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Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
Katie Barclay 0:00
And I guess, as a love historian, we never question that love is a universal. We might question its form and shape, but not that it exists, right? Whereas loneliness, we genuinely go, "Oh no, some cultures just don't get lonely. I thought that's worth thinking about.
PJ Wehry 0:20
Hello, and welcome to Chasing Leviathan. I'm your host, PJ Weary, and I'm here today with Dr. Katie Barkley, the fellow future fellow at the School of Humanities at Macquarie University. And we're here to talk about her book, Loneliness in World History. Dr. Barkley, wonderful to have you on today.
Katie Barclay 0:37
So, thank you for having me. It's my pleasure.
PJ Wehry 0:40
Dr. Barkley, why this book? Oh, yes. Thank you. I have, like, I have it on digital. It's so much better when you can see. Yes,
Katie Barclay 0:48
see the cover. Yeah, it's a good question, because I like to think of myself as a love historian, and so I like to deal with the happier side of, like, and loneliness is not that, but I think if you spend a lot of time thinking about love, if you spend a lot of time thinking about love and community and relationships, then loneliness starts to kind of come out of that, right? Like, what about the people who aren't feeling those connections, or for whom those connections aren't working in various ways, and before I did this book with some other colleagues, we decided to do an edited collection on loneliness, and so we've done this big volume with various people giving their kind of thoughts, and so coming out of that, I thought, yeah, I think it's time to write a kind of, it's really a kind of survey, but it's really also a question, right? What does it mean to study loneliness across different times, different cultures, is this a very modern Western idea, which is what the literature has set, or in fact, can we identify loneliness all over the world? And I guess, as a love historian, we never question that love is a universal, we might question its form and shape, but not that it exists, right? Whereas loneliness, we genuinely go, "Oh no, some cultures just don't get lonely. I thought that's worth thinking about.
PJ Wehry 2:07
Yes, and something I noticed in the introduction too is the way that you frame this is that you are, and correct me if I'm wrong, it seems like you're setting up not just the interest in loneliness, which is valuable in itself, but you're pointing towards a new, maybe not like entirely new, but like a kind of way of pursuing a certain type of methodology that's not really caught on yet. Is that a, is that a right way to think about it?
Katie Barclay 2:38
Yeah, I think, because there's two kinds of emotion scholar, right. You've got the kind of psychologists, not the cultural psychologists, but the more clinical type, and they think emotions are universal, and we might use different words in different languages, but fundamentally we're talking about the same. And then you've got people like me, and we're all about cultural variety and different, and we're also, because we're humanities scholars, generally, we are very big on language, and so for us, language is not just a label that is over a kind of generic experience that the language actually gives form and meaning and shape our experience, and so the way, if I am feeling amour, or if I'm feeling love, actually we are just different, because the language itself is going to shake how we experience, and that is a real principle, I think, of the history of emotions in general, is that sense that we can't really get out of the language trap when we want to talk about emotion, and I think so believe that, but if we, if we want to do comparative work, if I want to think about loneliness across the world, if I want to do something. It's called writing a world history. Then the question then becomes, well, how do we even go about doing this comparative work? And as translators do this work, right? We were happy to kind of try it. And so the method here is, let's think about seriously about how we do a kind of comparison across not just languages with very shared works, but very different words,
PJ Wehry 4:03
and forgive me, I didn't quite catch what kind of trap. What's the trap that that you're working to get out of
Katie Barclay 4:11
both language trap? The idea that if I mean, if I think that being an English language speaker fundamentally shapes my experience of love, then I can't really compare it to French a more if you see what I mean, because we're kind of stuck within the paradigm of the way that our culture gives shape to our experience, but the other side of it is that we talk across languages all the time, even if it's in translation, we have lovers in many languages, you're very lucky, and but we also, we also talk across the world to other people, and we find ways of communicating meaningful experiences, right. So, the language trap, in that sense, only traps us so much. And so, I think we needed a method to do comparative work, and to say, well, it's not exactly the same, but maybe it's close enough. How do we think about how do you think. But resemblances and celerity and emotion
PJ Wehry 5:04
is some of the language trap and the the reliance on that the idea that we should stay closed off some of that is and I understandably so kind of a sensitivity to imperialism in language and making sure that we're not just like, well, love just means a mora, and that's what you know, that yeah, and then start importing like English into, into French, that sort of thing, not that wouldn't so much go that way, but I think you understand what I mean,
Katie Barclay 5:34
yeah, absolutely, and I think, especially like in medicine, where we've been quite concerned about the way that medical norms and ideals, which are pretty much all coming from a Western, maybe an Anglophone context, are now ruled out across the world, and you're just expected to like pain, so famous one, you know, we have the Glasgow Pain Scale made in Glasgow, though, but the, we take a definition and set of definitions for pain, and we go, and we translate that into a different language, and they ask them to rate their pain on the same scale, but perhaps that pain doesn't make any sense in the way that we make sense of pain, and so we want to avoid that. I think, because the sense that you go, well, just because we make sense of our world in this way, we can't assume that someone else does, and we also have this challenge, right, of if you then go to a different country and you want to translate love or loneliness, what word in their language is the right one, because most languages have quite a lot of words that kind of speak to these experiences, right, and so there's it's never a choice of this one word, is this one word, it's always like there's this one word, and then there's nine words, and which one is the right one, and of course the anti is there's not right, it's because emotions aren't directly comparable in that way, but perhaps that's what I discussed in the book, really, is we can kind of think about how they resemble each other, and then we can use that as a way to kind of put boundaries around the comparative conversation,
PJ Wehry 7:01
and so there's this focus on on listening on dialog, and I think if we're going to avoid the kind of imperialistic, and this is just me making sure I'm tracking with you, it's it's having definitions that are thick in context and thick culturally rather than thin and kind of mathematical in equation, and so that takes just time getting to know the culture, that takes time understanding the stories and the folklore, and all of the.. for I just had a scholar on about Gian Battista Vico, but sensus communis, which is this like it's common sense, but in America, common sense is just like a natural thing, but it's, it's the sense that's generated by community, and so the fact that language is generative, like you said, is it means that we can compare, but that they're just going to be, it's going to be formed differently, so it's not necessarily, anyways, I'm starting to trail off a little bit, but am I? Are we on the same track? Yeah,
Katie Barclay 8:04
absolutely. And I think that actually, what a lot of us are, the humanities type of emotion scholars, have done is spent a lot of time on that thick, rich description, the common sense of the community around, say, love or hate or anger, and so we've built up the sense of, well, in this community at this time, when they use this word, they mean this, but never just this, this, and this, and this, and this, and so, because just think about love, right? Like, you know, when I say I love you, I might mean something different if you're my brother, or my father, or my mother, or my husband, and or my child, and so we use the same word, hopefully you
PJ Wehry 8:43
do,
Katie Barclay 8:44
and again, hopefully in our culture, but perhaps in others. I mean, is it Calvin, you know, the Reformation religious guy, come, he said you should love your neighbor, like literally your neighbor, and the same passion as you love your wife, you know, which raises lots of questions, right? How much you love your neighbor, you know,
PJ Wehry 9:10
yeah, yeah, yes, yeah, and it's yeah, which, and it's so funny how that translates even across context, you know, it's like if you said that people are like, what you know, I mean, we could see to move it, even apart from love. Just to give a different example, I mean, the way that humor is so different across cultures, and I live in Central Florida now, and the New England style of humor that I've lived here for almost a decade now, and I'm still a fish out of water. I will see, I will notice that people, I'm like, no, I'm joking, I'm joking, watching people, oh, you know, it's just watching, watch it, you know, like, like brothers meeting each other and going, hey, jerk, you know, in. One culture is very different in another culture. I don't know if that, that tracks alongside, but yeah, so you give kind of a definition of culture, and I didn't write down, you kind of use two different people, but when you talk about to say definition of culture, excuse me, a definition of loneliness that might be more useful here. When you talk about loneliness, what are you kind of give three main traits that you pull out of those definitions? Can you talk about those three traits?
Katie Barclay 10:34
Get the book open at the beach.
PJ Wehry 10:37
Yeah, that is totally fair. Feel free.
Katie Barclay 10:40
Yeah, I think it's because I do start off with first definition by from actually what was a popular psychology book called On Loneliness by Kachiopo and Patrick, and they kind of say it's about just kind of pain, first of all, and then that is a pain that's about a mismatch between a the level of social connection desire and the level that the environment provides, and so what I kind of suggested is that they then offer a definition that has these kinds of parts to it, right, one that we think of as a kind of pain, one that we think of it as something that's undesirable, and something that is about your own set level for loneliness, and that I might have a higher tolerance for loneliness than you, and I kind of said, well, I think all those things might be true in America in the 1990s when they did that study, and I'm thinking,
PJ Wehry 11:35
yeah,
Katie Barclay 11:36
but it is very
PJ Wehry 11:37
specific, yeah,
Katie Barclay 11:38
but I think we could actually question all of those things, right, but not everybody would think of loneliness as being a kind of pain. They might think of it as another kind of emotion, or as an absence, or perhaps the lack of feeling, or kind of apathy. So, you've kind of got other ways of actually articulating how it's felt. You can ask whether it's desirable or not, and I would think, actually, even in America, in the 1990s there are probably contexts where people might pursue loneliness for religious reasons, or because they like walking in the forest, and it's very pleasurable. So, there's kind of.. we can question all of these things, and also I was troubled by the idea, it's about your own preference, as if there was no material conditions underlying whether or not you know you experience loneliness, and that somehow it's your own fault if you're too lonely, or you know, not enough. And so I kind of started from that point of going, well, here's a very common definition, very widely used in the modern literature, and kind of going, but perhaps we should actually ask whether any of these things hold true, and if they don't hold true, then how do we go about looking for this thing alonelines, and what are that we're actually comparing, and then the rest of the book really, I think, is kind of going, so let's figure out it in this way, and this context, and then this situation, yeah,
PJ Wehry 13:01
and this is, I think, a good example of the cluster of words. Even in our own culture, we don't think about how they're all associated. I think, by definition, in English, as certainly in the American culture, loneliness is just automatically undesirable, because if you, and that's just the way the word forms us, right? It's like, oh, loneliness, undesirable. I just want to.. I'm not lonely, I just like being alone, right. And so that's all. And so, when you're going across, do you mind sharing? Because.. and I think this is what you're talking about, breaking down and being able to look at the positive side of loneliness, which is like, what does that mean, right? And it's just that's the way the word shapes and forms us. And I'm gonna probably say this wrong with the Kaluli. You start off with the Kaluli peoples to us completely alien ritual of, I mean, anyways, I'll let you describe it. I was, I was reading it, and I was.. it's good. It is so challenging.
Katie Barclay 14:07
Yeah, so even now I'm going to have to explain it, but so the Kalui are in Papua New Guinea, and this was an anthropologist. He goes there in the 60s, I think. And so I think from the anthropological mind, these are kind of primitive people who still live in a tribal way, and they're very, you know, they're not like us in the West, and I think that informs quite a lot of how people are read, but they do engage in some very, I think, challenging rituals, and one of them is a kind of ritual for releasing pain, really, but they at night, and it's dark, and they, they have these dancers, and the dancers come, and they have torches, and the dancers sing songs about loneliness, but other things, but about being lonely, and it's to invoke weeping in the audience, and so it's kind of an interesting ritual, and often it's quite, it can be personalized, so if your child had died, for example, they might sing about the loss. Your child to evoke you to weep and to release the pain, and then you get really upset, and then you might take the flame, and you might burn the dancers as a sort of reciprocal answer, a sharing of the pain across bodies and community, and even though they've been burned, the dancers just keep doing it, and they do it all night, and they often go around the whole room, and so eventually lots of people are crying, and lots of people are burnt immediately, but it's actually a sort of meant to get sort of cathartic experience that's that's releasing a lot of pain, but it's reminding people about the cycle of life, and often happens on the same day as a wedding, or on harvest days, when they share out all the harvest across the community, and so in the daycare we've had this wonderful celebration of fertility or of life and harvest in the night time. You release the pain and the darkness, so you think about the world as a cycle. You can see the beautiful ritualness of the practice, right? But I think what was really interesting was how prominent storms about being lonely work within their repertoire, and with loneliness for them being outside the community, and particularly like lost in the forest, and perhaps because for them, much more than us, if you are lost in the forest, you might, you'll probably die, right? In a way that we'll find supermarket, they're going to.. there's this is a substance community, they hunt, they gather, and they grow some small crops, but if you do not have community, you're not going to survive, right? And so loneliness has a completely different resonance in some ways. I think for community like that, it's much more existential, perhaps, than for us, for whom it might still be a real issue and psychologically challenging, but you're probably not going to starve to death, right? It's like slightly different game.
PJ Wehry 16:44
Yes, and it's.. I was just talking to some friends of mine, but I had gone to visit a friend in Cambodia, and we were talking about cultural differences and the way that food is shared in the. in the United States, like, that's a very, you know, private thing. You don't expect food from people, whereas, like, you always share food in Cambodia, and part of that is, if in the United States you don't share food, it's like, oh, well, you don't want to hang out with me. If you don't share food in Cambodia, that's the difference between them. At the, you know, I'm sure it's changed over time, but especially during the Popov regime, like you, that's an existential threat, right? And so not being part of the community is is an existential threat. Yeah, it's interesting too when you talk about the comparative side of things, even saying, and it there's no getting around this, you're like, it's a very cathartic experience, which, of course, is for us going back to, like, Aristotle, right? It's like, but we, if we don't have a point of reference, we can't compare, we can't, like, translation isn't like you can't take the word and translate into an entirely new word, you have to be able to compare it to, you have to have something to bring it into an R language, and then work around it. Am I tracking with that? Or
Katie Barclay 18:04
yeah, and I think the way that I did this book kind of deliberately plays with that. Maybe I set that in the intro, but it's not necessarily always as explicit as you go on. The people I'm using, like the anthropologist who goes to the Kalui in Papua New Guinea, he calls it loneliness. I mean, I don't know why he doesn't actually justify that decision, which is something, right? They're just like, that's lonely, they are lonely, and so I, the historian of loneliness, go along and read his book in English and go, that's loneliness, but that's one of my grips. So, what I guess I let other people make my decisions for me a bit in this book. I said, well, what? How have people identified things as lonely in other cultures, and then use the word lonely to explain them? And that got me around having to then do that myself by saying, but people, at least certain communities, certain English speakers, have agreed that they think that this looks like loneliness to them, and I think so, in a way, that the book is always it's a world history, but it's a world history that's delineated by English and by the English viewer, if you see what I mean, or the viewer who wants to tell the story in English, they're not always, because books are in translation, then they're not all native English,
PJ Wehry 19:18
yeah, well, I mean, you have to choose a language to write the book in, right. So, if it's going to be delineated by, I mean, if it was written in Japanese, it'd be delineated by Japanese. That's just the human condition. And so, that's, uh, anyways, yeah. And that's
Katie Barclay 9:31
also, I think, to me, that's kind of important, right? Because loneliness, as you see, is quite negative in English, right. Whereas, if we were in the Spanish, and you were, I'm going to kill this word as I would say that if we were going to be talking about that experience is also their word for solitary and so they have a lot more uses of so that they knew that incorporates a lot more experience and a lot more positive experience as well as negative so when they use that in span. Ish to mean loneliness, they might not make ups carrying the same level of resonance or same kinds of resonance as it does in English, and so I think if I had written the world history of Saludad, there'd be different chapters and different studies, right? And it would be a different book.
PJ Wehry 20:15
Yeah. Yes. Ah, sorry, this gets me excited. That's so cool, so the you move from that and you start talking about the communal self in the in chapter two, that does seem to be the universal, and I think maybe the universal makes comparisons possible, but we never fully arrive at it, is that it's not a fair way? So, you're like, there's definitely something loneliness always has to do with the social self, the communal self. Can you talk a little bit about what you're tracing there with the importance of relationships in loneliness?
Katie Barclay 20:56
I think there's, I guess, two kinds of things I want to do in a chapter, just to confuse everyone, but one I think is what I'd call modernization theses or arguments about how populations have modernized, and I think really up until the sort of maybe 80s, maybe a bit earlier, historians, other scholars in general were quite happy to have these kind of what we kind of almost say stadial histories, you know. We start off in a primitive state, and then we develop, we start growing crops, and then we can move through these stages of civilization until we come to the modern subject, and
PJ Wehry 21:34
which is us,
Katie Barclay 21:35
which is us, also us in the West, right? Yes.
PJ Wehry 21:40
No, no, it's whoever's writing the book, yeah.
Katie Barclay 21:42
And so, what happens along and for more primitive societies, including us in our past, but not now, was that they were more communal, communally minded, community-orientated, and they didn't have such a strong individual sense of self, a much more communal sense of self, and that what happens in modernity and the European American context is that we become more individualized, and we start to see ourselves as separate from each other, and that's supported by industrialization and the wage economy, and a whole lot of things happen to allow us to be individual subjects. We no longer worry about the existential crisis of being in a forest, right, and so we're kind of different as subjects, and so this argument, even though people don't always know this, underpins a lot of the history of loneliness, and because what happens in the studies of loneliness is they go, there's two kinds of people, and there are people who are community identity oriented, and then there are people who are individualistic, and they will experience loneliness in different ways, and what you think happens is also queries, because it used to be thought that people who are community-oriented selves would actually experience some people think experience loneliness more acutely, right? So, if you're separated from the group, it's much harder because you don't have a strong independent sense of subject, right? Other people think it's worse for the individualists because they themselves have actually, they're so they don't have a community in the first place, and so in a way, by being alone and they have a much stronger sense of their own boundaries, and that actually makes their existential loneliness much more profound than if you're part of a community-oriented self, so I kind of tell that story, and the way that for a lot of the scholarship this is actually part of a history of modernization and civilization, and except for the challenge of what I call the Asia challenge, in a way, as Asians are in the psychological literature are identifying as highly community-orientated, even though they're pretty modern, right? They're probably as modern as us in many, in many of the classic modern modernity features. And so, and so it became this thing of what used to be a past self, then became a west-east self, right? And these, depending on where you got placed in the globe or in history, depending on a kind of self, then depending on a kind of loneliness, and there was lots of debates, and I felt that that story had to be told, because funnily enough, when these psychologists, who are not historians, are writing these assumptions about what Asian people are more community-orientated, and so they have loneliness in ways he didn't actually get that this, these claims were not just like universally true in some sense. They came out this long history of how we told the story of the self in relation to loneliness, and perhaps if you thought a bit more critically about where that story came from, and it's quite imperial or colonialist or racist, or depending on words you want to use here, you feel interrogated a little bit more about why we made those assumptions about the relationship between certain kinds of identity and certain communities and certain kinds of loneliness. We might tell a different story about loneliness, and so that chapter is kind of setting up. Sort of intellectual history of how these films have been dealt with, I guess.
PJ Wehry 25:04
I, and this is a shot in the dark, and we can, we can just move on if this doesn't hit anything. Is it because this feels very adjacent to Charles Taylor's work? Is that something that is part of what you're doing, or is it just, is it just kind of running in parallel track?
Katie Barclay 25:19
Great question. I love you. Know, obviously, I love Charles Taylor's work. I think what I feel, not so much in the loneliness book, but I think is true if you read my love stuff, as that I think. So, here's this, yeah, this modernization narrative in the loss of the social self as part of modernization, and he tells a very compelling story, and increasingly I'm not convinced that the modern subject is as lonely as Charles Taylor would suggest, right, and so I'm quite interested in actually the same philosophers in the 18th century, and the ways that they also actually strongly talk about love and community and neighborliness is a really critical part of the selves that they're creating, and the way that loneliness is actually always part of a sociability, and so, and even in the Western tradition, which Charles Taylor's being a Western, I think that takes messiah, that's always the historians, yeah,
PJ Wehry 26:16
that's why I like to keep it interdisciplinary, it's not just a philosophy podcast, right, it's yeah, and it's really interesting, and even as you were talking about, like, this great story of the struggling individual, you get to a point where it's like, oh, they're really suffering, and then you even get, like, it's hard not to read it this way and understand this is an oversimplification, but it is funny to me that we're talking about, like, this this historical story that it kind of gets hidden and told about loneliness, and we end up with certain French philosophers, you know. We must imagine Sisyphus happy, and it's like they literally take this story and then they valorize it, you know. And then you can kind of see that picked up in Charles Taylor's work, of like, see, and it's like, well, that's because y'all are reading each other. If you went out, there's a lot of people don't read these books who are very happy and in community in the West. Am I tracking with you there, or is that that will help me? It's a
Katie Barclay 27:11
yeah, like this is slightly enormous, but reading recently, that's often,
PJ Wehry 27:17
often the best parts. Yeah, go ahead,
Katie Barclay 27:19
Ernest Bloch and his principles of hope, right? He says the thing that's completely underrated by philosophers, they're all interested in love, by which they really insects, right? And none of them deal with hunger. And he goes, and really, if you want a driving behavior, your fundamental thing that drives humans to do things is much more important than the sex driver's hunger. And he goes, but the problem is that no philosopher has ever been hungry.
PJ Wehry 27:43
Yeah, there's a lot of things that when you see it's like, oh man, Joseph Peeper has a book about, like, how important leisure is to creating culture, and you're like, yes, but also that carries a lot of presuppositions that you have, like, like I've used this example too many times in this podcast, but it's like it is very suspicious that Aristotle's like the perfect being is the one who sits around and thinks all day, and you're like, that does feel like maybe, yeah, anyways, so and that you do some really other interesting things. My apologies. I'll bring us back to your wonderful book. I mean, I knew the stuff of the rabbit trails. Yeah, you start talking about even like the material conditions of loneliness, which you kind of mentioned earlier the physiologies and the space, place, and time. Is there which one of those would you want to start with first?
Katie Barclay 28:49
Well, let's start with the body, shall we? Yeah,
PJ Wehry 28:52
for sure.
Katie Barclay 28:53
So, I guess in those kind of chapters I was kind of interested. Well, like, so we've opened the question, well, what is loneliness? Like, how do we start to kind of think through the different ways we might ask that question, I guess, and so one is, well, how does it feel in the body, and so we start off with the pain ideas as one model, but you can also, you can think about the physiology parts, like if do you blush or do you go pale, do you feel cold, do you feel hungry, do you long for someone to touch you, and so that chapter kind of explores, I guess, the physiological dimensions, I guess, of how loneliness has been explained and explained in different cultures, and when also there's interesting stuff there, because like things like touch loneliness becomes its whole category, which was a big deal during the pandemic, and there is other work on that, but at other points we don't think about it as much. If you don't actually have anybody touching you very much, there are consequences of that, perhaps, especially in childhood or development. Yes, so you touch hunger, but also it's really interesting that in a lot of. Like where people are lonely, they behave in certain kinds of ways, and one of the ones associated with it is hunger, and so they watch or eat a lot themselves, or they watch videos of people eating, which is now like a big thing in Asia, which has seemed to be a response to loneliness, is that they like to watch people eat large amounts of food, sometimes as part of a community, so you can see that you're eating with a community, even if you're not. There's something.. there's something about eating, which is such a communal activity, I think. Actually, many cultures that them watching people eat and consume kind of satiates a kind of lonely hunger, and so that chapter kind of explores different ways the.. I guess the body has been taught to fought about in relation to loneliness.
PJ Wehry 30:45
I, I'm not gonna lie, that has crossed my feed. Is it called Mukbang? The.. and I had no idea, like that's one of those moments where, like, thank you, you just helped something slot in my life. I was like, why do people want to watch this? This is like, I don't want someone to eat this much food, and that, that it's that's an interesting, so it is. I mean, is that understood in Korean culture largely as an emotional support thing?
Katie Barclay 31:13
I'm not sure if it's the only thing it does for them, but yes, I think that's in the academic register explaining that phenomenon, that is how they explain why people do it. I imagine people who do it themselves might have other people, complicated, they might have other reasons why they do things, right?
PJ Wehry 31:30
But that is, that's what the psychologists tell me. So I told you, yes, yes, yes, yeah, that's fair, that's fair. And I mean, and, um, yeah, there's obviously what the viewers like getting from it is going to be different from the from the person I mean, speaking of hunger, you know, there's a, there's, there's a financial incentive to, for that drives a lot of the ways the behavior for clicks, sort of, sort of thing, and then for space, place, and time, can you talk us through. I just had Dr. Donahoe on talking about the phenomenology of place. So, this is, I, this is really interesting to me, because I'm curious to see how it intersects.
Katie Barclay 32:13
Yeah, well, I guess actually, in some ways, a lot of this, because taking a phenomenological approach. There we go.
PJ Wehry 32:20
Yeah,
Katie Barclay 32:20
got that right.
PJ Wehry 32:22
It's not easy. It's not easy. I practice it off screen. I'm not gonna lie,
Katie Barclay 32:26
in the sense I am trying to break it down, and so you know, so it's in the body, but then it's something you do in a place, right? And so, in that chapter, I'm kind of interested in the kinds of places and spaces that we've associated with loneliness, or the kind of maybe material culture elements of that in an environmental context, more generally. So, I talk about forests a lot, because that is a pretty people associate forests with loneliness, and that's kind of an interesting one, because you can think of loneliness as a thing, like, think of all emotions, we often think about something inside of ourselves, but what that kind of chapter I hope encourages you to do is to think about the way that when you go somewhere that you actually are encouraged to feel certain things, and so we go to church, and perhaps in that environment we feel that uplift, that sense of awe, and that's hopefully because of the good architecture, and the light, and maybe music, and a lot of work that goes to teach you to have that response, but in a similar way, we go to a forest, and we feel lonely, and we don't just feel lonely because there's something innately lonely about forests, arguably there's nothing innately lonely about forests, but because a lot of culture, interestingly, not just in Europe, but in Japan, teaches us that forests are lonely places, and so they encourage you to feel emotions that you associate with loneliness, and forests might make you feel a bit frightened or dislocated, or make you want to leave. We have all the fairy tales, right, and European sports are where bad things happen, or where you have large moral dilemmas that you have to make, and then you can leave the forest and get your consequence to be good or bad, and so there's a kind of the lonely place is a place, or the lonely forest is a kind of place where you go and be really do certain kinds of self-reflection, make choices, but the importance of that chapter is to really get you to go, well, loneliness might not just be about me or my feelings or my relationships with people, but my relationships with place. And then we could move on to certain cultures for whom land and space is actually fundamental to their sense of self. And so many indigenous cultures actually have a relationship to land that's more profound than our own relationships or white people's relationships, and so they might then, when they are dislocated from land or moved off of it, or colonized, that dislocation is much more profound than just having to move house or move territory, because they move up, removes them from culture, and it removes them from their ancestors, and it removes them from land that is actually much more. A part of who they are in their identity, and so there's kind of discussion, I guess, of colonization and its effects, but also of white people and their loneliness when they go to colonize, and the way that they are encouraged not to be lonely, right? And so we think, because we think of that, or there's a lovely literature, and very rightly so, emphasizing the effects on indigenous people have been dislocated from their land, but we perhaps have paid less attention to the fact that the colonizers had to get a lot of academic literature from the prescriptive writers, going, 'don't be lonely, it's not manly, stop being so unmanly, it's like a little boy, you're like a little boy, be more manly, so they did a lot of work to teach white people, I think, to understand colonization as a thing that was not a lonely experience, and that I think maybe speaks to the profundity, I think, of place and actually shaping our emotions, so it's not just about people, or it's not just about self and your psychology, it's about where you are and your relationships with environment and material comfort things around Oh,
PJ Wehry 36:03
it's.. it's going to kill me, because I can't remember the name of the book, but I just read a novel about the riots that took place right before partition, and it's, you know, it's considered a masterwork of decolonization fiction of Indian fiction, but one of the things, and I'm now hearing you say that I recognize that he, the author, was pulling apart the British couple anyways, but to see you reference that specifically, that to rewrite this story, because the wife of the, the district governor, I think that's, or like, the head deputy, or whatever, is brutally, brutally lonely, and she's, she's developed alcoholism. She constantly leaves him and goes home, and so that, which is him rewriting and attacking that sort of, like, you know, we're English, we don't feel, you know, it's like this is our duty here, don't feel lonely, that sort of thing. Anyways, thank you, that helps put that back in kind of perspective. Yeah,
Katie Barclay 37:11
and I think, as well, in that example, when the poor white woman problem was often they were very isolated, and they were unable to look at their, their many slaves and servants of people that they could actually have real relationships, real meaningful equality of friendship, which is pretty sad. So they end up very isolated and lonely, because, but there's all these people there, and they just.. there's not open to them because of the racism, and it is..
PJ Wehry 37:36
yeah,
Katie Barclay 37:36
yeah, that's kind of sad.
PJ Wehry 37:38
Yeah, the power dynamic. Sorry, yeah, I mean, the it's dehumanizing both ways, yeah, yeah. I had a couple. Well, I wanted to ask, so you talked about forests, and if you don't mind, this might be an Americanism, or I don't know where this got spitballing with me for a second, but what are some, what are some like architecture that we associate with loneliness? Is there any, are there other certain types of buildings, certain types of rooms that get associated with loneliness?
Katie Barclay 38:12
Yeah, I mean, so I talk a bit about the high-rise flats, the big apartments, because, especially when these, like, now we now knock them down a lot, I guess. So we're kind of, we kind of move for the cycle of going, yeah, these are great. And then now they don't operate, and now we've not, or in many, in much of Europe, in places like, but the high-rise flat actually starts off with us kind of symbol of kind of utopian community. So it wasn't all we, I mean, you didn't build them going, "Oh, I want people to be lonely, and they're flat, right? They build them with this kind of utopian idea, and in practice, because they become associated with communities that are poor and often have problems related to poverty, that people feel like they're isolated from a community, and so they become these kind of - this becomes these symbols, I guess, of deprivation, but of loneliness and isolation, and there's an irony, right, because you're living so close to each other, and yet you can't leave your house because your neighbor might be in drug, Alec, or you know, and so there's a sense, so of the ways that these buildings sort of symbolize all the social wrong, but also particularly loneliness, and then that is a kind of iconic symbol of loneliness, and so, yeah, there's a number of different kinds of architectures that we associate, I guess. Lighthouses are another one, although lighthouses are a bit less negative, and they're like, yeah, I'm lonely in the lighthouse, but I'm like, it's romanticized, yeah, so it's kind of, I guess, this way that we do think about physical architecture, the shaping your emotional experience, and the ways that's also historicized, because it changed that loneliness comes with certain kinds of not just about the building, but who's in the building, how is it understood, which,
PJ Wehry 39:59
yeah, so. And this is, forgive me, this is me just exploring this with you, and so I don't know, I might be falling into the trap of the great story of modernist, you know, oh, we are the rugged individual who we should imagine to be happy, even when they are lonely, kind of thing, but when we talk about the flat, is it seems that the flat and I live in a, in the suburbs, and there is that, like, there's so much about the material conditions that are built around possession, and when it's built around possession, it, it kind of crowds out the possibility of third spaces, third places, and so does that. So, are we, are we seeing like material conditions making, and again, it's you know, you're studying loneliness, and just when it happens, but is this an example? We have language that generate, generate, generates, generates loneliness, and we have material conditions that generate the things that we call loneliness, and would that the emphasis on possession, and as you trace that through the rise of capitalism, Europe is that one like, is that a thread that we can draw through to things like, oh, we have a hallway we share, but that's only for traveling, you can stand and talk in it, but not for too long. That'd be weird, you know? I mean, you're like, I, if I do invite you, it's to where I own, right? It's like, which is very personal and very intimate, and so it kind of, by destroying the, the in-between the liminal spaces, is that part of, is that part of the material conditions that are generating that?
Katie Barclay 41:41
Yeah, and certainly, like, I mean, Betty Friedan is that one of the other examples in my book, her classic, all the poor women in the suburbs with their kids, and they're very isolated, and because suburbs, maybe especially in the US, but also in other places, are very car-orientated, and so,
PJ Wehry 41:57
yeah,
Katie Barclay 41:57
you might, your garden is big enough that your neighbors aren't pressing, because I think in some ways in Britain we have suburbs, but you don't have big gardens, so you still have a sort of sense that you can walk next door, but if you have to get in your car and drive to your neighbor, or if there is actually real distances between houses, there then sort of becomes a kind of sense of on the one hand you have this lovely piece of land that you own and perhaps you have a washing machine, and that's that's probably the best thing you can have as a woman. And so you have these kind of like amazing material conditions at one level, but you're also quite isolated from people and place, and then socialization becomes very, or social sociability becomes very rendered and routine in formalite. So you have an invitation, and you go for dinner on a Friday, but then you don't go again until the following Friday, and then you know, so the sort of sense of that everydayness of dropping in and bumping into people of the kinds of sociability that happens accidentally or without sort of organization kind of dissipates, and so certain kinds of property ownership, I guess, really do isolate people more than others, and I think, well, in the case of Betty Friedan, is you've got these highly educated women in the suburbs who are blowing out their minds because they also need some kind of stimulation that isn't washing machine, and it only goes so far, and like, and so there's kind of the sense, I guess, of the suburb as a kind of big poverty, but also about kind of being trapped, I guess, in that place. I don't know, I can't, I don't think I would be happy to say there's an obvious kind of, you get richer, you get lonely, or any of those things. No,
Speaker 2 43:36
no, no,
Katie Barclay 43:37
but I do think there's a sort of sense that, yeah, like you might figure that big house is what you want, but will it take away as much as it gives you, right? And thinking about what that means, I guess, in terms of how you live your life, how you meet people, whether or not you have to arrange to own visit.
PJ Wehry 43:55
Well, you could have better material conditions in a different culture, and it would not necessarily lead to that, like that comes out of specific economic, like economic constraints, or economic articulation. Anyway, I, that was me, I just listening to you, and that, that kind of struck me as we were talking. I now, and this may, so we talked a lot about the very sad things about, about loneliness, because you know we're speaking in English, and that's what we do, but at the end of the book, you talk about solitude and creativity, and so when we talk about, in, I mean, this going back to, I'm not even going to try and say the Spanish word, but this idea of like this broader expression of what loneliness can be. What are some of the benefits of what we would call loneliness?
Katie Barclay 44:48
Well, I think in the European imagination, like isolation has also seemed to be a place of genius, and we were to write and to be inspired by the muse, and so there's. Kind of history, and I think we have the word solitude because we are uncomfortable with calling that loneliness. I think that that is a modern anxiety. I'm not sure that, like, people often refer to, like, poets and writers as lonely. Loneliness itself was a modern word, so it's a bit of a tricky one. It's hard, you can't go back and go, yeah, they were calling it loneliness, they were calling it lonely, meaning they're in a lonely place, or the lonely poet, or.. and so there's a sense of which that retreat from the world provides certain kinds of opportunities to really do that creative work, that thinking work, that perhaps in some things of isolation, I think again with my sort of feminist hat on here. It also provides needs a servant to bring you dinner, right? Because very few of these people are doing substance barring and then writing their novellas, so that they're never entirely alone. And that said, I think they is who they matters and how they frame their isolation from many is really interesting, but there's a sense of genius, for example, requires these moments away, and I feel more than that. It's also the sense that if you are away from community, you also get better perspective on it, and so the kind of idea that you know, if you go up the hill, you look down, you'll see the village taking a different shape, you'll see relationships happening in different ways. So, there's something about removal that gives perspective, which existed, that we think informs creativity and genius, and so that you can see loneliness is kind of being bad, but it's also produced some, our best art and our literature, and people have pursued it for all of those reasons, and so there's this fabulous contradiction of this bad thing that we nonetheless see as a bit essential to our creativity and to what makes us great.
PJ Wehry 46:45
Alan, there's this interesting thing where a lot of times the solitude is because we like conflict in our stories, so like he's a genius, but he paid for it with his isolation, and it's like that's not necessarily good or bad, that's just a.. that's just different, right? It's like if someone's up down and looking down at the village, and someone's in the village, yes, someone may be living a better life here, a better life here, but it's not necessarily so, right? Like, it's just different. Is that.. I mean, is that one of those things where we.. the language can sometimes force us into dead ends,
Katie Barclay 47:22
yeah. And I think, as well, like I said, as a trope, right? So, like, they really like Virginia Welch's room of our own, right? She literally meant a room, right? She still wanted her kitchen downstairs with her servants in it. So, like, there's a kind of sense, there's this sense, I think, that you can actually do certain kinds of genius work without a community, you might think you're doing without community, but somebody, even if it's your DoorDash, or somebody is bringing you your dinner, right, or somebody is paying you to be alone to allow you to do your art, or you know, if you have to go out and do the DoorDashing, amount of hours of you having your day to do art is just so much more constrained, right? So, there's a sense of which the.. it's nice to say, oh, it's about freedom and liberty and loneliness that creates genius, but really it's about the community that allows you time alone to allow you to get your work done, and that actually is maybe means that you actually have a lot more community, a lot more love than perhaps you'd appreciate,
PJ Wehry 48:23
yeah, we talked about the starving artist, but remember that the starved artist is dead and hasn't written anything, you know, it's gotta be at least some food, yeah. Well, I want to be respectful of your time, but Dr. Barclay has been absolute joy having you on. Just as a final question for anyone who's been listening, besides, first of all, let me say, besides buying and reading your excellent book, Loneliness and World History cover, yes, thank you, but besides buying and reading your excellent book, what is something you'd recommend to somebody who has listened to us for the last 45 minutes talk, and let's listen to you share what's something they should do in response, or say you should meditate on for the next week.
Katie Barclay 49:08
It's a great question. I think the thing that I have been thinking about a lot at the moment is the idea that loneliness is contagious, and I think in our post-pandemic moment, we've been talking about that a lot more, right? The sense that we spend more and more time on our phones and not enough time in community and not enough time in natural relation to people. And now, with AI allowing us to, in some ways, retract even more. You don't even need advice, you don't need to ask your mother, you can ask a chatbot. You don't need a lover, you can have a lover on chatbot that we're kind of, I guess, isolating ourselves even more, and so I guess the question you might want to ask yourselves is, in a world where we want to avoid loneliness, which we seem to want, maybe what can we do to maybe just push ourselves out of our isolation and. Community, and then to relationships with the other, a little bit more, not necessarily big, that you know what. Where can you bump into your neighbor and have a conversation, or what can you do to create a bit of joy in someone else's life? A
PJ Wehry 50:13
beautiful thought to end on. Dr. Barkley, it's been a pleasure. Thank you.
Katie Barclay 50:17
Thank you.