Loneliness and ethics
Our generation has been labelled “the age of loneliness”. This paper seeks to set out some of the contributing factors before exploring the ethical questions arising from what has been described as a “public health issue”.
Statue of 'Eleanor Rigby': Stanley Street, Liverpool
by Tommy Steele
It’s 1966.
Eleanor Rigby: picking up rice, where a wedding has been; waiting at the window.
Father McKenzie: writing the words of sermon no one will hear; working, darning his socks.
In the night when nobody’s there.
Eleanor Rigby: buried along with her name.
Father McKenzie: walking away from the grave.
And so 50 years ago The Beatles sang:
All the lonely people
Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people
Where do they all belong?
Eleanor Rigby is cited as a key moment of The Beatles’ evolution from being live performance pop band to something more akin to a lieder or tragic ballad. In singing about fate of an elderly woman they draw attention to those its too easy not to see. There was a real life Eleanor Rigby: born in Liverpool in 1895; married on Boxing Day; at 44 she died of a brain haemorrhage.
The real woman. An imagined life. A number 1 single.
All the lonely people.
Where do they come from?
It’s 2016.
Eleanor Rigby has been replaced immigrant hotel workers longing for home or a woman shopping in the hope of starting a conversation only to find that it’s only the automated till that talks. It’s the police officer on the night desk, rather than Father McKenzie, presides over the anguish of the mentally ill and the pain numbing revelry of St Patrick’s Day. This is the album Breaking the Spell of Loneliness.
And so, today, Ewan McLennan and George Monbiot sing:
There is such a thing as society
It keeps us from losing our minds
It’s working and living and laughing together
That makes us human kind.
Fifty years ago, perhaps the lonely were ‘the other’. The people on the margins of society - waiting at windows and darning socks into the night. But now, the lonely could be you. It could be me. As Monbiot writes, ‘an epidemic is sweeping the world: an epidemic of loneliness. Never before have we, the supremely social mammal, been so isolated. The rests are devastating: a collapse of common purpose, the replacement of civic life with a fug of consumerism, insecurity and alienation, we cannot carry on like this’ (George Monbiot, Breaking the Spell of Loneliness, Fellside Recordings, 2016).
Two years ago, he wrote about the impact of loneliness in an op ed piece in The Guardian. Rather than calling our generation the digital age, defining us by our artifacts just as we describe the stone, iron or space age, he chooses to say something about society. Rather than shutting himself away in a room to study loneliness, he collaborated on a project which might address rather than merely document the problem.
In this seminar, I hope that we can do more than document the problem too. Before we explore the ethical questions, let’s look at some of the statistics and the stories underlying song lyrics. That will enable us to identify some contributing factors - and the consequences. If loneliness is described as public health issue, how might we respond?
Britain has been dubbed ‘the loneliness capital of Europe’ ('Britain is the Loneliness Capital of Europe' in The Telegraph 18 June 2014 See here). A study by Independent Age reported that 700,000 men and 1.1 million women over the age of 50 experienced severe loneliness. The Campaign to End Loneliness cites research which explores the relationship between social isolation and physical health. Parallels are drawn between loneliness and the influence of cigarette smoking; the risk of high blood pressure and cognitive decline are also noted. Obesity, depression, anxiety, suicide are risk factors for the young as well as the elderly.
In a poll commissioned for the BBC Faith in the World week in 2013, half of English adults said they experienced loneliness. The ComRes survey also indicated that people ‘who have a religious faith are more likely than those with no faith to say they are experiencing greater levels of loneliness than they did ten years ago’ (ComRes Religion Loneliness Survey 2013). As a priest and a theologian perhaps that was the most shocking statistic of all; yet in terms of my own experience it made sense. Perhaps one response to social isolation is that we seek out community - including within the life of the church; perhaps too, our ways of gathering (including family services or the cliques that form) can increase a sense of not belonging. To what extent do we put on more ‘activities’ targeted at a particular group - to what extent are we called both to shift a culture and equip people to live well alone.
As an aside, according to the 2011 census data, 34.6 percent of participants identified as ‘single’. If we add those who’re separated, widowed or divorced, that rises to 53.2%. The percolate of those who are married dips to 46.6% compared with 50.9 in 2001. In the UK in 2013 there were 26.4 million households and of these, 29% consisted of only one person (ONS Office for National Statistics: Families and Households 2013). Unsurprisingly, there is a generational split with 54% of over 65s living alone compared with 10% of 18-24 year olds. However, the make up of households have shifted in other ways too: 27% of parents have at least one adult child living at home. Living in close proximity can lead to higher levels of stress; as does the geographical spread of so many of our family networks.
Such statistics help us to plot the basic fabric of our social structures. However, they do not reveal the deep-seated nature of our experience of loneliness. We have to look at anecdote as well as census data to understand more about the ethical pinch points of loneliness.
Earlier this year, a film by the director Sue Bourne called Age of Loneliness explored the narratives and situations behind the statistics. Loneliness affects people of all ages: admitting it can be a hard thing to do. I might enjoy my own company, but admitting that some days no one says my name can be painful. We are perhaps seen as vulnerable, needy or odd; perhaps we give the impression of being successful and contented; perhaps others make assumptions about our support networks and emotional needs.
Age of Loneliness: Sue Bourne BBC 1
For me, the words of psalmist says it out loud with a pathos which reminds us that this is not a contemporary phenomenon: ‘I lie awake; I am like a lonely bird on the house-top’ (Ps 102:7). Loneliness is a common human experience - fleeting moments, regular intervals or sustained periods. It doesn't correlate with our relational status or our business; or discriminate between those of us who're cup half empty or cup half full people. Perhaps we’re just too darn afraid to say it out loud.
Bourne invites people to do just that: I am lonely. If the film strikes a chord it also jolts us into understanding a painful reality. Grief, geography, illness, separation, work - all these things separate us. Several participants such as Iain and Clare talk about the mental health problems. We also meet Isobel19 year old student and Olive 100 year old church goer: what if university isn’t the time of your life? what if you’re afraid to die alone? We meet Ben the divorce and Jaye, like me, the 40 year-old singleton. We stake so much in relationships, what happens when they break down? We celebrate parenthood - but do we recognise the isolation of the new mum or father staying home to supervise homework? At 72, Richard joins an internet dating site: longevity intensifies bereavement in a particular way, a longing for companionship.
We are scared of loneliness - yet it raises some of the most ordinary day to day ethical questions: dealing with death, childlessness, mental health, parenthood, relationship breakdown; it forces us to explore human purpose and meaning - in work and without occupation; it is about intimacy and kinship, which takes us beyond sex and biology.
What does it mean for us to be social mammals in a digital age? Does our fear of missing out prevent us from embracing solitude creatively; are our social expectations distorted by Facebook? Walk down any street or get on a train - even the courteous eye contact with strangers is lost to us as we stare at our electronic devices. The very thing which connects us, separates us; yet when our network of family and friends, we rely even more on social media or Face Time.
To quote Monibot: ‘people travel by car instead of buses, use YouTube rather than the cinema. But these shifts alone fail to explain the speed of our social collapse. These structural changes have been accompanied by a life-denying ideology, which enforces and celebrates our social isolation’ (The Guardian 14 October 2014 The Age of Loneliness is Killing Us). Is loneliness the collateral damage of what he calls ‘heroic individualism’ - the self-made, self-starter, self-reliant?
He goes on to observe that ‘our lives are becoming nasty, brutish and long’; he identifies what he calls ‘palliatives’ for isolated older people including ‘men in sheds’ ('The Age of Loneliness'). But loneliness is not an issue for just one group of people - Bourne’s film deconstructs that myth. Loneliness is part of our human condition - we feel it even when we are with people. Rowan Williams, the theologian and former Archbishop of Canterbury puts it with heartrending, recognisable eloquence: ‘Loneliness has to do with the sudden clefts we experience in every human relation, the gaps that open up with such stomach-turning unexpectedness. In a brief moment, I and my brother or sister have moved away into a different worlds, and there is no language we can share... It is in the middle of intimacy that the reality of loneliness most dramatically appears’ (A Ray of Darkness, pp. 121-126).
The question remains, how do we break the cycle? Where are the pinch points of isolation and loneliness and what might we say in response? The ethical questions that are raised are both corporate and also deeply personal.
On the one hand, there is a collective and relational aspect - the initiatives that we can take, the opportunities we offer to come together. This is often less about doing things for people, but, as the ethicist Sam Wells argues in his book A Nazareth Manifesto, it is a matter of being with them. He challenges us to move beyond ‘help and service’ of those we see as vulnerable or need - which can be dehumanising, leaving them as passive recipients of our actions. Instead he explores a more sustainable and transformative approach. Perhaps we can foster an ethical approach to loneliness which flows from that vision of co-existence.
If you listen to Radio 4’s Clare in the Community, we catch a glimpse of all the potential pitfalls of maintaining professional boundaries at the risk of doing for as well as the potential impact of being with. Clare is a social worker with all the right jargon but who struggles to find the appropriate practical solutions. Last night’s episode ‘Joan Alone’ highlights why it is important to be aware of loneliness and isolation. Clare is reluctant to go to Joan’s 30th birthday because it’s her day off; but Joan has been preparing for weeks. We are confronted with the reality of depression; anger in response to social ‘graces’ which allow us to stay for a short while ‘if that’s alright with you’; the awkwardness of trying to do what we think is right; and an unexpectedly heartfelt expression of taking the risk of being with.
On the other hand, there is a deeply personal aspect - which is about how we take forward the challenge posed by the BBC’s response to the ComRes survey. That is how do we live well alone? This has been a concern of mine as someone who happens to be single and in public ministry. As a priest and a theologian I have to be able to give an account of our need for companionship and solitude; our need for intimacy and most acutely, how we face our mortality without fear. Being alone is something that we all face - as children, the never married, those whose relationships have ended; those whose partners are sick or who travel. In ordering the practical and emotional aspects of our lives, we need to cultivate both appropriate vulnerability (and openness to others) as well as a level of resilience.
The psychiatrist Anthony Storr in his book Solitude challenges the notion that success in personal relationships is the only or primary key to happiness. He uses a series of biographical sketches to illustrate the relationship between time alone and creativity; he seeks to demonstrate that the capacity to embrace solitude (whether as a result of our temperament or because of circumstances) is a sign of maturity. It is an approach that may be contributes something to an ethical approach to loneliness by freeing us from negative connotations. Sara Maitland is an author who has chosen to live alone in a remote part of Scotland. She has the ability to take her experience and allow it to speak into the busy and lonely realities of our daily lives. In How to be Alone she both challenges our cultural attitudes and also practical ideas and advice for how we can embrace our own company.
However, there are certain points of life where responding to loneliness - whether that’s being alone or being together - highlights very particular ethical questions. These are the ethical questions of the every day. Parenthood and childlessness; death and grief; work and a sense of purpose; social isolation and the loss of our narratives of self in the face of dementia for example. Michael Banner’s recent book The Ethics of Everyday Life, seeks to open up new areas of reflection which are of significance for the moral philosopher as for the moral theologian; for the social anthropologist as well as the ethicist. He explores the intricacies of our social life - looking at the feelings, practices and institutions we experience or inhabit, not just the controversial questions or extreme cases. You might expect a book such as this, to pay explicitly attention to the topic of our seminar; and yet, neither the word ‘lonely’ nor ‘loneliness’ appears in the index.
We might to focus one one particular area of human life as our conversation develops, but for now it might be worth highlighting one of his focal points and asking ourselves if we can go deeper in naming and responding to loneliness.
For now, I want to highlight his contribution to ‘conceiving conception’ and exploring the desire for a child of one’s own, Banner addresses childlessness. There is something intrinsically lonely about childlessness. If anyone has seen or read reviews of the Young Vic’s recent production of Yema, we cannot be unaware of the pressure to conceive; the impact of failed IVF cycles; the conversations that are avoided; the questions about personhood, legacy and grief; the resultant isolation from a partner and wider family as the imagined child does not come into being. For Banner, ‘the existence of a child of one’s own’ is not the answer to the tragedy of childlessness (The Ethics of Everyday Life, p. 81). Whilst I am critical of his approach - perhaps glossing over too quickly the tragic - I do find something creatively challenging in a wider understanding of kinship.
How do we fashion kinship amongst strangers? Although the church has what we call sacramental means of embodying and enacting such kinship - in baptism, in the gift of god-parenthood, in the Eucharist - we often fall back on segmenting our communities. For example, if we have a group for mothers and toddlers, do we then need an activity for those who aren’t parents, for the single, the widowed? Or can we recover a sense of inter-generational support and friendship?
Eleanor Rigby and the nameless hotel workers, the childless woman and the widower with dementia are in their own particular ways lonely. But they aren’t ‘alone’ nor are they ‘other’, somehow removed from us.
To think ethically about loneliness will place demands on us as a society - whether we invest in co-operative housing schemes or how we embed an ethical approach to care. To think ethically about loneliness means we have to engage across generations; how we use social media without being consumed by it; how we value friendship and non-biological kinship when our tax and social system is so grounded in supporting or passing on to ‘our own’ the resources that we have.
In ‘Reclaim the Streets’, we hear of seven billion lonely lives alone together. The next verse seems to hark back to a bygone era:
But once there was a time of feasts and holy days
Carnivals and fairs lit the town
However grim life got, folk came together
to turn the old world upside down.
Perhaps the closest we get to this are street parties for royal occasions. Can we once again fill our streets with life - sharing the nurture of children and ensuring that no one died unknown? The clarion call for Monibot is that we feast and share together:
So roll out the beer, lay out the tables
Hang the flags and come on out to eat
Open wide your doors and stand together
Today we’re reclaiming the street.
The day to day reality poses sustained ethical engagement: creating a culture of care and attention in the small things; acknowledging the humanity of others and restoring their dignity. Perhaps we might be acutely aware of loneliness in this pre-Christmas season. The social expectations - reinforced by advertising campaigns - is of a time full of joy and being together. But it can also be an empty time. It is at Christmas, those "sudden clefts" feel more acute.
Christmas adverts promise the perfect celebration - the idyll of togetherness. It was last year that John Lewis spent millions of pounds acknowledging that often we feel "half the world away" and inviting us to "show someone they're loved".
Christmas is so often viewed as a full time - but for those without work or home, those without someone to love them it can be an empty time. Our responses to others - and the way others reach out to us - go someway to cultivating community and expressing support in tangible ways. When we are lonely, deciding to "do something" can take us out of ourselves, creating a sense of purpose by giving us something else to focus on; but the depth of kindness expressed in that something is even more powerful if we are prepared to be with others, learning something of their story.
Part of my narrative response is to draw on the resources of my tradition. The resources of scriptural texts which say within its opening chapters that it is not good to be alone; that we are called to shared endeavour and companionship. To texts which also speak positively about being alone as a place of challenge, reflection, transformation and empowerment. And, in this season, I turn to the opening chapter of John's Gospel for a poetic and majestic expression of this love; it's sublime in its intimacy and scale. In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God. The Word was God.
This Word is full of light and light, truth and glory; grace and peace. This Word becomes flesh, coming to us and dwelling with us - even in the depths of our loneliness. Humanity is reconciled in this: the Word who abides close to the Father's heart, abides with us.
Whatever forms our ethical framework, there is a deep wisdom in that abiding with that we can imitate. The Gospels tell us the stories of Jesus as a nursing infant and a toddler in exile. He learnt a trade in the stability of a home in Nazareth, yet he was without honour there. He was tested in the wilderness and sought refreshing solitude on the hilltop. He was betrayed in a garden by one friend and denied in a courtyard by another. He cried out in dereliction on the cross, yet in alienation spoke words of forgiveness and acceptance. He was buried in a stranger's tomb and drew alongside disciples on a road; he shared his risen life with them in broken bread.
Perhaps an ethical response to loneliness to find ways of telling our stories; of being with others and hearing theirs. Of breaking bread together. Of reclaiming our streets.
© Julie Gittoes 2016
