The Lonely Century: Coming Together in a World that’s Pulling Apart (Sceptre) by Noreena Hertz
In 1853, having just generously appointed himself emperor, Napoleon III hauled a regional bureaucrat named Georges-Eugène Haussmann into his office, unfurled a map of Paris and ordered him to prettify the morass of scummy arrondissements that made up France’s seething capital. Over the next seventeen years, Haussmann, a self-styled baron and “Artist-Demolitionist,” tore bold avenues through the thicket of crafthouses and tenements, tugging the city into imperial, industrial splendour.
At the heart of Haussmann’s famous cityscape, however, was not mere urban renewal but a form of population control. Precisely because of their tight quarters, kept cosy with rats and effluent, Parisians had a tendency to revolt: countless times during the Revolutionary years after 1789, and again in 1830 (when Haussmann was caught in the fighting and discovered his disgust of the lower orders). Louis-Napoléon himself had come to power amid the rancour of February 1848. Those rotting warrens bred dissatisfaction and dissent. Their sheer proximity, pressed together in shared immiseration, was the grist of insurrection. It’s much easier to heed the tocsin bell when it’s in earshot, much easier to build a barricade in a narrow lane.
Haussmann saw to it that these boroughs would be bulldozed over, their residents exported to the fringes. If turmoil broke out again, as it did in the Communard months of 1871, Paris’ new boulevards and squares would provide the perfect arteries along which a repressive army could amass and manoeuvre.
Whether deliberately or not, this same process has taken place again and again ever since: the suburbanisation and atomisation of metropolitan life, and the steady transformation of experience from common intimacy to bare distance. The Western world (followed swiftly by the East and South) built upwards, great hostels in the sky, and outwards into immense conurbations only reachable by stretches of highway either desolate or jammed. Big box retailers (aptly named) and chain franchises crowded familiar family-owned stores and workshops off the high streets and main drags. Technology replaced shoulder-rubbing workers in the halls of industry or exported them out of sight; in offices the partitions were broken down, producing only distractions and paranoia rather than vaunted ‘innovation’. Even our meagre entertainments take place by the dim glow of a laptop, rather than in grand theatres and cosy cinemas.
In a sense, the present pandemic has accelerated what was already underway: the sequestration of lives, hidden behind perspex and facemasks, cloistered beyond closed curtains. This fragmentation often doesn’t need a Haussmann, a central authority to direct it from above. Shifting mores and social pressures are enough. Consider the way office workers in particular once prized their one-hour lunch break, but who today never leave their desks, shaving downtime to twenty or thirty minutes.
Community (that much abused jargon term of the technocrat) no longer exists as an organic product of environment. The town hall, the barbershop or café, the masjid or market – these old epicentres of whole neighbourhoods have become mere gathering points for individuals. In such a world, traditions fall apart. We are less likely to join a union or parent-teacher association, attend a religious congregation or live with family. Most miserably of all, we even have less sex.
Outside the front rooms, flatshares, fenced-off playgrounds, and silent underground commutes, the very texture of modern life feels ever more unforgiving and ultimately empty. We experience it not as existential catastrophe, rather a kind of diffused, ambient angst. This is not new – Ballard and DeLillo, David Mitchell and Kurt Vonnegut have all apprehended its texture in recent decades – but it has become worse. Ultimately, we live in Haussmann’s glimmeringly desiccated beau idéal. Man has become an island, an archipelago alone. We live, as the intellectual Noreena Hertz describes it with the title of her latest book, in The Lonely Century.
Hertz’s skilful early chapters survey a mountain range of studies and trials and surveys and experiments that all point in one direction: to feel loved, to have purpose, to be connected to the world around us makes us healthier, more productive, more resistant to disease and decay.
And yet. Growing numbers of elderly women in Japan are committing petty acts of crime so they can be locked up with peers their own age. The robot market is booming, especially for droids that can satisfy desires made unsatable by the minefield of modern dating. In New York, you can hire a university student to be your friend – at the price of forty bucks an hour. The internet compounds and intensifies anomie, particularly for teenagers who dig within themselves deep wells of misery because their lives never seem to measure up to the crystalline purity of a favoured celebrity. The very existence of Facebook is a public health issue. The sale of single-serve ready meals has skyrocketed in recent years – perfect for the cottage industry of influencers who do nothing but stream themselves eating copious amounts of food.
Most importantly, a Gallup survey conducted in 155 countries found 85 percent of employees felt disconnected from their company and their work – a detail that chimes nicely with the YouGov poll that the late anthropologist David Graeber used as the basis for his excoriating work Bullshit Jobs: fifty percent of British workers were unsure if their work made any meaningful contribution to the world, while 37 percent were “quite sure it did not.”
The Lonely Century, however, does not wed this richness of data to a proper history of how loneliness came to be such a common feeling: the Century of her title is the last twenty years, not the past one hundred. Hertz is, after all, still doing what many other intellectuals-cum-policy wonks of the Third Way/think tank style did (to some success) in the wake of the 2008 crisis: the approachable voice with its plasticky, chummy style, the attempt to float above ‘partisan politics’, loftily proposing imaginable ‘solutions’ to the ‘problem’, which usually involves trying to save capitalism from itself.
Hertz’s villain here, the chief perpetrator of this age of malaise, is the individualistic, competitive, dog-eat-dog drive of neoliberalism which has, in Hertz’s argument, filtered down from the corporate world over the last forty or so years. This allows her to call on the state or the market to alleviate the symptoms of loneliness while never reckoning with the root of the crisis. It is “time for game-changing and radical steps,” she declares, reaching for a peroration that is neither game-changing nor radical, “time to implement a more caring and kinder capitalism.”
If we don’t, the chronically lonely are liable to lash out, Hertz says. The surge of what she terms right-wing “populism” and “tribal” thinking across Europe and the United States is an attempt to salvage some meaning from a society seemingly growing ever more hostile. Consider the ways rightists have appropriated older socialist and union tactics in creating a vision of community. Vox in Spain host youth-only beer nights; Trump rallies are cook-outs with a side of authoritarianism; Italy’s Lega Nord hosts dinners and parties that emphasise regional tradition - the emotional resonances of these gatherings replicated in their social media propaganda. Of course, corporates have proved to be quite savvy at cloaking themselves in the slogans of family and care, regardless of their real mission. HSBC calls itself the “world’s local bank.” Insurance giant State Farm wants to be “a good neighbour.” The annual schmaltz of the John Lewis Christmas advert is still an advert for a department store.
And anyway, in mapping these political consequences, what Hertz is trying to identify is not really loneliness at all but a deeper affliction. It is a term she deploys only a handful of times in the book despite its far more potent past: alienation.
Where loneliness represents a gap – an existential one, to be sure – between our lives and the lives of others, alienation refers to an entire world in which we seem to play no meaningful role. It is a psychological severance separating our sense of self-worth from the poor assets we’ve inherited. Popular culture no longer enchants, and political conversation seems to have less and less bearing on daily routines. In work, so few of us actually produce anything. Instead, we serve: as pint-pullers or burger-flippers or Uber drivers, telemarketers or PR flacks or bureaucratic box-tickers. The horizon of a rosier future has been foreclosed, and alienation stems from this lack of power - the ability to place our collective finger on the scales of justice.
Again, this is not new. Indeed, as we today approach Victorian levels of inequality, it’s worth remembering that the era in which Parisians (and others) tried to break through their alienation by rebelling, and Haussmann was called in to break them up, also saw a full roster of philosophers dedicating themselves to investigating (perhaps even alleviating) what felt like a vast reservoir of deadness and homogeneity. From Kierkegaard to Feuerbach and beyond, the project of humanism was and remains a search for a way out, an attempt to grasp for emancipation.
It is telling that none of these names appear anywhere in The Lonely Century. Then again, Hertz is quite content to suggest that we buy robots for pensioners to watch television with rather than imagine a society in which the elderly don’t have to sit alone for their last days. It is perhaps the most alienating thing of all to be told we should take our wisdom from intellectuals like Hertz, only to discover that they have fashioned such a narrow window of possibility, and suffer such an impoverishment of imagination.
