthropologists and sociologists hate freedom and economic growth, or just markets in general, it’s why political scientists are usually wrong about everything related to turmoil and revolution, why big old companies capture the government to defend themselves from new firms, new technologies, the march of change. Why families without leadership and a set of norms, come apart. It’s why most governments work against economic growth because interests accumulate around it and extract protections. The values, mores, assumptions, attitudes, notions of sin and good, politeness and good manners all evolved or were explicitly created to hold families, institutions communities together. Demographic changes give rise to the same strains and entropy as technological change which as Gilder correctly says is driving growth.
When moderns want to liberate us from oppressive traditions, old obsolete ideas and institutions what they’re really liberating us from is civilization. It’s nature is to disintegrate and so it does and would without their help but these institutions are what help us survive until the old adjusts and the new emerges. Immigration from very different non European cultures, thrusts of trade, rapid technological change speed disintegration, and centralized regulations, inflexible schools slow down adjustment, and make it all more painful.
Learning can be a very lonely pursuit.
There’s evidence that, thanks to the Internet, interest in things like basic science, history, Latin, and classic works of literature, are on the increase thanks to the availability of public domain texts through websites like gutenberg.org, archive.org, and feedbooks.com, not to mention all the great edumacational video channels on YouTube and free podcasts. People are no longer limited to the narratives pushed on them by teachers and schools with their own ideological and pedagogical axes to grind. Those with curious minds have the freedom to seek out good sources of information on their own.
The side-effect is that they spend more time reading and learning, and less time socializing. I think it would be foolish to discourage such activity.
I’ve heard that these two books are good on socialism:
I know these writers well. Whatever they say about what the leading socialists have asserted in different periods of their writings would be quoted and footnoted. They probably give careful, objective answers to your question, although both writers have broader interests in socialism than just that of describing it.
As you know, the question is complicated by both persistent semantic confusion about the term “socialism” and by the very significant changes in theory between writers and between an author’s writings at different times of and tortuous. Fortunately, these authors are meticulous in their scholarship.
I’ve also heard that there are renegade “scouting” groups who are using the original 1908 edition of the Scouting Handbook rather than the watered-down milquetoast editions put out by official Scouting organizations over the past few decades. They couldn’t do that if the original edition wasn’t so readily available online.
Just one (admittedly anecdotal) example of the Internet bringing people together IRL.
Just in case you’re one of those curious minds:
Heather MacDonald: “More Studying and Less Sex. That Is Not Something to Be Regretted.”
https://www.the-american-interest.com/2018/10/18/more-studying-and-less-sex-that-is-not-something-to-be-regretted
The Fatal Conceit is on my nightstand. I’ll keep an eye out for citations of socialists claiming we have nothing else to learn as I finish it.
But understand, when one makes a specific assertion like this, and is asked for a citation, it doesn’t suffice to simply toss out a couple of book titles and say, essentially, go find them yourself.
I have found in the last few years that I have little tolerance for learning in classroom situations. Maybe it is my aging, but too often I become irritated at people wanting to make points that seem to be showing off how much they know; people asking questions that were already covered by the instructor; or making foolish arguments that aren’t even on the topic. I don’t think I was always this impatient. Then again, maybe everyone else is getting stupider. I prefer mostly learning by myself, and I know I miss something when I do. I just don’t care sufficiently to put myself in a classroom situation unless I must!
If you want the “Cliff’s Notes version”, Mises also published a
dumbed-downgeneral audience version called Planned Chaos.It’s a free download here: https://mises.org/library/planned-chaos-0
Your chastising may be directed at the author of the quote about socialism. But if to me, then you misread my note.* I did not make the assertion. I threw out a couple of book titles because
*In that case, no offense taken; I know it would have been an honest mistake.
There’s also evidence, given podcasting’s meteoric rise, of a dearth of good non-digital conversations.
I don’t remember having many good non-digital conversations before the rise of digital communications. That’s kinda why I so badly wanted a modem for my Commodore 64, way back in the day.
There’s a huge overlap in the statistics on loneliness and the statistics on the growing population of senior citizens. There’s way less overlap in the statistics on the growing population of senior citizens and the statistics on Internet usage. Correlation vs. causation, but still.
I was going to say this; being elderly is no joke, and the way elderly people are treated in our society is often less than ideal.
I’m not convinced that senior citizens were really treated any better by past generations (which I recognize isn’t technically what you’re arguing). I think it’s more that past generations’ senior citizens didn’t live as long as today’s senior citizens do. Out of sight, out of mind. One reason we have so many more senior citizens is because we treat ’em so much better than they did in the past.
If you were a poor senior citizen in, say, the 19th century you were almost certainly treated way worse than the average senior citizen today is treated (“poor” being a synonym for “average” in the 19th century), and it was exponentially worse if you had no family to take care of you. Many so-called “workhouses” were actually what passed for seniors homes in those days.
Once you could no longer support yourself you were “supported” in a way that would “encourage” your departure from this Earth. This end result wasn’t necessarily intentional. I’m not saying they were intentionally cruel to seniors. I’m just saying that was the practical effect.
So, today seniors are lonely, but they’re alive. In the past they were dead, but at least they weren’t lonely!
@freeven the bolded language is my summary of what I understood Gilder to be saying. You can go to the link and read the report/watch the entire interview and see whether I got it right. Whether someone with a socialist bent would say that we have nothing more to learn is not Gilder’s point (as I understand it). It is that the underlying logic of socialism that he is addressing.
Agreed. Loneliness is not the same as being alone or pursuing things alone.
Yeah, I think I conflated the two of you. Apologies to you both. I am genuinely curious and had no intent to chastise anyone.
For many of us retirement means no longer doing what we have to do (JOB) and beginning to do what we want to do whether vocation or avocation. That approach means I’m free to choose so I spend some of my time earning low wages partly to finance our frequent road trips and partly to keep busy and some of my time volunteering. Just busy enough to keep from stagnating but not busy enough to be overly stressed. It’s a balance I guard jealously.
Why not when it takes only a matter of seconds to do a Google or Amazon search. Why must someone else do that for you?
The classsroom model replaced the tutor model when printing made books widely available and reading skills thus became essential. Classrooms were much more efficient than tutors so there was litttle popular resistance. But classrooms are much less efficient than individualized learning on individual level for anyone with basic knowledge, including knowing how to learn new things, and a good internet connection. So it makes sense that you and others would be irritated at spending excessive time and money plus being tied to a schedule by using the classroom model when a more efficent method is readily available.
Getting older is not for sissies.
Gramma lived with us until she had to be put into a nursing home (this was in the early 60’s). This required that Dad was the wage earnerr and Mom was the homemaker which was then the norm. Today, many of the well functioning elderly are put into retirement homes, deprived of transportation and pretty much isolated from friends and family except for special occasions. That’s a recepie for loneliness. Older people need to be as active as they can comfortably be through some combinattion of ‘work’ and leisure involving volunteering and family/friend involvments. And this should involve regular inter-generational contacts. The old need the young to keep them active and the young need the old to glean wisdom. The prevalance of age segregation in our society robs both ends of this spectrum and leads to misunderstandings and suspicions undeserved.
Maybe you’re better with Google than I am. It’s not clear to me how to search for socialist authorities making statements to the effect of “we know everything.” Seems simpler just to ask the person who made the assertion if they have a source. I’m a simple man.
I think one must put Gilder’s comment in the context of some of his other writing. Markets are information systems, he says correctly (think Hayek), and provide information not available in any other way, so socialism is rejecting this information system therefore de facto has to assume it knows what must be known. Individual socialists don’t think they know everything and Gilder wouldn’t assert such.
Yes. This.
A great example of the fallacy of central planning can be found in the memoirs of Gennady Andreev-Khomiakov, who served as Deputy Manager of a Stalin-era Soviet factory.
The most difficult problems faced by this factory involved the acquistion of supplies. Equipment and spare parts were always difficult to get, becaue of the rigidity of the planning process, and personal relationships were key, along with off-the-books trading and outright bribery. The plant was entirely dependent on the supply of raw lumber, and allocation decisions were arbitrary and very political. Gennady, whose father had been in the lumber trade before the revolution, was contemptuous of the chaos into which the industry had been reduced by the Soviets:
The free and “unplanned” and therefore ostensibly chaotic character of lumber production before the revolution in reality possessed a definite order. As the season approached, hundreds of thousands of forest workers gathered in small artels of loggers, rafters, and floaters, hired themselves out to entrepreneurs through their foremen, and got all the work done. The Bolsheviks, concerned with “putting order” into life and organizing it according to their single scheme, destroyed that order and introduced their own–and arrived at complete chaos in lumbering.
As Gennady says:
Such in the immutable law. The forceful subordination of life’s variety into a single mold will be avenged by that variety’s becoming nothing but chaos and disorder.
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/31715.html
Ben Sasse should be writing legislation to fix the country — not books.
We only have 51 Republican senators. Do your job!
So far he’s written at least two books in office. One about loneliness?
Did he suddenly become Oprah or something?
Nebraska is one of the most sparely-populated states to where they claim that the football stadium which holds between 85,458 and 91,585 is effectively the third-largest city followed by Bellevue and Grand Island which also have over 50,000 people.
Move somewhere else, if you hate loneliness.
Loneliness of being a conservative on social media? That’s happens when people are afraid to speak up.
Hmm, the fourth sentence is, “I haven’t read Sasse’s book…“
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/10/are-you-lonesome-tonight.php
Bills sponsored by Ben Sasse:
Sen. Sasse has sponsored 12 bills in the 115th Congress (2017-18).
Whether that is few is a matter of opinion, I’m more interested in the quality of the bills he does sponsor and/or support. This list doesn’t include those co-sponsored by Sasse. I am not nor have ever been his constituent but I do appreciate anyone who takes a stand for limited government and/or civility including by authoring books, public speaking, etc. He might just be able to do more than one thing.