| > We live in houses with yards and fences and don't talk to each other. Yes, ironically, putting more people together creates more isolation. People live in extremely dense apartment housing in cities - and still don't know their neighbors, or want to know them. We think of the world as moving in the direction of coming together; of connecting. Yet "belonging" and "apartness" are duals of each other. Without a sense of separate and exclusive group identities, we are all equally alone. Consider that starvation was not a major cause of human death before the development of cities. In the hunter-gatherer days, a band would perish or survive together. Only when settlement and agriculture became the norm would we sit and watch our neighbors die of starvation. When I hear Zuckerberg say he believes in connecting people, it makes me cringe. We're already over-connected. When you're connected to everyone, you're connected to no one. Isolation and ultimately self-absorption come from a loss of the clearly defined ingroup vs outgroup rivalry we thrive on. We strive for universal human brotherhood; yet "kindness for all means coldness to your neighbor." There may be a way forward past both tribalism and contemporary nihilism, but we won't get there on the thin gruel of rational morality. |