and the rest of us as well

Thomas Homer-Dixon published (Globe and Mail, December 31,2021) an essay speculating on the possibility of American civil war, and suggesting that it is time for Canada to get its house in order to withstand the coming upheavals. He writes, “…the risks to our country in their cumulative effect could easily be existential, far greater than any in our federation’s history.” He then proposes that we respond with a…”permanent parliamentary committee.” 

Wonderful—the mountain has laboured and given birth to a mouse! The disproportion between the apparent danger he claims to foresee and the response he proposes is comic-opera material. If we took his predictions seriously, we would be responding by building independent infrastructure NOW, and expanding the military, sourcing its equipment from non-U.S. suppliers, with conscription a possibility. We would certainly need the wherewithal to respond if one or more militia groups were to spill over the border seeking refuge or pursuing an enemy. However the disconnect between the danger Professor Homer-Dixon foresees and the response he advocates might indicate a more fundamental issue: the inability to acknowledge a problem for which we have no words and not even a concept of an effective response. 

Because he and the rest of us believe that the only tool we have is a hammer, we define the problem as a familiar nail. Thus when confronted with increasing political extremism and polarization, we diagnose the cause as something we recognize, whether it be a particular individual (Donald Trump), capitalism,  poverty, or the decline of the family, and we then settle into our hardened ideological silos. This isn’t the first time we have been confronted by mounting political instability and extremism. We look back in dismay at the previous occasion in the 1930s, but we haven’t learned from it. 

Some people get it. Michele Goldberg wrote (July 19, 2021,New York Times): “There are many causes for the overlapping dysfunctions that make contemporary American life feel so dystopian, but loneliness is a big one.” She quotes Hannah Arendt: ‘…lonely people are drawn to totalitarian ideologies. The chief characteristic of the mass man is not brutality and backwardness, but his isolation and lack of normal social relationships,’ Arendt concluded in The Origins of Totalitarianism, describing those who gave themselves over to all-encompassing mass movements.” Arendt, Simone Weil, and Rebecca West all pointed out how the pre-WWII left failed by insisting on confronting their opponents only on the basis of material issues, foreshadowing the bewildered present day commentators who keep repeating that the working-class supporters of Trump ‘voted against their own best interests.’

Goldberg goes on to quote a Trump supporter interviewed at a campaign event, “Tell us where we need to be, and we just drop everything and we go,” she said. “Nobody cares about if they have to work. Nobody cares about anything.” 

Goldberg concludes, “If you give people’s life meaning, they’ll give you everything.” What the rise of Donald Trump really indicates is the emergence of alienation as a source of political motivation in its own right, superceding other issues because it is experienced on a more personal level.

The same forces that are shredding society in the U.S. are also at work in Canada, and in fact, all over the world. (The Globalization of Addiction, Bruce Alexander, Oxford University Press). No government seems to have an effective policy to deal with the combined set of problems that recur again and again, and have an overwhelming impact on the everyday lives of ordinary people. A preliminary list would include unemployment, domestic violence, substance abuse, child abuse or neglect, racial conflict, homelessness and gang activity. What they have in common is that they all involve personal identity, meaning and belonging, and because they aren’t about resources that can be measured and divided, they can’t be resolved by bargaining and deal-making.

Social democrats like to combine them under the heading of poverty, and claim that they have an answer in social programs. Yes, you can go to detox, and rehab, maybe even get a job. And you can, with your minimum wage, entry-level job, live in the kind of apartment that is the human equivalent of the places where they keep battery chickens. For the need for human significance and recognition you do what everyone else does, and buy a synthetic substitute at the mall, only with your income you can’t buy very much of it. This is the dirty secret at the heart of all social programs, and the reason why there is so little enthusiasm for them even among those who might expect to be helped by them: even the most successful social program can only re-insert an individual into a system that treats all people as replaceable—and disposable—commodities.

Two different approaches to homelessness illustrate this point. Both place homeless people into tiny-house villages. One, in Los Angeles, assigns every resident a case manager, who monitors residents in substance-abuse treatment and job-seeking programs, and requires them to graduate into employment and market rental housing within a specified period. The second, in Toronto, doesn’t involve case managers; residents can stay long as they want, provided they aren’t too disruptive. Here, the web of social connections that grows between residents—for some, it’s all that’s keeping them alive—is recognized as valuable and important. Some have voluntarily enrolled in harm reduction programs and are weaning themselves off drugs, and have even come to help manage the project. 

A different initiative began with James Harry seeking out members of his Haisla nation living on the streets of Vancouver, urging them to go through drug treatment and return to their traditional territory, saying that their nation wanted and needed their potential contributions. At first he used his own resources, but when the Haisla governing council noticed his effort, they were impressed enough to make his project a paid position. Three other indigenous nations have since joined the project and hired their own outreach workers.

Belonging, significance and an identity in which one can take pride: these are essential for all human beings. However, the corporate and bureaucratic agenda continually erodes belonging and identity by trivializing them, by ignoring them and by counterfeiting them; and it has been so successful that we don’t realize what it is doing to us or why it matters. The resulting emptiness is an ever-expanding market for counterfeit community, which is what most advertising aimed at the general public is really selling; the canned traditions of Martha Stewart, the pseudo-community of fans implied by sports broadcasts, the close-knit conviviality portrayed in the accompanying beer commercials. These can never be anything but bait-and-switch schemes because the belonging and identity they promise isn’t something that can actually be bought and everyone on both sides of the deal knows it.

Pseudo-identity and belonging don’t last even as long as the commodity they are used to promote; the TV series whose characters became real to you is cancelled, the team whose jersey you bought last month is sold to a different billionaire and moved across the country, the fans who chanted with you in the stadium don’t even recognize each other outside on the street. Your culture is entirely generated and manipulated for profit, your job is offshored and your skills obsolete, so you double down on the parts of your identity that can’t be cancelled or leached away—the race and gender that are encoded in your body. Then snide media opinionators hold you up to contempt on TV and encourage your children to despise you.

The central role of social cohesion is an accepted fact among crime prevention and public health workers. Criminal involvement, cardiovascular disease, depression, addiction, and most obviously, suicide, all have a proven connection to its decay. Any interview with a substance abuser, a homeless person, a former foster child or gang member will tell us the same thing: community is not a luxury or an option; it’s as much a vital necessity as food and shelter. It’s where we receive recognition and approval or disapproval, where we extend or withhold trust, where we find our sense of purpose. People will forego material advantage and risk personal safety for it, and without it they lack the will to live. 

In supporting the candidate who at least indirectly referenced these issues (acting on them, not so much), Trump supporters might have been expressing an inarticulate but more authentic sense of their own best interests than the elite commentators who deplored their choice. It explains their desperate violence in the attempted insurrection, and their continued fanatical loyalty. When some of them became anti-vaxxers playing Russian roulette with their lives and those of others in the cause of ‘freedom,’ their actions indicated that they believed their lives, life itself, was meaningless. If instead of demonizing them, we could manage to listen, we would hear something we urgently need to acknowledge: alienation is an existential threat, to individuals and society.

And after that, what do we do? Why is it so hard to even talk about it as an issue? One reason might be that whenever someone raises the issue, an encircling flock of vultures immediately thrust their way into the discussion to proffer each one’s particular conclusion about the cause and produce their trademarked remedy: racial equality, law and order, feminism, or spiritual awakening—among others.

Another reason might be that alienation is a twenty-dollar word, seldom used outside of academia. There doesn’t seem to be an equivalent in everyday speech, and as Orwell explained, it is overwhelmingly difficult to discuss an issue for which a vocabulary doesn’t exist.  If the rise of populism is the “muffled roaring of deaf-mutes trapped in a building that is slowly filling with smoke,” in the words of poet Denise Levertov, we have no subtitles for it. 

The collapse of social cohesion is going to continue eroding our lives whether we acknowledge it or not. The question is not whether it is going to find a political expression, but how, and with whom. The fact that one such manifestly unqualified candidate could get so much mileage from it is an indication of its power—the political equivalent of splitting the atom. What we have to concern ourselves with is not so much the second coming of Donald Trump, but the others, more disciplined and more suave, who will have taken note and be working the same patch now that its potential has been demonstrated. 

The recent phenomenon of the ‘Freedom’ convoy provides further proof, if more was needed, of the raw energy waiting to be tapped. The real story emerges from the comments on the YouTube clips, from people who weren’t actually involved in any real sense, but nevertheless experienced a huge upsurge in (national) identity and pride as evidenced in the over-the top emotionalism of their posts. Significantly, it has expanded far beyond its original goals to verge on insurrection, and seeded spin-off efforts in other areas. The sense of belonging and being part of something significant overwhelms critical judgement about what they are supporting, and if we don’t heed the depth and intensity of the need it indicates, we will be in serious trouble.

Although the right-wing populists may have got to the issue first, it doesn’t follow that they have a copyright on it. Another political entity could address the same issue, and by doing it better, co-opt their support. The optimal approach would be to openly acknowledge the malignant threat of alienation and together develop the criteria that solutions to it would have to satisfy, while not allowing opportunists of all ideological flavours to barge in with each one’s particular ready-mixed panacea. While no politician currently active in the English-speaking world has the credibility or skill to pull that one off, perhaps we can achieve the same result through learning by doing. 

It isn’t what anyone wants to acknowledge, but we might need our shored-up defenses. However, given that ideas don’t need passports, we might be able to do more than that, by leading by example. Because it IS within our ability to make the preservation and revitalization of community the lens through which all policies are evaluated—every policy, at every level of government. From environmental policy, to health policy, to town planning, to indigenous relations, to immigration policy, prioritizing it over economic growth, although it could easily have a positive economic effect. We will discover how rich and sophisticated the toolkit of community-building initiatives has become, and how the complete set has the potential to be much more than the sum of its parts. 

It isn’t dangerous and it doesn’t have to be expensive. Nor do we have to wait for government action, because politicians ratify cultural decisions the public has already made. We can launch initiatives like this. Or this one, (established in Falangist Spain, of all unlikely places). Or even this one (full disclosure; I made it myself). We just might surprise ourselves by moving the dial on problems long considered to be intractable—and it could siphon off the energy feeding alienation-driven populism without shedding a drop of blood.