The Anti-Social Century

Social Gospel was the label given to an early 20th century social reform movement to foster communitarian values in American life. Even the smallest actions, it maintained, created norms, norms created values, values drive behavior, and behaviors cascade. Out of a multitude of union halls, community centers, and dining rooms came what Robert Putnam (“Bowling Alone”) viewed as a moral revolution that changed a nation’s culture.

High time, perhaps, for a New Social Gospel to address where we now find ourselves in this (click: The Anti-Social Century, also appearing elsewhere in the Weekly). Consider how we’ve devolved. The first half of the twentieth century was extraordinarily social, whether measured in terms of church membership, marriage rates, union participation, branch-library visits. Compare that to an America today sometimes characterized as populated by home-bound, phone-tethered, get-off-of-my-lawn secular monks.

Let us gather together, indeed commune, to discuss whether such self-imposed solitude is indeed the most important social fact of the 21rst century. Perhaps the phenomenon goes far deeper than the oft-cited effect of our car-enabled suburbs and passive embrace of television. Don’t look now but maybe our screen-o-centric lives have been hardwired into our very souls.

The power of the screen to hi-jack the fully-formed adult brain for targeted manipulation is one thing (see MM 11/27/20 (Social) Media Bias and MM 1/27/20 Eaten Inside Out discussion sessions). It’s quite another to witness the emotional costs on those young adults whose formative brains are no match for the virtual onslaught. No wonder their capacity for physical-world togetherness has been stunted. The plasticity of that malleable organ adapts it to a virtual world as it ripens into a node on the network. And hardens accordingly.

Think that’s an exaggeration? Watch the eyes in a room. See how often they flit to the screen. And that’s in a communal setting. Never mind the fact (we are told) that the typical American watches 19 hours of television (the equivalent of eight movies) per week in homebound seclusion versus maybe three annual theater outings.

Now look out below as we secular monks become increasingly seduced in the AI century. Digital communication has already primed us for AI companionship – how many friends and family members who exist in your life mainly as words on a screen?

Definition of the problem, as they say, is half the solution. Pass judgment? Maybe not. Consider what passes for conversation today is sometimes little more than paired soliloquies. Perhaps the AI partner might actually be a more engaged listener. Besides, how can real life even compete with the Shakespearean entertainment readily available on a channel of your choosing? We would-be social animals have our books and our poetry and our smartphone to protect us.

Yet something vital seems to be lost calling for a new social gospel. One needn’t go all-Amish to appreciate Marshall McLuhan’s insight that every augmentation of technology is also an amputation. What comes to mind is the legend of Faust, the one who sells his soul to the Devil in return for all the knowledge and power of the world.

Now put that phone away. It’s foreclosure time.