CONTEMPORARY NONSENSE
All Happy Families Are Alike .
...
There is an inescapable affinity between socialists and communists.
Critics who are external to both of these groups are aware of such an affin–
ity and their members also have some sense of that affinity, much as they
disapprove of each other's actions and however vehemently each censures
the other. Many socialists feel sufficient affinity with the Soviet Union and
with communists to be embarrassed by what they do; they regret the mis–
deeds of communists as one regrets a misdeed by a member of one's own
family or institution. The relations between many social democrats and col–
lectivist liberals on the one hand, and communists on the other, are like the
relations of two religious sects which have become separated from one
another. Each is embittered by what it regards as the other's betrayal of the
ideal which both invoke.
Edward Shils, "The Social Ownership of
the Means of Production," in
Survey
(London), #113, Autumn 1980 (published
Summer 1982), p. 134
Miss Lonelyheart
The journalistic issue of the day may well be the dangers of an rea–
sons for loneliness . As Philip Slater said in his book, "The Pursuit of Lone–
liness," American cultural institutions are structured to make relations
among people difficult at best. We hold as self-evident the need for
"space, " for privacy, for individualism, for the right to compete . No won–
der we are wary of one another. We are lonely because we have cut our–
selves off from traditional values, from history, from the future.
The major theme in sociology since Emile Durkheim's 19-th century
[sic! ] work, "Suicide," has been that man's pathological behavior-crime,
alcoholism, suicide-may ultimately result from alienation from society.
Vicki Abt, Associate Professor of Sociology,
Pennsylvania State University, in a letter to
the Sunday
New lVrk Times Magazine,
on
"Loneliness in America,"
September 19, 1982
