Susan Pinker is Shocked and Startled. What is the World Coming To?! should be the title of her new, not very interesting cuts job, I mean, book. And its subtitle should be: Why Can’t Everyone be a Bit More Like Me!?I’m a Psychologist and Columnist, I Know This Stuff – Well, I Read about it on the Internet and Shoved it All, Ten Years after it Became Common Knowledge, Willy-Nilly, into my Latest.
It takes a village to raise a child, holds the African proverb. In The Village Effect Susan Pinker holds that lots of people now live alone. Many of them try to find mates on online dating sites, she reveals. Teenagers use computers a lot, she discovers. Some teenagers, she uncovers, will send text messages to one another, even if they’re in the same room. By the way: if you have lots of close friends they can give you the emotional support you need to get through a life-threatening illness and you’re more likely to find a friend of a friend who will donate you a spare kidney. Talking to someone on Skype isn’t the same as seeing them in the flesh. Solitary confinement is horrible.
Pinker’s last book, called The Sexual Paradox, looked at gender differences in the workplace and became a mild hit in the now too heavily leeched Malcolm Gladwell vein.
Her latest takes a look at why face-to-face contact matters. An interesting theme, if anybody, ever, in the history of the world had argued that face-to-face contact does not matter. But nobody has, and nobody will, so Susan is left defending an accepted truth. There is a “common assumption”, she alleges, wrongly, “that all social networks are interchangeable”.
The germ of the idea came to her in the fitness centre after Veronica, 37, admitted to Pinker that she cried every Saturday. “The loneliness is unbearable,” she said. Veronica was just one of three whole single working childless women that Pinker, a married mother of three, spoke to on the subject. It was enough to persuade her that Sartre was wrong. Hell is not other people, she deduces, it’s living alone. “If you want to live a long, healthy life,” one imagines Pinker may have said to the unfortunate Veronica, “Worrying and working hard won’t kill you. But doing it alone just might.” What reduces your chances of dying the most? Pinker cherry-picks her stats from Google and comes up with: social integration, strong relationships and smoking fewer than 15 cigarettes a day — in that order. She fails to clock that strong relationships and being in one can be mutually exclusive.
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She does undertake a bit of research, infiltrating a village in Sardinia where everyone is really old, no one ever leaves and distrust of strangers is endemic. The village brought to my mind the film Deliverance but, to Pinker, it illustrated the warm cuddly power of close ties. “Clearly there is something about the special attention spouses offer each other that trumps being footloose and fancy free,” she says, ignoring all dysfunctional marriages, except to say that women feel them more acutely than men. The thought hangs in the air.
“If you’ve ever attended a religious service where you’re prompted to stand, sit, bow, kneel, sing, or clap in unison,” she writes, “you’ll know how viscerally persuasive it feels to be one of many — and how difficult it is to resist.” No. Don’t agree. “Doing the wave at an arena or saluting the flag prompts similar feelings of unity.” No. I do not copy. . . 25 per cent “of us” – Americans? Canadians? (most of the research cited here derives from that continent) — are introverts, she admits, in a three-page footnote.
Very seldom — once — is she interesting: when she cites a finding that shows that reassuring text messages sent from mothers to daughters do not have the same oxytocin-boosting effects as real-life contact. But lacking real investigative depth or insight, and a too heavy reliance on the obvious barely elevates this moan about computers and fractured society above an opinion column dated ten years ago.
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