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Reviewed by John Atlas Her book, subtitled "Why Americans Feel So Alone," is not about the lonely life of the lovelorn, the homeless Vietnam veteran trapped in the urban ghetto or the elderly widow in the silent house. Instead, Pappano, a Boston Globe columnist and visiting scholar at Northeastern University, looks at the pressures and cravings of modern culture that lead to a life of self-imposed isolation. These new values "that promise to make life more comfortable, convenient, efficient and private", warns Pappano, "also create the reverse: lives that are more isolated, increasingly self focused and lonelier." For Pappano, the car is a metaphor for our more secluded lives. It is "an escape capsule so we may get away from everyone and everything. Car ads focus on interior amenities" the "supple leather-trimmed seats of the new Lincoln Town Car," the stereo systems, leg room, head room, cup holders, global satellite positioning systems, video players, fanny warmers, and the like "because inside is where we spend our time. Some ads never even show the car's exterior profile." Something is happening in our culture when cars have become a mobile home and office where the cup holder is more important than the fender. And despite campaigns to encourage car-pooling, 85% of us choose to drive to work alone. Pappano asserts we are paying for this consumerist and technologically burdened life with rising numbers of people suffering from depression, anxiety and sleeplessness as well as less cohesive communities. How did we get to this point? Pappano says the new more upscale lonely are that way because of their shopping habits, their need for mobility, their hunger for the latest gadgets with screens and their choice to live in big homes and gated communities. They shop, not only to acquire goods but as a way of "seeking love and attention lacking elsewhere." TV watching seems to encourage loneliness. The Internet can connect more people than ever before, but we use it when we should be meeting people face to face. While the Internet has become indispensable to modern life, Pappano cites studies that increasing use is connected to higher rates of social isolation and loneliness. And our bigger homes give us lots of rooms and bathrooms, but we lose some of those valued interactions with your family. Writes Pappano: "It is the sharing of space (including the bathroom) that allows us to know one another." Pappano makes a convincing argument that our culture of speed and efficiency paradoxically shortens the time we have to smell the roses and interact with fellow human beings. Her mission is to make us aware of the choices we make so we will spend more time with each other getting to know our family and neighbors and less time with our gadgets. Shop at the local stores, unplug the computer and turn off the cell phone when driving with your family, she exhorts. Get to "know people who are different from us and not buy so heavily into a consumer culture, which tells us that we deserve luxuries and personal attention." She tells us to listen to people like her butcher who "boasts that his girlfriend's mother from Hungary makes the best meat loaf he has ever eaten." Getting Americans to change their behavior won't be as easy as she suggests. First, its likely that many people don't want to know either their neighbors or their family. As Pappano reminds us "there is something trying even exhausting about human relations." And individualism lies at the core of American culture. Robert Bellah and others have written about how the lethal combination of individualism, consumerism and technology deeply embedded in our culture eats away at the social and moral fabric which Tocqueville saw as taming capitalist America's destructive tendencies. Frayed communities, huge economic gaps between the rich and poor, fractured families and loneliness is the price we pay for that individualism that which lacks the will for social consensus. A society increasingly dominated by market values and individualism, not only undermines our capacity to seek the common good, it discourages people from caring and connecting with one another. Pappano's book is similar to, but less exhaustive than Robert Putnam's recent book Bowling Alone. He found that Americans have withdrawn into themselves, neglecting to join social clubs and professional organizations, not bothering to vote and skipping church. He also found declines in eating together or discussing anything as a family, entertaining friends at home, participating in group games, social or sporting activities as well as political and interpersonal trust. Putnam took the connection gap deeper than Pappano's concern with loneliness and emphasized the importance of social connectedness in improving education, child welfare, safe neighborhoods, economic prosperity, better health, personal satisfaction and a vibrant democracy. Unlike Putnam' book which is chock full of evidence--charts, graphs, statistics, detailed footnotes--backing up his contentions, Pappano limits her evidence to a few footnotes and academic studies relying more on her personal experiences and interpretations of material from advertisements, literature and New Yorker cartoons. Think of her book as a Bowling Alone lite. But what Pappano lacks in scholarship and thoroughness, she makes up for in providing a readable and accessible picture of the high price we pay for all our conveniences and entertainment. She is right, certainly, that the bonds of our communities have withered, and that this transformation has very real costs. Her book will add to a growing communitarian movement that is attempting to draw Americans together at a time of isolation and fragmentation. Armed with the author's passionate look at the problem, perhaps more Americans will learn their neighbors' names, take a break from the TV set to talk more to their children and join a social action group to fight for a more just society.
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