How do loneliness and isolation shape our communities and politics?
In this class, we’ll explore questions of connection, isolation, and their impact on politics. We’ll discuss how social and psychological loneliness impacts our civic and political life.
Readings:
“The Political Consequences of Loneliness and Isolation During the Pandemic”, New Yorker article by Masha Gessen
Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression - and the Unexpected Solutions by Johann Hari*
About Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression - and the Unexpected Solutions:
Across the world, Hari discovered social scientists who were uncovering the causes of depression that are not exclusively rooted in the chemical balances in our brains but in the way we live today. Hari’s journey took him from the people living in the tunnels beneath Las Vegas to an Amish community in Indiana to an uprising in Berlin—all showing in vivid and dramatic detail these new insights about isolation, loneliness, and well-being. -Goodreads
“The Political Consequences of Loneliness and Isolation During the Pandemic”, New Yorker article by Masha Gessen
Journalist Masha Gessen draws on her extensive knowledge of the ideas of philosopher Hannah Arendt in this 2020 New Yorker essay. They explore the intersection of isolation, politics, and thinking for oneself. Gessen is the author of eleven books, including “Surviving Autocracy” and “The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia,” which won the National Book Award in 2017. Gessen has written about Russia, autocracy, L.G.B.T. rights, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump, among others, for The New York Review of Books and the New York Times. They draw on Arendt’s ideas about isolation, loneliness, and autocracy in this essay.
Loneliness, Arendt posits, is the defining condition of totalitarianism and the common ground of all terror. Isolation and solitude flank loneliness as two related but distinct conditions. Arendt’s examples—slaves and the subjects of modern totalitarian states—are both isolated and lonely, but not alone. Isolation, she writes, “may be the beginning of terror; it certainly is its most fertile ground; it always is its result.” Isolation is the inability to act together with others, which, according to Arendt, is the source of a person’s political power. Isolation renders people impotent. -Masha Gessen, New Yorker
Class Date and Time:
Sunday, January 15, 2023, 4:00-5:30PM PST
All Premise courses take place on Zoom.
Why take this course?
Loneliness is central to the human experience. Yet, it can be hard to talk about loneliness and isolation because of social stigma. We may feel that loneliness is a personal failure. In her poem The Loneliness One dare not sound, Emily Dickinson writes loneliness is the “Horror not to be surveyed.”
Loneliness is baked into what it means to be human, and most of us will experience periods of loneliness in our lives. But, what does it mean to be lonely?
Even before the forced isolation of Covid-19, rates of loneliness were skyrocketing in the U.S. and around the world. More than 20%, in fact, of the adult population in America admits to struggling with loneliness regularly. That's more people than have diabetes in our country and more adults than smoke in the United States. Public health officials medicalize loneliness and refer to it as an epidemic.
Yet, philosophers and psychologists have long argued that loneliness is an essential part of the human condition.
Philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote, “Solitude is the human condition in which I keep myself company. Loneliness comes about when I am alone without being able to split up into the two-in-one, without being able to keep myself company.”
The existentialist feminist writer Simone de Beauvoir embraced loneliness and thought of it as her creative force.
Each course in this series will examine what it means when we feel alone and how to make sense of the human experience of loneliness.
Together, we’ll explore the questions:
What does it mean to feel alone?
Are being alone and being lonely the same?
Can we be coupled, have a family or a strong community of friends, and still be lonely?
Is there a purpose for loneliness?
Can we live with the pain of loneliness without succumbing to it?
(*A note about controversial books: At Premise, we regularly offer up books for discussion that are provoking and with which we don’t entirely agree. For example, in Lost Connections, Johann Hari expresses opinions, based on personal experience and research, about the causes and remedies for depression that may anger and provoke Premise readers. We will constructively dig into these provocations and reader reactions during our class discussion.)
