More on Living Alone

Last week I wrote about Eric Klinenberg’s NYTimes piece on living solo. Now, David Brooks has weighed in with an interesting assessment.

If you remember, I said that people increasingly live alone (not necessarily in isolation) because they are reluctant to take on obligations. They want to be free to come and go in relationships on their own terms and their own timing. When you live with someone—even a roommate who has his own shelf in the refrigerator—you have to do some negotiating.

As a general matter, individualism doesn’t foster character or morality. Community does. We’re trending toward individualism.

Brooks’ take is that the primary force behind this trend is “maximizing talent.” People who are skilled and smart can manage their lives in a flexible, shifting world, getting what they want and advancing their careers. “Fast, flexible and diverse networks allow the ambitious and the gifted to surf through amazing possibilities.” They don’t want or need to be tied down. On the other hand, people without such social capital may fall through the cracks and become victims. They need the dedicated bonds of marriage, church, community and family to help them along. In a world where those ties are weaker, they end up losers. Brooks appears to advocate celebrating the freedom of the ubermensch, while providing as much safety net as possible for the rest. (Not government programs, so much as strong community.)

Brooks’ analysis doesn’t quite work, though, in that the people with the most social capital—measured in income and education—are far and away the most likely to make the ultimate commitment to marriage, and stick to it. If you graduated from college, you are extremely likely to marry and extremely unlikely to divorce. Not so, everybody else. Apparently, “maximizing talent” takes one away from the fast and fluent networks of modern urban society, and leaves you pottering in the garden on Saturday and driving your children to soccer games. As Brooks himself wrote in a recent blog, “People in the educated class talk like social progressives and behave like traditionalists. People in the less educated classes talk like social conservatives and behave like libertines. “

Still, there’s a long history of people with talent choosing to live as outliers, if not outlaws. Steve Jobs is a good example of how this works. I gather he was a miserable human being who created a great company that made great products. (I’m a believer, as someone who has been wedded to Apple since the Apple IIe.) Which would you choose: great products and miserable human relations? Or the opposite?

I don’t think there are any simple answers. We human beings are an uncanny mix. Our committed relations (marriage and family, particularly) can be exquisitely worthwhile or miserably oppressive. Our “creative talents” can be forged in extraordinary inhumanity (Jobs’ cruelty) or in care (“the HP way”). But if there is no blueprint for the ideal society, there is certainly, in Jesus’ teachings, a clear instruction about priorities: love God with all you have, and love your neighbor as yourself. That’s a particular way of maximizing talent, and it does not leave you free.

Living Alone

Sunday’s New York Times has a fascinating piece by NYU sociologist Eric Klinenberg. It begins with this startling statement: “More people live alone than at any other time in history.” It notes that in Manhattan and Washington, D.C., almost half of all households have just one occupant.

In a chart comparing nations, the most solo country of all is Sweden, where 47% live alone. At the bottom are India and Pakistan, where 3% of households have just one occupant. The U.S. and Canada are in the middle of that broad range, at 27%.

Klinenberg puts a rosy spin on the trend, noting that people who live alone aren’t necessarily lonely or isolated. In fact, he says, “living alone can make it easier to be social, because single people have more free time, absent family obligations, to engage in social activities.” He notes that “compared with their married counterparts, single people are more likely to spend time with friends and neighbors, go to restaurants and attend art classes and lectures.” It’s true of older people too: “Single seniors had the same number of friends and core discussion partners as their married peers.”

We’re not necessarily becoming more solitary or isolated, then, but we are shedding obligations. When you live alone you can be as socially engaged as you wish—on your schedule and your terms.

When you share a living space, on the other hand, you have certain nagging obligations: to cleanliness, to schedule, to shared expenses… and perhaps also to shared meals and social times. Obviously marriage and family—which are equally in decline—obligate you much more deeply. Is there any doubt this is the environment where character and spirituality are formed?

It’s not a simple matter. Freedom and privacy are terrifically valuable, and our evolution from tribe to democracy is progress, I believe. Nevertheless, I feel some deep concerns over this trend. Libertarianism enthralls the right on certain issues and the left on certain other issues. (Economic liberty, gun-toting liberty, abortion liberty, sexual liberty.)There are good grounds for wanting to be left alone, especially by the government. But there are also good grounds for entering a covenant commitment, whether to people sharing your apartment, to a wife or husband or children, or even to the government formed by “we the people.”

Clearly, we’re moving in the general direction of “we the individualists.”