A big question.

Do we take seriously the notion that modern life (in any sense) has left us relatively (to some idealized past) isolated? This has always seemed to imply that this isolation is a bad thing, and emerges in defiance of some evolutionary imperitive to be less isolated-- more specifically, to live lives that are intimately connected with others.

There are several useful theories of human development that rest on some notion that evolution has left us predisposed, even physiologically dependent on, recognizable connections to social others. (A lot of these theories are under the umbrella of what many American psychologists [see Steven Mitchell] refer to as Relational psychoanalysis, emerging from British object-relations schools of psychoanalysis [see Donald Winnicott]. Relatedly, see Bowlby and all and Attachment Theory) There's another basic argument that relates to how we presumably survived through collaboration and connections with others, and the ability to "think" as a group (what I would consider Culture, in the broadest sense).

Despite its dependence on some imagined, undertheorized and de facto unempirical notion of our past (I am particularly disturbed by the influence these imagined pasts hold in arguments emerging from evolutionary psychology), I really like this notion, in contrast to what unfairly gets called a "Darwinian" perspective on human biology (some might call this Machiavellian, or individualistic, etc. Basically, the assumption that we are in some pure, deep way just Looking Out For Number One). Even at my most misanthropic and self-isolating, I take pleasure in the work and emotional, symbolic expressions of others: sad movies, sad songs, food and drink technologies, etc. I tell myself I'm ALONE when I'm sitting at home drinking a beer, watching Miller's Crossing, and ignoring my phone, but we know that Tom Reagan and Myrna Birnbaum and the Coen brothers and millenia of farmers and brewers are there with me.

This isn't really intended as a refutation as the proposition mentioned at the top of this post, though maybe I should think of it that way. Upcoming I will post a few notes suggesting that Romance, in most of its senses, and perhaps the arts (?; not really my forte, but..) have perhaps emerged as evolutionary adaptations to this putative crisis of isolation.