THE GREAT ABANDONMENT

How our society slowly, steadily gave up on the idea of being human

Humans have existed for a couple of hundred thousand years, and we passed most of that time in small, autonomous groups of hunters and foragers. Not only were these groups too mobile to be subjugated, but they were largely egalitarian. Early humans hunted, traveled, slept, cooked, ate, and raised children in close proximity because their survival depended on it. If you were not a valued member of a group, you were dead, and that reality is readily apparent in our neurochemistry. The hormone oxytocin is released in women during childbirth and in both sexes during periods of intense closeness - weddings, funerals, sports events, battles and almost any kind of crisis. Oxytocin is so pleasurable that people often remember great tragedies, like the terror attacks of September 11, as one of the peak experiences of their lives.

Our bodies and brains have changed little since those eons of small-group survival. Through the invention of agriculture roughly ten thousand years ago, the rise of the great cities five thousand years ago, the development of science and medicine three hundred years ago, the advent of democracy two hundred years ago, and the rise of industry a hundred years ago, we have retained all our hunter-gatherer adaptations. Foremost among those is our intense need to be part of a group. From infancy to the grave, the one thing we need is to know that others will care for us. In exchange, we will make great and even mortal sacrifices to protect that group from harm. Not only is that bond highly adaptive, but it can feel deeply right and good.

Two weeks ago, I wrote about the survival value of touch and human connection (“Breathe With Me,” February 9), and this piece is about its opposite: Mass abandonment. Western democracies that have codified personal rights into a vast legal code have nevertheless degraded every conceivable social bond that makes life worthwhile and meaningful. Consider the Battle of the Somme: On July 1, 1916, human wave assaults killed almost 20,000 English soldiers in the first 24 hours - a man every four seconds. Many such slaughters have happened in history, but never at that scale and in a democracy. The Battle of the Somme was a supposedly free society violating the most basic compact between a group and its members: mutual need and respect.

Within decades, this new madness culminated in the very real possibility of a nuclear exchange between Russia and the United States that would wipe out the human race. For social primates that get their safety and meaning from the group around them, the idea of carefully arranged mass suicide by the world’s powers must have been psychologically devastating. It may not be surprising that the generations that witnessed both world wars and the advent of nuclear annihilation were the ones that adopted a novel form of parenting which placed the infant at the greatest possible physical distance from his or her parents. Subjected to merciless advertising and preposterous medical advice, American mothers all but stopped breast feeding and sleeping with their children. (This was particularly true for affluent and middle class white families.) All infant primates get their sense of safety from the physical proximity of adults; placing them alone in a dark room is way outside any human norm. Americans suddenly became, quite literally, the first mammal ever to sleep apart from its young.

In countries as varied as Sweden, Japan and Egypt, however, co-sleeping with children continued to be the norm. One study in Egypt found that every adult interviewed had slept with their parents as a child, and almost three-quarters continued to share a large bed with 1-4 other adults. Co-sleeping is known to reduce the stress hormone cortisol in both mothers and infants and measurably improves heart rhythm, body temperature and breathing. Multiple longitudinal studies have also found that adults in Western societies who co-slept tended to be more independent, more emotionally-regulated, and less anxious than peers who hadn’t.

One way to understand this unprecedented shift in Western society - forgive my cynicism – is that the mother-infant bond can’t be monetized without breaching it. How do you stop something as primal, healthy, and cheap as breast feeding? By telling mothers that breast milk is inferior to infant formula. (It’s not.) How do you keep parents from doing something as natural and pleasurable as sleeping with their child? By telling them it’s dangerous and immoral and then selling them a crib.

There was an upside to parental distancing, however: At least children were free. When I was young, every neighborhood had groups of kids running wild and experiencing the thrills and dangers of real autonomy. We played baseball in the middle of the street and built tree forts and had rock fights and walked to school on our own. That era ended with the rise of cable news and social media, which monetized parental concern by running endless stories about unspeakable things happening to children. The rate of unspeakable things had not risen but public awareness did, so children were soon stuck inside, watching the same televisions and computer screens that had made their parents so paranoid in the first place.

The loss of outdoor play for children parallels the loss of community for adults – the town square, the pub, the harvest festival, the front stoop, even the air raid shelter during the London Blitz. Journalist Mary Heaton Vorse, who covered both world wars as well as the American labor movement, identified the dangers of a fractured society early on: “Getting together is one of life’s necessities,” she wrote in 1942. “The need to work and play and worship together is as fundamental as to rush together to defend one’s country. The vitality of Fascism has been the recapture of this need, so unfulfilled in the isolated modern world. Fascism has perverted to its uses one of the most generous and powerful instincts of mankind.”

As community bonds dried up like a brackish puddle on a hot day, homes expanded and grew emptier. A century ago, 98 percent of Americans lived with other people, even sharing rooms and beds with non-family members. (Herman Melville’s classic novel, Moby Dick, begins with the narrator climbing into a boarding house bed with a South Pacific harpooner named Queequeg.) Today, around one third of American households have only one occupant and another third are occupied by childless married couples or single-parent families. In both North America and Europe, more space and fewer occupants statistically lead to unhappiness. The American average of almost one thousand square feet of floor space per person results in “dead zones” in a home that can make people feel lonely and depressed. Perhaps no one has described the costs of this lost connection better than author Bell Hooks, born in Kentucky in 1952. Looking back at her childhood, she wrote, “All the years of my life I thought I was searching for love I found, retrospectively, to be years where I was simply trying to recover what had been lost, to return to the first home, to get back the rapture of first love.”

Once parents physically abandon their children, the next step is only a matter of time. According to the American Psychological Association, teenagers now spend an average of almost five hours a day on screens and social media, leaving parents shut out of the most consequential and time-consuming part of their children’s lives. Parents lament this loss but are often too preoccupied with their own social media to do anything about it. The tech companies that addicted an entire generation of Americans to their products enjoy a combined market capitalization of over twenty trillion dollars, equal to two-thirds of the yearly economic output of the United States. These companies are apparently too powerful to rein in in any meaningful way.

The costs of mass addiction are well-known and will lead to one final abandonment: That of the Self by the Self. Without silence, we can’t appreciate sound. Without solitude we can’t appreciate others. Without a clear and uncluttered relationship with our mind, we can’t possibly understand who we are and what we’re doing here. There is a saying in trauma therapy: What you do to me, I do to me. Indeed. But then there’s this: Several years ago, I asked my youngest daughter if she knew what the word love meant. “Love means, Stay here,” she said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

And I thought, “If a three-year old knows that, everyone does. If a three year old knows that, there will never not be hope.”