Before America contracted this pandemic of the novel coronavirus, we were dying from a plague of loneliness.
Economists and politicians worry about the economic costs as everything shuts down. No basketball, no museums, no school, and — Lord, have mercy — no baseball. Hotels and restaurants are taking massive hits.
But the coronavirus shutdown will hurt America on a far deeper level. It will exacerbate our most acute preexisting condition: the cancer of loneliness and alienation.
We do not belong to as many things as we used to. We go to church less, we join fewer clubs, we volunteer less. We also know our neighbors less, get married less, and have children less.
Nearly 1 in 3 people in the United States lives alone, which is double the rate in 1960. Two decades ago, 70% of people were members of a church, mosque, or synagogue, and that’s less than 50% now.
The Joint Economic Committee found that “between 1974 and 2016, the percent of adults who said they spend a social evening with a neighbor at least several times a week fell from 30 percent to 19 percent.”
People, in other words, have been “social distancing” for decades, and the result is an affliction as lethal as the coronavirus. Now that social distancing appears necessary in order to slow the spread of the coronavirus, it will get worse, right when we need each other the most.
Loneliness, isolation, and alienation are deadly. Sir Angus Deaton and Anne Case, who documented the startling rise in suicides, drug overdoses, and alcohol-related deaths (that is, deaths of despair), found that social isolation was a key factor in this crisis. Loss of connection to family, “spiritual fulfillment,” and “meaning” are the driving causes of deaths of despair.
“Social relationships, or the relative lack thereof, constitute a major risk factor for health,” researchers at the University of Michigan found in 1988. One recent metastudy found that survival increases by 50% in people with strong social connections. Put the other way, the risk of dying goes up by 33% if you don’t have strong social connections.
Although we’re generally coming apart as a society, tough times usually bring us together. Trial, catastrophe, or tragedy make it most clear that we need others, that we need to belong to little platoons, that we need to reinforce our understanding of ourselves through our relations with others.
That’s what makes the coronavirus doubly cruel. While most crises require us to come together, this one seems to require us to go apart.
Think about the hubs of infection. In New Rochelle, New York, the literal center of the state’s “containment zone,” is a synagogue. Stories suggest the virus may have been spread at a funeral and was probably spread at a bat mitzvah. It was spread through worship services and through schools that were intertwined with the synagogue through the webs of a community jointly pursuing goods outside of and larger than themselves.
What made the lives of these members of Young Israel so rich was what made them all so vulnerable to the virus. Their mass gathering to celebrate a neighborhood girl and to mourn with a widow is the model of what we need more of in America in general.
But today, it appears, we need less coming together in order to slow the spread of the virus. In Bergen County, New Jersey, there will be no shul, no shiva, no funerals, no playdates, per the instruction of the rabbinical council.
President Trump gave particularly dispiriting, but needed, guidance Wednesday night: All visits to retirement homes should end unless they are medically necessary. The elderly in America are so neglected and so lonely. Now we need to leave them alone even more.
The novel coronavirus has enflamed a preexisting condition that was killing America: alienation.
