The New Isolationists
We will never know why two students from upper-middle-class families broke the suburban calm of Littleton, Colo., with a murderous rampage. Unfortunately, the tragedy at Columbine High School is unique only in scale. Similar incidents are frequent enough to force us to ask a general question: Why would children of privilege rage so violently against civilized community? Is the social fabric of daily life in our prosperous classes so rent that it fails to contain such primitive impulses of youth?
There appears to be trouble in the everyday lives of those with the means to purchase the American suburban dream. The cultures of work and residence in the territory of the prosperous, where so much of life is experienced and values molded, have been transformed in worrisome directions. If the work experience of the elite once gave order and direction to life, today’s business practices and values undermine moral identity and social connection. Similarly, new patterns of suburbanization work against a sense of social relations and responsibility. Atomization increasingly defines life in the vastly extended metropolis.
A century ago, the prosperous classes moved to the suburbs to escape the anonymity of the city; now the move to the suburbs is a descent into anonymity, into a world of diffused meaning and authority. Neither work nor home provide the structure to daily life that an earlier bourgeoisie found there. Such an environment is not likely to nourish in youth a clear sense of social norms.
The work culture of the modern middle class was formed and framed by the experience of a “career,” a word that entered American English in the 1850s. But the very idea of a career is at risk today. The market-driven business practices now celebrated for promoting economic growth subvert that expectation and the structure of personal identity and obligation it sustained.
Life in the suburbs has changed, as well. Earlier suburbs, linked to the central city by commuter railroads, were not far from the urban core and were essentially part of the city. These suburbs were doubly centered: The city provided a core orientation, and so did the train station, surrounded by local stores, professional offices, the library and other public spaces. To be sure, these earlier suburbs were wary of cosmopolitan urban life, but their local village center, built around the station, symbolized, perhaps paradoxically, connection to the city. While the exclusivity of the suburbs was as problematic then as it is now, suburban residents, tied economically and culturally to the city in a way that is no longer the case, did not deny dependence on the larger city nor social interdependence more generally.
Suburban life on a metropolitan scale no longer has a center. If the suburban railroad made places, the automobile obliterates place and exaggerates an ethic of isolated individualism. The institutions of social capital built by the bourgeoisie of the last century are languishing. Middle-class voters reject school taxes, decline to invest in housing for the less well-off and starve libraries, retaining their growing wealth for private use.
Ever since the rate of urbanization began to accelerate in the 1820s, Americans have feared that city ways would corrode traditional morality. Such worries were overstated but well-founded. Older patriarchal and personal forms of authority were dissolved and a new, distinctly urban society was created. Large cities created new forms of sociality and order among strangers. The social fabric was sustained by a complex and ever-changing combination of family, neighborhood and formal institutions--from trade unions, professional associations and fraternal societies, to police and schools, to participatory political parties.
The academic discipline of sociology was invented largely to inquire into these new principles of “social control”--a phrase that implied self and collective control, not the armed force proposed last week by Charlton Heston and the National Rifle Assn. Sociological inquiry into the “social pathology of city life” was focused almost exclusively on those thought not to have control: the poor, immigrants, racial minorities or others defined as marginal or deviant.
The 19th-century bourgeoisie was thought to have the necessary self-control. From our perspective, perhaps they had too much. To our eyes, there was much hypocrisy, as well. Still, men and women of means worked to strengthen the informal and formal elements of the social fabric, even if much of that work was necessary because of the antisocial consequences of the economy that provided them with their wealth.
The capitalist economy depends on continual transformation. During the past generation, it has changed in socially significant ways. The performance of the economy in the past eight years has dazzled commentators who, seemingly blinded by the brightness illuminating the stock market, have not noticed it also has brought unprecedented levels of inequality. In fact, the vaunted flexible, lean and mean economy may not be good even for its beneficiaries, because it may be undoing the best social legacies of the 19th-century bourgeoisie. Those practices typically praised in today’s business pages are subverting the moral identities that, since Victorian times, sustained individual character and nourished a sense of social responsibility.
The new culture of work undermines trust and responsibility, and new patterns of residence among the prosperous exacerbate the problem. The result is an unsettling trend toward elite withdrawal from social leadership. For all their material comforts, the prosperous classes are circling the wagons, using private resources to replace social interdependence and to bolster a shrinking and vulnerable private self.
The upper-middle classes that should be supplying the warp and woof of the social fabric are themselves suffering what sociologist Richard Sennett calls a “corrosion of character.” Today’s economy, we are told, derives its dynamism from a commitment to risk-taking and limited commitment to people, institutions and localities. More and more work is pursued in isolation, often in a home office, with only electronic links to colleagues, thus diminishing social relations. Employees are asked to think only of the moment, to abandon the long view of their own lives and of society. The resulting loss of a narrative sense of one’s life over time weakens personal identity and confuses one’s moral compass. Though these values are the product of the daily work experience of high-level employees, they are not quarantined at the office. They are incorporated into one’s general outlook and carried into all social relations.
The implication is profound: Freed from the constraints of a narrative structure for figuring one’s life-course, individuals are invited, like Madonna, to live a life of improvisation. There is something appealing in the notion of fashioning and refashioning one’s life with little respect to past or future. But such an orientation, without a sense of life’s shape or narrative line, lessens one’s sense of moral order and social relations.
A century ago, the prosperous classes were understood to have civic obligations, a kind of recognition that, whatever their individual efforts, they built their lives on resources that were social. The 19th-century school reformer Horace Mann grasped this when he observed that only an “isolated, solitary being . . . having no relations to a community around him” could subscribe to the “arrogant doctrine of absolute ownership” of the self. Yet today, we find an elite that, in the words of the critic Christopher Lasch, thinks of itself as “self-made” and “owing its privileges exclusively to its own efforts” and thus without obligations.
It almost makes one nostalgic for those old robber barons, Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. Ruthless though they were in the marketplace and in their approach to labor relations, they recognized a moral, even religious, obligation to return a major portion of their wealth to society. To do this, they invented the philanthropic foundation as a vehicle for the betterment of human life. By comparison, our most visible technology tycoons and wizards of high finance are disturbing examples of social failure.
Another comparison is even more revealing. In their important recent study of the effect of affirmative action on college admissions, Derek Bok and William Bowen, former presidents of, respectively, Harvard and Princeton, documented a striking pattern of community involvement by African American beneficiaries of affirmative-action policies. Bok and Bowen do not ask, but we might, why white elites do not possess the firmness of social responsibility evident in their black counterparts. My guess is that experience has encouraged a sense of social relations and of a narrative trajectory to a life in the one case and not in the other.
Photographs of Dylan Klebold’s home on the suburban fringe of Denver display the current tendency toward residential self-containment and isolation. He lived in the contemporary dream of the prosperous classes: a large house without close neighbors. For much of this century, such classes have clustered in distinct and homogeneous neighborhoods. That is itself a worrisome pattern, but it did invite sensitivity to social life and it did knit a social fabric.
Today, a new level of residential isolation is dissolving an already weak sense of social connection. Bigger houses on bigger lots are increasingly the rule. Houses with 25,000 square feet are being built, and they are worlds unto themselves. While the population of our metropolitan areas grows arithmetically, the geographical extension increases geometrically, as people put more and more space between themselves and others.
Feeling vulnerable, self-absorbed people of means are using their wealth to barricade themselves from all those who are “other.” Notions of absolute difference and a politics of moralistic extremism provide them with only a momentary and false sense of comfort and personal coherence. Isolation, with its denial of the social fabric as a resource for living, impoverishes personal and public life.