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Published: 2005
Category: Non Fiction
The Pursuit of Loneliness
Philip Slater
Serious times call for serious books. I look around the bookstore for something with an overview --- a book that's more than a partisan view of this or that. And you know what? I can't find one. Can you?
So I went back to my own shelves. And there it was. A book I read when it was first published --- in worlds-ago 1970, when the foreign war was with Vietnam and the domestic one was with kids and it seemed as if the country would split apart at any minute. In other words, a time that reminds me of ours.
Philip Slater is a sociologist and was, for many years, a professor. His writing can be formal and require a bit of work on your part. But he also can think -- and write -- in sound bites, which is way beyond what most academics can do. And his thinking is more original than scholarly. 'The Pursuit of Loneliness' is usually described as 'groundbreaking,' and its publishing life has confirmed that; in 35 years, more than 500,000 copies have been sold and it has attained the status of a classic.
Slater's thesis: One function of a society is 'to make its inhabitants feel safe.' Americans devote more of our resources to 'security' than anything else. Yet we do not feel safe. In fact, we feel more and more unsafe.
Who threatens us? "Blacks, hippie and student radicals." (Remember, this is 1970.)
But wait: what about Communism? Atomic weapons?
He finds somthing strange: these global and political fears are less urgent for us than domestic, social fears --- even though the domestic fears are of seemingly harmless minorities.
(Translate this into 2005 terms: Why are many of us more obsessed with gay marriage and abortion than we are with global warming and international terrorism?)
Slater's explanation: We over-react to domestic 'threats' because we have 'secret doubts' about the way we live. 'It is not what happens abroad that generates hysteria,' Slater writes, 'but rather what appears to be happening within ourselves.'
Or what's not happening: community....engagement.....dependence. Thanks to technology, we have less and less reason to know our neighbors. In a cultural sense, the cosseted rich kid is as deprived as a slum kid. Not wanting to know or deal with this --- that's not a universal human trait: 'Escaping, evading and avoiding are responses...that are peculiarly American."
Out of sight, out of mind: we hide our slums, our poor, our unhealthy and uneducated. We value property over all else. 'We pride ourselves on being a democracy but we are in fact slaves' --- a good reason we feel such vehemence for kids who violates our codes in a way as unimportant as growing their hair long.'
How's this for analysis: We feel that resources are scarce. And so 'Americans continually find themselves in the position of having killed someone to avoid sharing a meal which turns out to be too large to eat alone.'
Ouch.
Slater's remedy? Ah, for that you'll have to read the book. And then you have to decide if the l960s really do have something to say to us now --- and if you find more possibility for yourself in one camp or another. Either way, prepare to have your preconceptions roughed up and your loyalties challenged.
To buy 'The Pursuit of Loneliness' from Amazon.com,click here.