The long loneliness is seen in the woman who never had children in order to please a selfish husband, who then divorced her for a younger woman. It is there in the face of a sincere, but nerdy young man who can’t find a decent girl to marry or the faithful young woman who is left on the shelf because all the men she knows are either panting for promiscuity or frightened of commitment.
A pastor who is even half doing his job will be on the front lines of what might be called “the long loneliness.” It’s a term I’ve coined for the epidemic of alienation in our society.
It surfaces in many forms with different people. The long loneliness is seen in the woman who never had children in order to please a selfish husband, who then divorced her for a younger woman. It is there in the face of a sincere, but nerdy young man who can’t find a decent girl to marry or the faithful young woman who is left on the shelf because all the men she knows are either panting for promiscuity or frightened of commitment.
It surfaces in the faces of children broken by their parents’ divorce, the young men who don’t know how to be men, and the young women trying hard to be men. It’s revealed in the old people sitting alone in the assisted living center with no one to visit because they only had two children and those children had no children and besides “they are very busy and live in Oregon.”
I could go on describing the multitudinous manifestations of the long loneliness brought about by the sexual selfishness of the revolution of the 1960s. The human race is only now realizing what demons flew out of that particular Pandora’s box. We have done what our race has never done before: we have learned how to turn off and turn on our baby machine.
Mary Eberstadt’s new book Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics tackles the problem not from the pastor’s study, but the research journalist’s desk. Puzzled by the sudden surge of identity politics, Mrs. Eberstadt traces its genesis to the sexual revolution. In a short, but punchy and well researched study, she suggests (more than proves) how the sexual revolution contributed to the breakdown of the family which consequently left people as social orphans.
In her cornerstone chapter, “A New Theory: The Great Scattering,” Mrs. Eberstadt traces some of the causes of family breakdown. Divorce and absent fathers, alienated, angry, and confused children, the weirdness of artificial conception and it’s dysfunctional and distorted family relationships, the lack of siblings due to small families and the falling birth rate, all contribute to an epidemic of loneliness, alienation, insecurity, and lack of clear identity and belonging. Declining rates of church-going also contribute to the alienation since shared faith strengthens identity and belonging.
Mrs. Eberstadt then focuses on four particular expressions of identity politics showing that all four are the “primal screams” of faceless, lonely people grabbing at an identity like a shipwrecked person clutching at flotsam.
