On loneliness

“I know they accuse me of arrogance, and perhaps misanthropy, and perhaps of madness,” declares the narrator at the start of Borges’s short story “The House of Asterion.” He lives isolated in a house that he describes in sparse but precise detail. When he went outside one afternoon, people fled from him in terror, so he stays inside, waiting for someone to come to him and rescue him from his loneliness. At the end of the story, he is revealed to be the mythological Minotaur. His rescuer, Theseus, will kill him, but in doing so, will also free him from the constraints of the labyrinth. He doesn't even put up a fight.

What is clever about Borges’s story is that it flips our assumptions. You think of the Minotaur is lurking in the darkness, a monstrous center of gravity waiting to devour his prey. Instead, he is passive here. Like a captive princess, he waits and waits and waits for his redeemer. His loneliness is terrifying and self-replicating. Isolation reproduces itself, hardens over time into an impenetrable shell. Reviled by the world, the Minotaur’s withdrawal from it is taken as confirmation of his misanthropy.

The Minotaur by George Frederic Watts, 1885

“When I feared my own loneliness,” writes Laura Marris in The Age of Loneliness, “I suspect, it was partly because this hunger had spooked me when I’d encountered it in others. ” Marris weaves human atomization and disconnection into our increasing loneliness as a species in a time of extreme ecological collapse. She points out that the Greek word eremos can be used not only to speak of a lonely person, but also of a “desolated” place. “There’s a doubleness to this lens, a reciprocity: when people monopolize a place, we often deprive ourselves of sharing it with the abundance of other living beings.”

For much of written history, physical solitude was distinguished from the more psychic condition of loneliness. We have all experienced loneliness in a crowd, after all, on public transportation or in a crowded bar. Airports, as Marris points out, are often profoundly lonely places by design. She details the hours and hours of isolating and exhausting air travel she undertook to maintain a long-distance relationship between Boston and California. When her boyfriend tries to break up with her on one trip, she resists. She diagnoses her stubbornness partly as a fear of loneliness, which lingers at the edge of her vision during her relationship like a subtle threat. Physical proximity to a beloved staves off the existential fear of erasure, of one day ceasing to exist. Marris quotes Hanif Abdurraqib who says that “to sleep next to someone is to ‘fall into the space that is mine and they fall into the space that is theirs and for a minute, there is a kingdom that we are keeping briefly warm and even if it is not love, it is love.’ I wanted a kingdom of warmth, even if it was a place I could only visit. I felt a loyalty to that kingdom, to that person, to our temporary country of non-loneliness. ”

We do not know if animals are lonely. In zoos, they seem to suffer from depression and unhappiness. Bereaved, some species grieve like humans. It is hard to access the psychic life of animals without anthropomorphizing them. But Marris describes how horseshoe crabs amass a whole parasitic community of sea snails and barnacles and seaweed that attach to their bodies and eventually overrun them until they die, half converted into fauna for the ecosystem already. This is not companionship as most of us would understand it, but it is spatial belonging and comfort in an environment well adapted to your thriving. Today, the population of horseshoe crabs in the American northeast is on the decline.

---

In the months leading up to the presidential election, several rounds of essays about “male loneliness” swept through the media. Ruth Whippman (the author of Boymom) argued in the New York Times opinion section this summer that boys have been abandoned and silenced both by the patriarchal norms of the right and by the scolding feminists on the left who accuse them of taking up too much space. “Is the Cure to Male Loneliness Out on the Pickleball Court?” wondered Michelle Cottle also in the Times opinion section. Is the cure to male loneliness alternative country singer Zach Bryan, wonders Spencer Kornhaber for The Atlantic in response. “Boys with progressive views of manhood feel the least purpose in life,” claims Jean Guerrero in an op-ed for The Los Angeles Times about male loneliness, citing one study. “Is the Cure to Male Loneliness Being a Contestant on ‘The Golden Bachelorette’?” asks Jezebel, tongue-in-cheek but maybe not far off.

It is not only men who are lonely. Vox cites studies finding that men and women are lonely at about the same levels. Poor people (with incomes under $24,000) are lonelier than their wealthier peers. White people are lonelier than people of color. New mothers are lonelier than non-parents. LGBTQ adults often feel lonely (several times a week).

But the uproar about men is that men, so the argument goes, get radicalized by loneliness. In a slew of post-election think pieces, journalists and pundits argued that Trump’s second victory was at least in part due to a massive rightward shift among young men who found a balm for their loneliness from far-right influencers like Andrew Tate. Caught between an aggrieved identitarian left that paints them as violent and evil and an unsympathetic neoliberal right establishment that has disenfranchised them and that encourages them to man up in response, it is no wonder that they find Trump appealing. He encourages them to be men again. Within the slogan “Make America Great Again,” there is also the red-blooded promise of traditional masculinity. It is a masculinity that is obsessed with sex, with the pliancy and subservience of women, with the virgin-whore dichotomy.

It’s impossible to really say for sure that young men are further to the right or more misogynist than their fathers and grandfathers. Older generations grew up in a very different world. They had different political choices presented to them, wrapped up in slightly different packages. They did not have access to the internet. Political polling or polls on cultural perspectives or emotions are famously flawed. The fear of young men, as a mass, seems mostly like a distraction to me from the oppressive forces of government, the lobbying pull of corporations, the extreme heights of class exploitation at work in this country. Progressive abortion bills passed in several states where people had a chance to vote on them. Most studies indicate that legal abortion is widely popular. The rollback of Roe was not voted on and happened under Biden, making it difficult to pin the election’s outcome to that, even if it is a critical question at its heart.

For many liberal commentators speculating about male loneliness, the fear seems not to be that boys are isolated in comparison to their female peers, but that their vulnerability has been exposed. These boys are discouraged from being boys, forced to comply with feminist niceties, discouraged by the mechanisms of consent and the bullishness of modern young women from even wanting to have sex. Instead, they stew in their rooms, watch “manosphere” videos and porn. They emerge weird, deadened to the world, unable, like Borges’s Minotaur, to bridge the gap of sociability.

If this is more true for men than it is for women, it is largely because of norms of masculinity. An entire cultural system was built to preserve and sustain this kind of rugged masculine individualism and in its ruins, it has left viciousness and chaos. It is telling to me that a lot of contemporary writing about the so-called “gender wars” seem to call for a return to an imagined golden era post sexual liberation but before the advent of angry puritanism and isolated sexlessness. What is frightening about the right wing young men of now is precisely that they are impotent. “Incels,” writes Amia Srinivisan in The Right to Sex, “as I have said already, aren’t angry about their lack of sex, but about their perceived lack of sexual status.” Incels are mockable and ridiculous cultural figures because they can’t get sex and because their entitlement to women’s bodies mostly expresses itself in online rants or, at times, in bursts of extreme violence. If they were better initiated into masculinity, better able to assimilate to the ideal American norm (often implicitly the white American norm), if they were just less weird overall, they would be fuckable and then they would just be boys again. Boys will be boys.

“For me it is masculinity out of control – masculinity in a panic – that is most likely to turn ugly, “writes Jacqueline Rose in On Violence and On Violence Against Women. Masculinity is frightening when its fragility is laid bare, in the way that a wounded animal is frightening. It becomes ugly. In its proper place, attractive, dominant, easily able to cajole women into sex, it is venerated. Sophie Kemp, writing about the radicalization of young men in America for The Los Angeles Review of Books, describes how tempting it can feel to just give in and submit to power. “And how could that not be seductive, to an extent? To be told what to do. If young men crave hierarchy, it would only be natural that women would too.”

It is seductive. Not least of all because we have been raised with punishing gender norms and because they dictate so much about how our bodies move, how we desire, about our self-image and introspection. But the language we use around our desires also risks naturalizing masculine power and enshrining it into violence. This kind of latent submissiveness is not the same as compliance, as surrender, as love. Freud argued that fascism works by stoking libidinal attachment to a leader, who fills in, in an Oedipal sense, for a strict authoritarian father. It awakens a kind of passive masochism in response, a sense of helplessness that is deeply gratifying. It lowers your regular moral values, your sense of responsibility to the world, your capacity for empathy. It makes you grotesque.

---

“When you’re lonely,” writes Laura Marris, “it’s hard to see yourself in the language of others.” She quotes biologist Robin Wall Kimmerer who works on the grammar of animacy — types of linguistic constructions that grant subjectivity to the natural world. Instead of water being a noun, it is a verb that can act as a subject with free will. “The arrogance of English,” Kimmerer points out in Marris’s quote, “is that the only way to be animate, to be worthy of respect and moral concern, is to be a human.”

How many categories of people are dehumanized by our language? Kimmerer’s own Potawatomi ancestors were rounded up by American militia in the 1830s and sent on a 660 mile death march from Indiana to Kansas where nearly 30 children perished. This foundational violence lives in the bedrock of American society. I recently heard a talk with a middle-aged American writer who described a moment in the 2010s when Obama’s victory over John McCain radicalized a whole generation of young white men and ushered in the Trump era. I assume she was drawing upon personal experience but I thought it was a strange periodization. I would have looked further back to the Bush era, with its extreme violence and authoritarianism. Or maybe even further back, as Jacqueline Rose does, to Reagan and Thatcher, the deregulation of social services, the rise of corporate globalism, the never ending warfare waged on the Global South. Or you could go further back to Jim Crow laws, to Japanese internment camps, to the kidnapping and enslavement of millions of people over centuries, to the doctrine of replacement, of Manifest Destiny, of settler colonialism that infected our original social structure, that permeates everything left.

It’s not so simple once you start to really look. Everything recedes into violence. To this extent, the Minotaur’s refusal to fight back is not only a signal of defeat, succumbing to his social exclusion, but also a commitment to his own humanity. It is we who have made a monster of him. It is we who will pay the price.