Social isolation

“ The people who have led us on to shut ourselves in, and who now want us to break out, warn us against the terrors of "isolation." Our ancestors all came here to isolate themselves from the social burdens and inherited errors of the old world. When the others are all over ears in trouble, who would not be isolated in freedom from care? ”

“ They showed that the crowded city life can bring out human nobleness as well as human baseness; that to be crushed into contact with their fellow-men, forced at least the loftier and tender souls to know their fellow-men, and therefore to care for them, to love them, to die for them. Yes—from one temptation the city life is free, to which the country life is sadly exposed—that isolation which, self-contented and self-helping, forgets in its surly independence that man is his brother’s keeper. ”

“ I have indeed observed cases of a sort of splendid social isolation here, which are not without a certain amount of pathos—people who know no one, who have money and finery and possessions, only no friends. ”

“ How could the isolated state of nature endure for a year in face of them? Or what was the precipitating incident which suddenly set them to work, and drew the primitive men from an isolation so profound that they barely recognised one another, into that semi-social state in which the family was founded? ”

“ Its aim, in fact, was to end this isolation.
But the community from which the worker is isolated is a community of quite a different nature from and of quite other dimensions than the political community. This community, from which his own labour separates him, is life itself, physical and intellectual life, human morality, human activity, human enjoyment, the human community. ”

“ Here such trivialities as starched collars, blacked boots, and coats according to the mode compel attention. Society has its fixed rules, by which it enforces social continuity and connection. To neglect these throws one off the ring; and, with rare exceptions, isolation is barrenness and death. ”

“ More important than this is the result of the isolation upon the worker herself. There is nothing more devastating to the inventive faculty, nor fatal to a flow of mind and spirit, than the constant feeling of loneliness and the absence of that fellowship which makes our public opinion. If an angry foreman reprimands a girl for breaking a machine, twenty other girls hear him, and the culprit knows perfectly well their opinion as to the justice or injustice of her situation. ”

“ Doubtless, it is indispensable to all our notions of comfort, and of the due independence of social life—it is, indeed, one of the main elements of the constitution of a family, that a certain degree of isolation should be maintained and respected ”

“ The motives to self-isolation may be because youth feels its lack of physical or moral force to compete with men, or they may be due to the failure of others to concede to the exactions of inordinate egotism and are directly proportional to the impulse to magnify self, or to the remoteness of common social interests from immediate personal desire or need, and inversely as the number and range of interests seen to be common and the clearness with which social relations are realized. ”

“ This isolation would be at worst a group isolation, and there can be no doubt that my friend is right in pointing out that there is much more social toleration for an act committed under the sanction of a group than for an isolated act that may be merely impulsive misbehaviour masquerading as high principle. ”

“ Sociologists are able to take into account forms of isolation not considered by the students of the physical environment and of racial inheritance. Studies of folkways, mores, culture, nationality, the products of a historical or cultural process, disclose types of social contact which transcend the barriers of geographical or racial separation, and reveal social forms of isolation which prevent communication where there is close geographical contact or common racial bonds. ”

“ The community may maintain itself in a state of complete isolation, but more usually there are tracks or roads to the centres of adjacent communities, and a certain drift of travel, a certain trade in non-essential things. In the fundamentals of life this normal community is independent and self-subsisting, and where it is not beginning to be modified by the novel forces of the new times it produces its own food and drink, its own clothing, and largely intermarries within its limits. ”

“ Some of these men who fail to find a place in the social community meet their isolation grimly and are embittered against life. Others, after a few months or a year of lonesomeness and neglect, give up their university career broken-hearted, and by so doing perhaps take the first step in a life of failures. ”

“ Man is a social being; without life among his fellows he is like an animal out of its element. How can he become better if he lives alone. The cell stupefies him, isolation and monotony make him a machine, which later will not be fit for a free life. I do not know a better description of the consequences of separate confinement than that given by the competent author of “Pictures and Problems from [527] London Police Courts”, Th. ”

“ I, too, realize that the striving in certain quarters is no longer for home and love and happy times, but for something new, even if it is merely for the sake of change, and that this infection of social unrest is quickly spreading downward from the Bluffs, touching the surface of our little community, if not yet troubling its depths. ”

“ In the end—and it is an end which comes quickly—he finds that the one thing unendurable to his soul is isolation. Cut off from the thought currents of his group, he is chilled, lonely, and beset by a vague uneasiness. He yields, and he yields without a pang, glad to get back into the warm familiar atmosphere of class complacency, of smugness, of “safety first”; glad to sacrifice a wavering idealism and a purposeless independence for the solid substance of smooth living and conformity to his neighbours’ point of view. ”

“ Those who have need of others, whom others distract, engage, soothe, whom solitude harasses, pains, stupefies, like the forward movement of a terrible glacier, or the traversing of the desert; and those, on the contrary, whom others weary, tire, bore, silently torture, while isolation calms them, bathes them in the repose of independency, and plunges them into the humors of their own thoughts. ”

“ It is no longer only the fit that survive; the unfit also survive; and if the unfit are to survive, we all have a common interest in taking the necessary steps to prevent the unfit from proving too heavy a burden upon the community.
Again, all isolating vices such as lust, ferocity, craft, fear, and selfishness—vices which characterize the carnivora and condemn them to lives of isolation—are being tempered by the necessities of common life—by the fundamental fact of the solidarity of Man. ”

“ The brutal indifference, the unfeeling isolation of each in his private interest becomes the more repellant and offensive, the more these individuals are crowded together, within a limited space. And, however much one may be aware that this isolation of the individual, this narrow self-seeking is the fundamental principle of our society everywhere, it is nowhere so shamelessly barefaced, so self-conscious as just here in the crowding of the great city. ”

“ There is another method of isolation and separateness. Never in the open country do I see a young man or woman at nightfall going down the highways and the long fields but I think of the character that develops out of the loneliness, in the silence of vast surroundings, projected against the backgrounds, and of the suggestions that must come from these situations as contrasted with those that arise from the babble of the crowds. There is hardiness in such training; there is independence, the taking of one's own risk and no need of the protection of compensation-acts. ”

“ It is manifest, therefore, that their life must be one of increasing isolation, and this must be especially the case on the commons.
Nothing brutalises human beings so rapidly as withdrawal from the influences of society; and when the morality of a common is said to be comparatively good, as I am told in some cases it is, I think it will be found that the cottagers to whom the statement refers live in small villages, not in isolated dwellings. ”

“ Such isolation of a little community, continued, as it has been, for centuries, produces isolation in the individual as well, and nowhere will you find greater independence of character than among the people of Polearn. ”

“ And so the moral health of the world demands that every community have a pest house where the isolation and treatment of the morally diseased may forestall an epidemic.
"Coming nearer home, I would call your attention to our sister states to the north of us. These states are bound up with us in a political system. Destiny has made us one people, and by the outside world we must be reckoned with as a unit. ”

“ It is a scene which to most civilized eyes is oppressive in its self-centered isolation, its air of remoteness. The isolation of a community, self-supporting, self-sufficing, the remoteness of a place which cares not if, indeed, there be a world beyond its boundaries. ”

“ These are the wearing cares under which health decays. Then there are the privations. No mother, brother, sister, or friend to speak to every day—or any day; no domestic freedom under which life flows on in a full and easy stream; none of the social consideration which persons of all ranks enjoy in their own homes; no choice of friends and companions with whom to travel and enjoy the daily stage of life; none of the support which family love and pride afford to self-respect. ”

“ And rising to that aspect of the question which connects it with human society, he is strenuous in condemnation of that taste, not so much for solitude as for isolation, which can tolerate no neighbourhood, and finds its only enjoyment in the sense of monopoly. ”

“ Those who have seen what are the morals and manners of families who live alone in the wilds, with no human opinion around them, no neighbours with whom to exchange good offices, no stimulus to mental activity, no social amusements, no church, no life, nothing but the pursuit of the outward means of living,—any one who has witnessed this will be ready to agree what a blessing it would be to such a family to shake down a shower of even poor Irish labourers around them. ”

“ In both the facility of moving from place to place, and finding a distant home, tends to dissolve the closeness of civic and family life, and to make the individual rather than the family or the city the unit of social life. ”

“ Of course this arrangement whereby country folk all live in villages turns inside out and upside down most of those conditions which seem to us inevitable accompaniments of country life; for instance, the isolation and loneliness of the women and children. ”

“ The rules which should govern your conduct, as an isolated individual, were such a thing as isolation possible in the midst of society, are modified by your relations to those around you. This life of ours is a complex affair, and our greatest errors arise from our one-side views of it. ”

“ A horrible burlesque of family life is enabled, with all its inconveniences and none of its sanctity. People from different cities, with different interests and standards, are expected to “chum” together in an intimacy that begins with the eight o’clock breakfast and ends only when all retire for the night. No privacy, no isolation is allowed. If you take a book and begin to read in a remote corner of a parlor or piazza, some idle matron or idiotic girl will tranquilly invade your poor little bit of privacy and gabble of her affairs and the day’s gossip. ”

“ In times past most farming regions in this country have suffered the disadvantages of isolation, the people have dwelt far distant from one another and from markets, they have had little to stimulate them intellectually or socially. Strong and peculiar individuals and families were often developed at the expense of a friendly community life: neighbourhood feuds were common. ”

“ I conclude, gentlemen, by saying that a society in which one sees such social inequalities as we see all about us, in which we see every day suicides caused by poverty, prostitution flaring at every street corner,—a society whose principal monuments are barracks and prisons,—such a society must be transformed as soon as possible, on pain of being eliminated, and that speedily, from the human race. ”

“ But, failing society that was endurable, he lived in an isolation, with a savagery which fashionable people called pose and ill breeding, public authorities a recalcitrant spirit, his neighbours madness, his family selfishness and pride. ”

“ When people, accustomed to isolated lives, are brought into daily intercourse with one another and with other people, when their work, until then performed along traditional lines, is suddenly performed in new and unaccustomed ways, when their interests, until then strictly personal, are thrust forward to mingle with social interests, a revolution in the thoughts and habits of these people is bound to follow. ”

“ And may we not turn the whole tale into a parable of the isolation produced by a peculiar and unnatural rearing, say in heterodox beliefs, or unconventional habits, unfitting the victim for society, making her to be shunned as dangerous? ”

“ He knew, indeed, that poverty may at all times sufficiently account for isolation—that an acute sensibility may shrink from that contact with the crowd which may, and does, so frequently betray or wound it ”