Taking life one century at a time

the best feature of atomized individualism is the possibility to get a support network of twelve friends who are actually similar enough to you

The rationalist thing is to go “Atomization is great, because rather than being forced into coercive, restrictive social structures, we form our own by choice!”

Which is very pretty and an admirable goal but as evidence based rationalists it seems to me that the question of whether that’s actually what’s happening ought to matter to you.

If this is what was happening then… Well, like I was saying the book wouldn’t be called “Bowling Alone.”

If that was what was happening you’d expect the slow disintegration of churches, lodges and political organizations to be accompanied by rising participation in such indisputably non-coercive activities as hobby groups, sports leagues, and informal get-togethers to eat or play games, as those things would continue to be important for their own sake and begin to act as voluntary informal support networks.

But subjectively I don’t see that and according to Putnam that hasn’t happened. Instead all kinds of socializing have just gone “bleeeeagh” at the same time.

Anyone saying “I am in a group house in Berkeley with twelve of my best friends who are supporting me in living my best life” is saying that atomization worked, that the new norms helped him to find a comfortable social milieu rather than robbing him of one.  I would be inclined to say much the same thing, for myself, even though I live on the other side of the country and I have less than no desire to live in a group house. 

You’re making the assumption, again, that there are two different kinds of social connections whose strength is inverse:

“I’m well off, because the weakening of the thick, coercive social structures has strengthened the informal, choice based social structures that help me.”

Admittedly, Bowling Alone was written 20 years ago but personally I have strong doubts whether the trend has reversed, and in any case it demonstrates that there is no necessary inverse relationship between these two kinds of structures.

It is entirely possible that as it has become easier to flee an abusive church or family and more difficult to form voluntary, makeshift communities to replace them.

It is possible that “certain kinds of misfits who would have suffered greatly in old thick-obligatory tribes” are not “making out like bandits” but find themselves struggling not to feel like living ghosts in a world that doesn’t care.

A real underlying frustration thing I have is the tendency of people in rationalist or adjacent spaces to intensely drag things back towards the “competing needs” framework in a way that doesn’t feel evidence based to me.

I think I’ve said this before but when I watch old 50s sitcoms the thing that seems nostalgic isn’t that women and children knew their place, it’s that mom and dad are always having friends over to play cards. It looks fun, to have game nights that don’t have to be scheduled six weeks out only for 3 of the 4 people you invited to call an hour before and explain that they aren’t coming.

Bowling Alone was gratifying to me because it validated my underlying sense of, “Putting this stuff together feels really hard”.

I haven’t finished college because I was hit with a severe bout of depression of the “I can’t even get out of bed except to use the bathroom” variety and I just went home because all those great voluntary bonds I formed in college weren’t strong enough to support me through that or provide much other than “Gosh I sure hope things get better.”

Several books could no doubt be written on this topic, and I don’t think I can do it justice here, but I’ll essay anyway. I think you’re poking at one aspect of a much bigger problem, which is the rise of a semi-monomaniac consent culture with the exception of government, especially at the same time as the rise of semi-totalitarian unified government.

I suspect many social bonds, including voluntarily formed ones, need some minor violations of consent-as-understood-in-modern-atomized-individualism for their maintenance, by social pressure or threat of ostracism. “Samuel, get off the computer, you have a course to attend tonight.” Nowadays, you can’t do that any more, partly because of the directly increased importance of consent and partly because it’s so much easier to drop out.

Without that, you get only the social bonds where members have a very high sense of duty or community, or very good fit with one another.

(For those who are looking uncomfortably at the creeping authoritarianism here right now, let try to rephrase it in libertarian idiom: I can no longer voluntarily bind myself to an enforceable contract of duties to my social circle, and libertarians are all about the binding contracts, right? ;-) )

If I swear before God, man, and dice that I’ll be at the RPG group at seven tomorrow, and then tomorrow I don’t show, the other players have no power to drag me to the group and make me play.

If they then try to sue me for breach of contract, the judge probably goes “why are you wasting my fucking time suing someone for petty shit like this”, or in legal speak, de minimis non curat lex. On the other hand, if the group does come by to drag me out of my house and off to the RPG session, it’s likely that the judge will very much back the resulting suit I might have for breaking and entering and kidnapping. In effect, I have lost my power to promise.

At the same time, on the other hand, government can speak the political formula of The Consent Of The Governed, and with the magic words TCOTG said, violate actual consent with all the frenzied passion of Genoscythe the Eyeraper. And government is increasingly a single thing, despite nominal separation of powers, because there’s no independent government to be had. Many local powers of law enforcement, justice, money printing, et cetera, et cetera, used to be things that local persons or organizations could own as a form of political property.

Which meant there were many small organizations independent of “government” in the sense of King-or-Parliament, functioning as microgovernments that could microviolate consent based on a political microformula, including the generation and maintenance of local social organizations tailored to circumstances.

“I have this, therefore it can’t be getting rarer” is not a valid kind of evidence. Humans are social creatures. Outside of a few outlandish, Matrix-like science fiction apocalypses, you are never going to have a society where nobody ever gets together with friends or participates in informal support networks.

But it can certainly get rarer or more common.

And rereading the chapter on Bowling Alone I want to again reiterate:

We do not see a pattern where church attendance drops off but informal meetings with friends increase during the latter half of the 20th century; rather, all of it goes “Blegh” and the kind of informal connections that Rats like are hit HARDER then church attendance, with steeper drop-offs than church attendence (Which has slumped in the last two decades, but it didn’t lead in the trend, it resisted the trend for longer than other organizations)

This thing where “Atomized Individualism” led to a huge increase in the power of voluntary associations just… Doesn’t seem to exist. There seems to be no evidence for it whatsoever, and significant evidence from multiple sources that the exact opposite happened, that from around 1970 to 2000 the specific kind of social capital that rationalists value became much harder to acquire, and people on average had far less of it and had more difficulty acquiring it.

The sorts of informal, non-coercive, voluntary associations that rationalists value took up less of people’s time by the end of that period than they did at the beginning.

I’m generally inclined to be skeptical of what little data I’ve seen concerning “friendship strength” stuff in the contemporary world, because, well, social science. I am prepared to believe that we’re living in a time that’s overall rough for people’s sense of connectedness, largely because I keep hearing that from so many different independent sources. It’s not my intention to argue with the thesis that the New Bonds haven’t come very close to fully replacing the Old Attenuating Bonds, overall, in terms of the amount of human connection that they have to offer. They probably haven’t. A lot of people have lost their Thanksgiving dinners, in one way or another, and Friendsgivings have not completely filled that void by any means.

All that said, you’re not engaging with the points that your interlocutors are trying to make. That I’m trying to make, at least. I can’t tell whether the fault lies in my attempts to articulate, so…I’ll try again.

Pretty sure board game groups in the 1950s didn't enforce attendance with breaking and entering. Pretty sure they enforced them the same way we do now: "If you keep flaking we won't invite you to things anymore" plus general mild criticism of being a flake. Or at least something more like that than like home invasion.

Rotating a theory in my mind where autistics, queers, and other weirdos took advantage of atomization to build communities of choice with their preferred norms, and people who had previously been well-served by communities of proximity got hit with a loneliness epidemic because they weren't used to having to look hard for companionship. But there's no reason it should have to be that way forever; neurotypicals should be able to form communities of choice with the same resources other groups are using. They just need to find something subtler to sort on than "people who are the same kind of socially shunned freak".

"I have this therefore it's plentiful" isn't valid reasoning, but "X got me and lots of other people I know lots of Y, so X does not destroy Y in all circumstances" is. It's an existence proof.

Azure Tit (Cyanistes cyanus), family Paridae, order Passeriformes, Russia

Resign from office on the grounds that I only ran for the bants, triggering a further by-election

and EVEN WHEN things were more muted/neutral, the neutrality was OFFSET by ACCENT COLORS and HIGH CONTRAST between the wood tones and everything ELSE

ALSO AMERICAN COLONIAL INTERIORS POPPED OFF, Y'ALL (IN TERMS OF COLOR/COZINESS)

PEOPLE USED WHITEWASH AND COLORFUL TRIM OR EVEN JUST COLORFUL FURNITURE IF THEY COULD AFFORD TO DO SO

AND DON'T GET ME STARTED ON FRENCH AND BRITISH AND AMERICAN WALLPAPERS

"ELIZABETH" YOU CRY, "WHY ARE YOU BEING SO EXTRA THIS MORNING?! IT'S MONDAY"

Because, my friend, my war on GREIGE will NEVER end.

Historic interiors were filled with LIFE and LIGHT and COLOR. ALWAYS HAVE BEEN.

Part of the reason we don't see a lot of textile art is because, frankly, textiles tend to degrade over time - especially ones that had utility! And yes, pigments and weaving and dying all boosted the expense of things, when we were finally reliably block-printing fabrics and broad reams of paper, it was no longer just the wealthy who could afford pretty patterns!

In the Americas, a far wider variety of pigments also became available because of the abundance of... well, a shitton of flora and minerals, some of which weren't as common in Europe.

WHY THE HIGHLIGHTER COLORS? you ask.

CANDLES.

Those colors reflect candlelight and natural sunlight REALLY WELL.

Humans LOVE bright colors, it's NOT just a thing for kids. We live in a brilliant, vibrant, multifaceted world. We ALWAYS have.

(If ever you have the opportunity to visit the Stencil House at the Shelburne Museum in Vermont (pictured above at 3, 4, and 5), I highly recommend.)

And that's before you get into American painted murals: