Sarah Hempel, in a routine excess of baseless nostalgia for primitive communism, says that in the past, “people didn’t live alone in the same numbers,” that they “spent more time with their families, church, and communities” because “[t]here were no TVs or internets to keep them home away from other people.”
Funny, but nobody forces me to watch TV rather than hang out with my neighbors. In fact, just about every day I choose to watch TV rather than hang out with my neighbors. You know why? Because neighbors, by and large, bother me. On the other hand, when I want to, I can go talk to my neighbors—and frequently, we talk about things we saw on TV; it creates a shared culture for us.
Previous generations weren’t sitting around thinking about how happy they were that they were stuck together with nothing else to do. They were bored out of their minds; they were in constant arguments and squabbles with one another; they were every bit as lonely; they longed for rooms of their own; they saw privacy as a luxury only the rich could afford. Human beings are most emphatically not “communal beings.” They are individuals who have the right to choose for themselves when they want to spend time with their families, churches and communities, and who, given that choice—as they are in modern society to a degree they never were in the past—frequently make the choice to spend time alone. If Sarah Hempel does not make that choice; if she hates being alone so much—and her art studio doesn’t seem all that crowded—then that’s fine. But we should not have contempt (even the mild sort of contempt veiled by pity) for those who prefer to spend time alone, or in the company with only a few choice people—a decision which people were denied in the past. I don’t deny that in the past people were too poor to afford their own homes. What I want is evidence that people were happier that way—and some explanation of why, if they were happier that way, they don’t go back to it.
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