Closing schools, churches, bars, playgrounds, sports teams, restaurants, McDonald’s, coffee shops, bowling alleys, clubs, swimming pools, libraries, sandwich shops, and most of the institutions and locations where humans connect to other humans while barring family gatherings, festivals, concerts, and large picnics has many negative effects.
Increased terrorism and extremism will likely be among them.
That’s the worry of the federal agency dedicated to identifying the root causes of radicalization and terrorist violence. “Social isolation” is one of the “risk factors that may make an individual more susceptible to radicalizing to violence,” notes a recent memo from the Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention.
Imagine a 17-year-old who doesn’t go to school, can’t play sports, can’t hang around at McDonald’s, can’t get a job, sees his friends and cousins less, gets chased off of basketball courts, and so on. That’s a socially isolated teenager. There were socially isolated teenagers before COVID-19, but now, there are thousands more, and the isolation is deeper.
Depression, anxiety, “plus negative self-esteem and a fear of others” often result from isolation and lack of connection, the DHS memo argues. This can lead to extremism, violence, and terrorism.
Lone-wolf shooters and bombers tend to lack human connection while simultaneously being plugged into virtual communities where conspiracy theories fly around unchecked. Terrorist, racist, or fundamentalist message boards, Listservs, and online groups have a far greater hold on people who lack flesh-and-blood fraternity and connection. That’s many more people today than it was a year ago, thanks to COVID-19.
Look at the Vegas shooter. His brother’s description of him was one of anomie and isolation: “No affiliation. No religion. No politics. He never cared about any of that stuff.”
As I wrote of the San Bernardino shooter: “The San Bernardino shooter was a Muslim, but he was basically unknown to his local imam. He had apparently been radicalized by groups or individuals halfway around the world.”
“I incessantly have nothing other than scorn for humanity,” the Sandy Hook shooter wrote to a fellow gamer. ”I have been desperate to feel anything positive for someone for my entire life.”
The white nationalist who murdered Heather Heyer with his car in Charlottesville grew up without a father, without faith, without a hometown.
It’s easier to resent others and deny their humanity if you are connected to fewer humans.
Cultural commentator Robert Nisbet defined alienation this way: “The state of mind that can find a social order remote, incomprehensible, or fraudulent; beyond real hope or desire; inviting apathy, boredom, or even hostility.”
Also, conspiracy theories take hold in the isolated mind.
People who belong to flesh-and-blood communities are more likely to pick up social cues in unplanned, everyday interactions and to discern slowly and subtly that fundamentalist ideas and conspiracy theories are avoided or waved away. The quiet shunning of fundamentalism and conspiracy theories are crucial because you can’t really argue people out of those positions. As G.K. Chesterton pointed out, crazy conspiracy theories are often perfectly logical — they are also supremely unlikely. The best way to guide someone out of believing something irrefutable is to show them that happy people whom they respect think that that’s a crazy idea.
Hatred of others also withers away in groups. This is especially obvious in a diverse group, but it’s true of even more homogeneous groups, especially religious ones. Recall that among Trump voters, those who went to the church the most, which is not the same as saying the most religious, had the warmest attitudes toward racial minorities and immigrants.
COVID-19 will leave many bad things in its wake. One will be more extremism and radicalism.
