When public officials and pundits talk about recessions, they almost always are describing an economic downturn. But there are other kinds of recession–and there is troubling evidence that we are experiencing one that is arguably more worrisome than a bad economy.
Ever since a notorious chart showing that fewer people are having sex than ever before first made the rounds, there’s been increased interest in the state of America’s social health. Polling has demonstrated a marked decline in all spheres of social life, including close friendships, intimate relationships, trust, labor participation and community involvement. The continuing shift has been called the “friendship recession” or the “social recession” – and, although it will take years before this is clearly established, it was almost certainly worsened by the pandemic.
The decline comes alongside a documented rise in mental illness, diseases of despair and poor health more generally. In August 2022, the CDC announced that US life expectancy had fallen to where it was in 1996. Contrast this to western Europe, where life expectancy has largely rebounded to pre-pandemic numbers. Even before the pandemic, the years 2015-2017 saw the longest sustained decline in US life expectancy since 1915-18, when the US was grappling with the 1918 flu and the first world war.
There is plenty of debate over the causes of the phenomenon: the Internet, social media and our increasingly online lives come in for considerable criticism. Other observers stress economic precarity and the decline of public spaces and community.
On the right, the critics indict contemporary culture, accusing the emphasis on inclusion of undermining social traditions — especially gender norms and the longstanding “traditional” family structures that privileged (White) men and subordinated women.
Whatever the reason, there’s no denying that a growing number of people feel “lost, lonely or invisible.”
Pundits, politicians, bureaucrats and the like have generally fixated on the social recession’s potential to incubate political extremism. Entire institutes have been set up to study, monitor and surveil the internet’s radicalizing tendencies buoyed by anti-social loneliness. The new buzzword often used in this sphere is “stochastic terrorism” – meaning acts of violence indirectly motivated by messages of hate spread through mass communication – and much of this discussion has focused on the need to contain some unknown, dangerous element taking hold of the dispirited online. The goal here is not to solve a pernicious problem, but instead to pacify its most flagrant outbursts.
Getting the Wild West of the Internet under some sort of control is clearly necessary, but I would argue it isn’t sufficient.
Back in 2009, I wrote a book titled “Distrust American Style,” in which I argued (among other things) that the reason for what was even then obvious social anomie was a loss of trust in America’s social and governing institutions– and that the remedy is to make them trustworthy.
The linked article considers the evidence of growing social isolation and the influence of our increasingly online lives, but it concludes by making an argument similar to mine:
Missing from all of this is the building block of society: trust. The past 50 years have seen America’s transformation from a high-trust to a low-trust society, accompanied by a collapse of authority across all levels: social, political and institutional. In 2022, trust dropped to a new average low – a development that has been the trend since the 1970s.
Americans do perceive that trust has diminished among the general population, according to Pew Research. The vast majority are “worried about the declining level of trust in each other”. Many also feel that they no longer recognize their own country, although that recording is probably caught up somewhat in political partisanship. The erosion of trust in the US began decades ago, after Watergate and the “crisis of confidence” during the 1970s, but it binds our current time to a more familiar past cynicism. Skepticism toward the state has evolved into more generalized distrust of society at large, constantly amplified by the internet.
Although it is absolutely true that malaise and discomfort always increase during periods of rapid social change, I’m convinced that the severity of this particular social recession is largely a result of diminished trust in all of our social institutions. It isn’t just government–its business interests dodging taxes and bribing Supreme Court justices, churches covering up molestations, sports figures doping, cable news sources spewing propaganda–the list goes on.
When people don’t know who or what they can trust, withdrawal from communal life is hardly surprising. That said, engagement in healthy communities is absolutely essential to democratic functioning–and trust is essential to engagement.
The challenge –in our MAGA and QAnon world–is figuring out how to restore that necessary trust.
Comments