After the Pandemic: Loneliness, Belonging, and Rebuilding Our Civic Infrastructure
I started blogging here at The Art of Association three years ago because, well, I was lonely. It was two months into the pandemic. I was spending most of my waking hours on zoom calls in a dingy garage suddenly recast as my “home office,” cheek by jowl with our hot water heater. As a bookish introvert, I hadn’t realized how much I needed the society of my fellow human beings.
Our family was holding up and staying healthy in ways that, looking back, were wonderful and lucky (albeit with some grumbling about my newfound enthusiasm for vegetarian cooking in certain quarters). But I was bereft of many other things that also gave my life meaning: going to church on Sunday mornings, shopping at the farmers’ market, browsing at the public library, chatting with neighbors as we walked our dogs at the park, going to Ann’s Coffee Shop for breakfast, eating lunch with colleagues at the Hewlett Foundation, hosting dinner parties, etc.
So I started this blog. I figured it would give me an alternative if imperfect and virtual means to engage with many of the people whom I was missing. One of my goals was to lift up the voices and work of leaders and organizations making outstanding contributions in civil society. Doing this has enabled me to reconnect with old friends and to make new ones. Each post prompts emails from readers with affirmations, challenges, and questions about what I’ve shared. Our exchanges, in turn, enrich my grounding in the world and how I think about it.
Tocqueville’s hypothesis
The blog has thus turned out to be an antidote for my pandemic-induced loneliness. But I also started it, and am keeping it going, for another reason: to explore a hypothesis I have harbored for some time, following Alexis de Tocqueville. In a nutshell, it holds that our civic and associational lives impart an exceptional character and resilience to democracy in America.
Many of us are familiar with Tocqueville’s observation that Americans have a knack for forming and using associations to solve common problems. In today’s parlance, this is all about the “direct impact” of nonprofit organizations. I remain intrigued by a related but distinct aspect of Tocqueville’s thought, one not so widely appreciated, regarding what we might call the “indirect impact” of voluntary associations.
Tocqueville believed that associations help free and equal individuals, who would otherwise lose themselves in private and self-interested concerns, become citizens worthy of the name. In his words, “feelings and ideas are renewed, the heart expands, and the human spirit develops only through the reciprocal action of human beings on one another.” It is through their associations, then, that Americans learn how to join forces, iron out differences, and solve problems together.
I sensed early on that the pandemic was going to put Tocqueville’s hypothesis to an acid test. I noted in my inaugural post that “the pandemic is challenging our society in ways that we have not seen since the Great Depression and World War II.” I went on to ask, “How are the activities and solidarity in our associational life helping the nation cope with and respond to the crisis? How might the social strains and economic fallout of the crisis erode these sources of strength?”
Three years later, we are in a position to begin answering these questions. But before we do, we need to acknowledge that, as things turned out, it was not only the pandemic that put our democracy and civil associations to the test.
Two weeks after my first post, a Minneapolis policeman murdered George Floyd, virtually right in front of the American people and, for that matter, the entire world. Already reeling from the pandemic, the country was engulfed by righteous, widespread protests and a profound racial reckoning. It was predominantly but not always peaceful.
Then came the 2020 presidential election. Even before the pandemic, Donald Trump had sought to undermine its legitimacy in case the result went against him. While officials scrambled to conduct free and fair elections amid a global pandemic, Trump ramped up his efforts to subvert them, culminating in the disgraceful events of January 6.
We witnessed all this behind masks (or not), socially distanced (or not), growing wary and resentful of fellow citizens and localities that made different choices. An omniscient and malignant diamond cutter could not have come up with a more intricate method of dividing and isolating us. The pandemic pounded away at the resulting social fractures like a pile driver. Spaces that had hosted our associational lives–schools, congregations, cafes, libraries, parks, movie theaters, playgrounds, town squares, and city halls–became civic battlegrounds.
To be sure, our associational muscles had already been atrophying for several decades. The titles of a handful of very good books tracing this demise tell the story: Bowling Alone, Diminished Democracy, The Big Sort, The Filter Bubble, The Vanishing Neighbor. But against this grim backdrop, the rolling and combined crisis of 2020-21 ran roughshod over us.
The Belonging Barometer Has Dropped
Where are we now? One early, powerful, and distressing set of signals came in March with a report from Over Zero and the American Immigration Council. Entitled The Belonging Barometer: The State of Belonging in America, it introduces a compelling new indicator of belonging, which it defines as follows:
“Belonging is an innate motivational drive–underpinned by our ancestral origins–to form and maintain positive emotional bonds with others. Our need for belonging is so great that it permeates our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors and is integrally connected to how we perceive and pursue our life goals.”
The report goes on to convey new survey research about the extent to which Americans feel they belong in five different life settings. These include their family, friendships, workplace, local community, and the nation. Belonging, the report notes, “is not a switch but a scale,” at the opposite end of which lies exclusion, with increasingly painful levels of ambiguity in between.
The data presented in the report are sobering. A majority of Americans report experiencing non-belonging (exclusion or ambiguity) in one or more life settings. Nearly 1 in 5 Americans report non-belonging in all five life settings. As we might expect, once we get beyond our family and friends, where 60% and 57% of us experience belonging, respectfully, feelings of ambiguity or exclusion become more common. Survey respondents reported non-belonging rates of 64% in their workplace, 68% in the nation, and 74% in their local community.
I found these last two data points especially depressing and confounding. The higher rates of non-belonging in the local community relative to the nation would, if replicated and validated over time, falsify Tocqueville’s hypothesis. He held that it was locally, where most of the reciprocal work of associating takes place, that democratic citizenship was most apt to develop, apply itself, and flourish. Insofar as his worldview holds up, Americans in aggregate should feel more like they belong in their local community vis-a-vis the nation as a whole.
I checked in with my friends Rachel Brown and Nichole Argo at Over Zero to learn what they made of this anomaly relative to Tocquevillian theory. They too were struck by it. We considered several alternative hypotheses, but we don’t yet have a solid, data-based explanation. My conjecture is that during the pandemic our social isolation, combined with inter- and intra-association squabbling, discombobulated our sense of belonging and abraded ties to our local communities.
We will learn more through follow-up assessments using the Belonging Barometer in future surveys. Hopefully as the isolation and conflicts borne of the pandemic fade, more of us will come to feel a sense of belonging in our local community. In the meantime, the barometer concept has brought an illuminating framework and new data to bear on dynamics many of us have been concerned about.
Countering An Epidemic of Loneliness
The findings of the barometer report fit with those of another issued last month: Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community. Dr. Vivek Murthy has done us a great service in promulgating it, and in drawing public attention to this issue more broadly via a recent book he has written on the topic.
Office of the Surgeon General advisories are “reserved for significant public health challenges that demand the American people’s immediate attention.” In introducing the Advisory, Murthy notes he was surprised to hear on a cross-country listening tour so many people tell him that,
“They felt isolated, invisible, and insignificant. Even when they couldn't put their finger on the word ‘lonely,’ time and time again, people of all ages and socioeconomic backgrounds, from every corner of the country, would tell me, ‘I have to shoulder all of life’s burdens by myself,’ or ‘if I disappear tomorrow, no one will even notice.’”
Reviewing research on a problem that was new to him, Murthy learned that nearly half of American adults experienced loneliness, and this was before the pandemic. Hence his urgency in responding to the problem worsened in its wake. He goes on to note that,
“The mortality impact of being socially disconnected is similar to that caused by smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day, and even greater than that associated with obesity and physical inactivity. And the harmful consequences of a society that lacks social connection can be felt in our schools, workplaces, and civic organizations, where performance, productivity, and engagement are diminished.”
The report later surveys the virtuous cycle that Tocqueville posited, as discerned through the lenses of modern social science. “Higher levels of social connection are associated with increased levels of civic engagement.” In turn, “emerging evidence has shown that civic engagement helps to develop ‘empathy, problem solving [and] cooperation’ among community members.”
The first of six pillars presented in the report to improve social connection is a call to “strengthen social infrastructure in local communities.” The key recommendations for making this happen include “design the built environment to promote social connection, establish and scale community connection programs, [and] invest in local institutions that bring people together.”
A subsequent recommendation for “what philanthropy can do” calls upon it to underwrite such efforts, both promising startups and established ones that merit scaling. Philanthropy can also fund public goods for the social connection sector in the form of evaluations, knowledge sharing, convenings, and communications platforms. (Let me share one unsolicited recommendation for funders here. Sponsoring biennial national surveys of the Belonging Barometer, with sufficient power to allow for local and state inferences, would be an exemplary contribution!)
The good news is that several philanthropic efforts along these lines are underway. They include the work of the New Pluralists Collaborative and members of PACE (whose work we discussed earlier in a conversation with CEO Kristen Cambell). The Omidyar Network has also launched an important new initiative with the goal of building cultures of belonging.
An especially promising idea still in development is a new Trust for Civic Infrastructure. It builds on an idea in a report from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Our Common Purpose: Reinventing American Democracy for the 21st Century. I welcomed this concept when it was proposed in 2020 and would be greatly encouraged to see it finally come to fruition.
These philanthropic initiatives depart from the patterns of much recent funding in the democracy field, which is increasingly focused on near-term interventions very close to if not directly involved in politics. In contrast, funding for civic and social infrastructure provides public goods that a diverse range of Americans and their associations can use for their chosen ends over the long term. As such, it can help seed and cultivate new forms and varieties for our associational lives. They may have withered and in some instances been torn up by our recent calamities. But they can grow again–and we will need them to.
