Provocation: The Frenzy and the Fury
Or, why the Surgeon General's Report on loneliness makes me angry.
The Provocation is a regular feature at Wisdom of Crowds. Once a month, subscribers have the chance to pester, goad, or torment one of our writers. Our readers are constantly adding to the conversation — by commenting or writing an article. But the Provocation is a way of starting a conversation.
This month, it’s ’s turn at the scaffold. He chose to respond to a provocation by . Enjoy!
— Santiago Ramos, Executive Editor
Hard not to pick up a glove when it’s so stylishly flung, and by one of our most alert readers.
To honor the challenge, I’d like to go after one of the more publicly generous figures in America. Eighteen months ago, the Surgeon General Vivek Murthy published his “Advisory on Loneliness and Isolation.” The document sought to bring to public attention what he took to be a major health crisis.
“Loneliness,” he writes, “is far more than just a bad feeling […] 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.” The advisory goes on to argue that the levels of loneliness in America have now risen to the scale of “epidemic” affecting “people of all ages and socioeconomic backgrounds.” Murthy is candid about his own personal experiences of loneliness and the realization as Surgeon General of how many people are suffering acute isolation. These concerns draw him to argue that we need to “reorient society to that deeper fulfillment that comes from deep connection to ourselves and others.”
The document is warm, empathetic, rigorously researched, and entirely inadequate to the civilizational turmoil we’re experiencing.
***
Weirdly, since the election, my reading habits have gone in completely different directions. On the one hand, I’ve become vaguely obsessed with reading Democrats trying to sort out how they lost. It is a genre that includes Nancy Pelosi essentially blaming the inadequacy of their messaging; Michael Tomasky putting that burden not on Democratic mistakes but on the power of the right wing media; and there is an ongoing argument about whether democrats need moderation to win. Like the Surgeon General’s report, it’s a polite genre—measured, data-laden writing about working class voters and swing state demographics (with a few moments of fire breathing).
On the other hand, I’ve been falling back into a much older fascination for me, namely reading about ancient rites of sacrifice. Here’s a description of a prominent practice in the late Roman Imperial period called taurobolium. A 4th century writer offers the most comprehensive description:
The high priest goes down into the depths to be consecrated, in a trench dug in the ground, with strange bands round his head […] Above him they construct a platform by laying plans in a loose arrangement […] Here they bring a huge bull with shaggy, savage brow, bound with garlands of flowers around his shoulders or entwining his horns […] When the beast for sacrifice has been brought into position here, they pierce his breast with a hunting spear consecrated to the gods; the vast wound pours forth a stream of blood, and over the bridge of planks below a reeking river gushes out and seethes all around.
The priest who is hidden directly beneath the bull,
catches the shower, holding his filthy head under all the drops, fouling his clothes and his whole body. He even throws back his head, and offers his cheeks to the downpour, puts his ears under it, exposes his lips, his nostrils and washes his eyes themselves in the stream.
To emphasize the point,
after the corpse has become stiff … the pontifex comes out of the trench, a ghastly sight, and he shows off his soaking head … everyone hails him and from a distance offers him reverence — because of the worthless blood of a dead ox bathed him.
So here’s the thing: reading the Surgeon General makes me angry. I’ve delved into his Advisory probably 50 times, and in each instance, I can feel the frustration rising as I move past the early sections on health outcomes into what Murthy calls “A National Strategy to Advance Social Connection. ” Its recommendations include items like:
“Enable Pro-Connection Public Policies”
“Establish and Scale Community Connection Programs”
“Cultivate a Culture of Connection”
The specific recommendations run from telling local governments to “incentivize the assessment and integration of social connection” to telling individuals to “invest time in nurturing your relationships through consistent, frequent, high quality engagement.”
In principle, I should be thrilled. Murthy is writing at the national level about an issue I’ve spent my career obsessing over. I wrote my PhD thesis and first book making the case that loneliness is intrinsically political, and did so a decade before it became a matter of public interest. And all of this, I think, because I feel matters of intimacy very deeply — both the quiet ecstasy of seeing another person, or being seen; along with that strange pounding pain of isolation when that’s absent.
But this is where I begin to feel furious. Somewhere within the genteel habits of the Democratic party sits an evasion. There is in my view something cynical, almost malign in being able to take on something as intimate as loneliness and conclude with recommendations for a “pro-connection public policy framework.”
I have a hard time seeing what good a “community program […] that connect[s] us to our neighbors” is likely to do if it does not somehow find a way to drag the actual experience of life out into the open. The astonishing thing about old sacrificial rituals is that they were public. These were not quiet acts of piety or violence, but entirely serious adult affairs played out at the highest levels of state. In slitting the most muscular of animals from below and watching its still palpitating heart drench a priest in blood, the Romans are directly and publicly confronting nearly every ambiguity of human life — mortality, fragility, revenge, lust. It’s a ritual of collective anger and purgation.
Most Roman sacrifices tried to set off the cleanliness of the priest from the impurity of the animal, but in taurobolium the entire point is to emphasize that there is no distance, to make clear that no one, not even the priest can evade death and filth.
Sacrifices were not, I emphasize, Good. We find sacrifice — animal, and often human — spread out almost universally, on every continent and in cultures widely separated from one another. And there are extremely good reasons that we’ve tried to transmute, dilute, sublimate this impulse. The cruelty of many of these regimes is completely unappreciated in modern retellings. And if the goal of sacrifice was to ritualize the violence of human community as the great René Girard has argued, the idea of turning instead to the neutrality of judicial systems seems entirely welcome.
And yet.
There has been a lot of talk about hypocrisy since the election, including on this very site. The problem is that it’s hard to believe in a humanity that is too polite. As Democrats, we talk about saving democracy and creating space for “inclusive belonging.” The Surgeon General tells us that “a culture of connection rests on core values of kindness, respect, service, and commitment to one another.” But where is the humanity in any of this? How dare he pick up something as essential as human intimacy and render it so anemic? The problem with politeness is that it presses anyone who feels anything with too much heat to the shadows. Fury, agony, love, jealousy — these are human matters. What good are public rituals that don’t have space for rage or pain or passion or love? (It is perhaps no accident that Trump’s cabinet includes Linda McMahon, who built the WWE, which is perhaps as close as we get to public rituals of rage). If we can’t feel these things publicly, then we end up huddled away, festering privately.
Our institutions still match this. Poverty happens in obscurity. Death in assisted care facilities, and hospitals. And I see very little in the Surgeon General’s proposals that would drag these human realities back into the light of day.
We need death rituals, periods of mourning, public rites of repentance and absolution. Maybe at times we do need “kindness, respect, service” — but we also need the fury and frenzy of humanity.
This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.
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gemma, this is such a lovely response, and very much in the spirit of the argument. I suppose the question is where do we find this in a secular frame? Is there some intrinsic reason that secular society is having a difficult time creating this kind of vulnerability ?(Maybe AA is an exception—though there is a kind of spiritualism even there?)
I think this is an excellent analysis. Optimization and toxic positivity guide many programs on socialization. Don’t get me wrong, kindness and joy are essential parts of life. But so too, as Kimbriel notes, are the painful affects of life. True connection bonds and supports through both. This piece notes the importance that rituals of grief, etc can play here. And I think we forsake those elements of spiritual traditions to our detriment. Epistemological research shows that all social connection is good, but connection derived through religious affiliations offers an added benefit (ie greater effect size than just club memberships). I don’t think this has anything to do with theological beliefs, but rather as a marker that these social connections also take place in the context of rituals that have connected people through millennia as they faced life’s challenges.