Essay II : Going Solo

Essay on Eric Klinenberg's Going Solo

by Carlos Murgueitio

Sociology Class, Princeton University
 

Years before Eric Klinenberg published his "Going Solo" book, in which he tries to understand the views and reasons of people who have decided to live their lives isolated from other people, C. Wright Mills in his book "The Sociological Imagination" dwelved into something that may relate to Klinenberg's ideas. According to Mills, he found out that people usually felt "trapped", or pretty much hopeless in their social environments because they thought they could not change what was going on around them, that it simply was too much overwhelming, so taking action into account was pretty much useless. But, Mills also thought that every single individual of a society was pretty much responsible (or took part, even without knowing it) of what he or she was receiving from society. Indeed, it is a feed-backing act between individuals and society. 

Likewise, Howard Becker (A few years after Mills' ideas were published) thought that we as scientists, we should not let our biases to interfere with the final results of whatever social analysis we were undergoing, in order to keep the results under an objective and scientific point of view. The question is, how does this apply to Klinenberg's ideas explained in his "Going Solo" book. Plus, he also remarks something very important, which I'll quote because it does apply to the context in which I'll develop this essay: "In any system of ranked groups, participants take it as given that members of the highest group have the right to define the way things really are"​.

Going through Klinenberg's "Going Solo" reading, I've focused on the quotations he put on, which are made by people from different times and centuries, who have manifested their views about loneliness, or solitude. From Benjamin Franklin, to Margaret Thatcher, these quotes seem to reinforce the will of the author of making us readers think that we actually are living in a "singleton society" - as he calls it -, and in fact he seems to perceive it in a very strange, sometimes confusing and contradicting way.

In some of the paragraphs of the lecture, he seems to agree with the views of Franklin, Thoreau and Thatcher, considering their roles in universal history and their contributions to society. But on the other hand, he seems to be quite worried about the growing number of people deciding to live alone, especially in "most developed" societies like those from Scandinavia, Japan, North America and Brazil.And it seems to me that he comes to the conclusion of the "singleton society" because of these particular countries' cases. And here's where Klinenberg's views fail to meet what Becker requests from sociologists, the ability to keep our personal biases away from our research, or as I prefer to call it "under observation" 

- Or as Freud calls it, "Observing Ego". Because at the end of the day, our conclusions, biases, are nothing but the result of our Ego reinforcement -.

The opinions of Franklin, Thoreau and Thatcher are not appliable to all societies, because we're not living under the same conditions, or set of rules in the societies we're part of. For example, in my country (Ecuador) people have a tendency to live on their own at first, but after a certain age (Middle Twenties) both males and females start to find a couple, if they have not met them before being 25. Because here in Ecuador there is a certain fear of living alone or developing a professional life on your own, by your own set of rules just like Franklin said. 

Ecuadorian society tends to be a big collective. We have a historical background of social changes where the most dramatic transitions have been made collectively, not by the people in the higher powers, but rather by a certain group of people who have protagonised huge manifestations in the capitol cities of the country. So, Klinenberg's "Rich Experience" here would be labeled as wrong rather than rich.

Now let's go to the countries where people are choosing to live alone. It's the same, they have not the same social conditions, nor they have the same life cost or life expectancy. European, North American and Asian societies are not the same as their less developed counterparts. In this study it shows Brazil as a "representative" of South American culture, but that may not be the case because, Brazil's cultural background is quite diverse and casually, it does have people from European, North American and Asian Societies living in their country.

Rather than taking for granted and as the ultimate truth the results of "Well-Developed-Countries", Klinenberg should have considered broaden his research horizon if he was going to make such conclusions, which to some extent, seem illogic.