Killer by Adamski and Seal was one of the biggest and most influential hits of the 1990s. Its title might suggest a pre-occupation with criminal violence, but actually the song is about loneliness – as made clear in the lyric “it’s loneliness that’s the killer.”
It turns out that Messrs Adamski and Seal were on to something. A growing body of research suggests that loneliness – and specifically the feeling of being lonely – is detrimental to both body and mind.
Writing in the New Republic, Judith Shulevitz summarises the latest research:
If that is the case, then we have a problem because loneliness is on the increase:
It's not just the greying of the population that’s driving the loneliness epidemic; family breakdown is another contributory factor:
Furthermore, scientists are confirming what should be intuitively obvious, which is that emotional deprivation in childhood has lifelong effects:
This isn’t just a matter outward behaviour, the effects of emotional isolation have been detected in the wiring of the brain and even gene expression. The good news is that much of the impact of loneliness – even the physical impacts – are reversible.
Shulevitz concludes her article by quoting Steve Cole, a professor of medicine and psychiatry at UCLA:
“Choose our life well” – what better slogan for a liberal society! And yet the choice that liberalism (both social and economic) gives us, is the freedom to break the personal ties that define a traditional society. Mobility, divorce, abortion, euthanasia, secularism, immigration, offshoring, tax avoidance – the things that all these features of modern life have in common is the severing of previous connections. Of course, for many people, this works out to their satisfaction, but other people get left behind – and alone.
For libertarians this is just the price has to be paid for freedom. The liberal approach, however, is to try and compensate through state intervention. Early years intervention programmes like Sure Start are a key example of this approach:
But, surely, the fundamental problem here is is not the failure to help families raise their children, but the failure of families to raise their children.
There is no clearer illustration of the difference between liberalism and the emerging politics of post-liberalism. Liberalism is about substituting for family and community; post-liberalism is about restoring family and community.