The Age of Connection

Photo by Wolfgang Hasselmann on Unsplash

There is strong public awareness of our isolation from one another. The consequences of isolation are beyond the loss of our sense of belonging, beyond coping with loneliness as a spiritual or relational challenge. Our isolation impacts every aspect of society: our political landscape, our sense of safety, our health, our belief in institutions, our choice to join associational life. Isolation breeds distrust and the experience of scarcity. Isolation feeds and reinforces authoritarian forms in every dimension of our lives. Dictators. High-control leaders. Retributive practices. News and social media that thrive on what and who is wrong. It feeds every industry that is built on fear.

Walter Brueggmann, in his classic book “Journey to the Common Good,” says, “Those who are living in anxiety and fear, most especially fear of scarcity, have no time or energy for the common good” (p 7). Scarcity and fear feed individualism, breed helplessness, and are therefore well designed to serve the interests of the market economy. They are also the breeding ground for selling a national security state to justify imposing the will of modern Pharaohs on the population.

Measuring and explaining our isolation and its costs is useful but, in itself, does not bring us together. We do, however, have in our hands the pathways and capacity to do something about it. There is a widespread presence in our society that has the skills for re-establishing trust and connecting people with those outside our immediate circle. It is time to value these skills more widely and integrate them into the fabric of our lives.

Acting on What We Care Most About

In whatever matters to us––whether social services, youth, religion, economic justice, or the planet––we remain relatively blind to how connection puts what we know into action. Most of our efforts toward our economic and social well-being give priority to new legislation, good messaging, more research, and getting the corner office on our side. Here is the problem: being right, having data to support you, obtaining support from the CEO or mayor are reassuring, but do not produce real change. They produce programs.

We have declared wars on poverty and on drugs, created safety nets, opportunity zones, visions for our cities. Every pillar of our culture is seeking to more fully deliver on its promise. The school promises to educate all our children, higher education promises to produce careers, research is all around us to care for the planet. Health care promises to solve disease, the church and religion promise peace and salvation, police promise to keep us safe. All of these efforts and programs rest on three beliefs:

1. We believe that we live in a world of scarcity. That what we need is more.

2. The path to fulfilling our vision and commitment is to acquire greater knowledge, more evidence, and deeper expertise.

3. A stronger economy with better technology is the pathway to well-being.

These beliefs are naïve in their conviction that knowing more and having more is in service of our common interests. What we are blind to is that real change and the implementation of knowledge come from peers trusting and connecting with each other. If we want students to use what they are taught, the academy to produce livelihood, health care to produce health, research to be applied, our streets to be safe, peace and salvation to be all around us, then peers connecting with each other in each domain of interest is essential to any real transformation. This is grounded in the realization that:

1. Instead of needing more, we have enough.

2. We have all the knowledge, evidence, and expertise needed. Acting on it is the problem.

3. Our current economy and technology serve to isolate us and breed distrust of institutions, including democracy.

The point of focusing on connection is that it is the means to accelerate acting on what we know.

Connecting Is Something More

We are surrounded by skills and disciplines that focus on us as individuals and our relationship with other individuals. The priest, the rabbi, the therapist, the coach are all committed to healing within the self and between individuals. When it comes to relationships within groups, there also are many positive disciplines. Group therapy, recovery groups, team building, post-surgery groups, mediation, support groups for healing and spiritual formation, organization development for institutions.

All of these are exceptional, and impactful, but they are rarely integrated into communal settings and everyday practice. The experiences they represent are not considered central when we have a practical task to do, whether it is the church, a social service, a hospital to run, or a product to deliver. We are not in the habit of believing that trust and agency among peers is the essential determinant of success. We consider the market values of speed, scale, and convenience as the real work. Even when we intend to build community well-being––through our efforts to improve education or governing, in digital webinars or community engagement gatherings––our attention goes to the content and we treat building social capital as a nice option, a luxury for when we have some more time. For now, let’s get back to what we came for.

When we decide that citizen or employee connection is important, our choices for doing this are special occasions, event focused. Workplace gatherings, celebrations of accomplishments, block parties, festivals, awards, town halls, and press conferences. They each have the intent of building community and support for our well-being. They increase our affection and attachment to where we live and where we work, but they miss an important opportunity to reduce isolation with the “other,” those outside my existing circle. The way these events are usually structured is with people facing the front, embodying the belief that attendance and demonstrating support or friendliness is enough. In these efforts there is also a “like-mindedness” effect that does not end our greater isolation. The events are valuable, we do develop an affection for the community, and meet others, but something more is needed.

Connecting, building trust, is needed for re-humanizing ourselves, our institutions, and our communities. To achieve this, we need to expand the importance we give to connectors and connecting. Suppose we found ways to treat connectors with the same attention and value we give physicians, scientists, quarterbacks, and venture capitalists?

In addition to its value for its own sake, connecting people, including strangers, has very practical uses. It is the critical step in seeing our decisions and plans and commitments become a reality, especially in the arena of the commons.

When we decide to take seriously the need for a deeper connection in all we do, then we can consider connection as a formal discipline. It is already a discipline for trust building in niches of social science, public service, employee and community engagement, and common good domains. The goal is to expand it, consider it a central part of everyday life. To see that it can bring the declared intent of science and institutions into a more powerful way of being. It is a delivery system for us to be more able to act on what we know.

Beyond Enlightenment

After years of experience creating the methodology for connection, I am suggesting our work is to elevate it and integrate it into the daily practices every time people come together for a purpose. This requires a large shift in context, or narrative. Creating a transformation based on ending isolation and valuing connection as the center of attention has precedents. In the eighteenth century the age of enlightenment emerged from the medieval context where kings, lords, and bishops were in charge. The limitations of the medieval age were memorialized when Galileo was imprisoned for his evidence declaring that the earth revolved around the sun––we were not the center of the universe. This helped propel the transformation into the age of enlightenment, an era which valued reason, science, and empirical evidence. Individualism over tradition.

The evolution of the enlightenment age is now embodied in the market economy and its guiding star, technology. This is at the center of our culture and how we choose to live together. The industrial revolution and the information age were steps along the way. With the benefits of reason and science, what began as a departure from the historical tyranny of medieval times has evolved into a market ecology based on the practice of commodifying people and extracting resources from the earth for economic gains. It is the context that governs most of what we do.

We are ready for an evolution beyond enlightenment. Another context, another age. Call it the Age of Connection as a working title. It is about the centrality of a relational way of being with people and the planet.

Let us consider that connection, belonging, ending social and economic isolation are a new age. The current market context of speed, scale, and convenience won’t be overthrown by direct objection, but will shrink in scale and interest when we give full attention to the alternative. The centrality of connection becomes a candidate for a next version of enlightenment.

Enlightenment was about the triumph of reason: Descartes declared, “I think, therefore I am.” The Age of Connection’s version is “We connect, therefore we are.” To reach this state, we need a convergence of all the advocates and practitioners around us. In addition to applying and spreading our practices, we need to honor people in every neighborhood who are natural connectors. This means agreeing on terms and language which form a discipline to spread the methodology and spirit of connection and communal experience.

Here is a pass on first principles for a discipline, science, curriculum, and practice of connection as essential to well-being and a better way to build the agency and social capital that are required to act on what we know.

1. Questions are more important than answers.

2. Pace is slow and small by design.

3. Our physical spaces are designed for relationship first, and function and efficiency second. Spaces that support the experience and spirit of connection have natural light, living plants, floor lamps, and the presence of art in all its forms.

4. When we want new outcomes, we place the design of how we come together to accelerate trust and belonging at the top of our concerns. We give priority to designing how peers and citizens connect with each other wherever we are: church, concert, protest, conference, council meeting.

5. Accountability is understood as an outcome of trust and an understanding between peers, a form of covenant. Serious agreement without consequences. Accountability that works cannot be enforced or demanded.

6. Studies, ideas, updates, problem solving, and the reasons why we come together are important but they do not create agency. The possibility to act on what we know is increased when in small groups, with the admonition to not give advice, we start talking about what meaning this content has for each of us.

There are hundreds of ways of building the discipline of connection. The opportunity is to take this moment of collective concern about ending isolation and have it be the dominant context for most anything else we are doing. What begins as ending isolation evolves into creating an age when our humanity and care for the planet is constantly the center of our attention.