Society's Strength in Weakness

Society as a Body #

Even amid growing distrust of public institutions and a polarized political climate, I continue to believe there is a common good. In earlier times that phrase may have rolled off the tongue more easily, as if its meaning were obvious, as if it needed only to be invoked to be secured: the commonwealth. Perhaps it is good that we approach the phrase more skeptically now, since its implications are more demanding than its familiarity suggests. To say that there is a common good is to acknowledge that we owe something to one another, not merely as a matter of sentiment or preference, but as a taproot of our shared life. There is a good that cannot be reduced to the sum of our individual prosperity or comfort.

Before the term politics had become tarnished by practice, Aristotle used it to describe the shared life of citizens in a city. A household may flourish in its way, a business in its way, but the governance of a community must seek the good of all its members. This common-wealth, Aristotle wrote, is “something greater and more complete” than the well-being of any one person taken alone.¹

We belong to one another. This is an old insight. One Roman story tells of a time when aggrieved citizens withdrew their cooperation from the city. A senator answered by comparing society to a body: each part depends on the others, and none can be neglected without harming the whole.² Saint Paul gives the image a sharper turn when he writes that “those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable.”

Because we are prone to self-importance, this is also a perpetually new insight.

We Depend on Each Other for Security #

Each of us is vulnerable, whether or not we have the courage to admit it. The body wears down, the mind falters, fortunes rise and fall with a randomness that mocks any pretenses of merit. Each life has its weaknesses, whether visible or not, whether hidden in our DNA or waiting around the next street corner.

Some of us, however, have more protection than others. I, for one, move through the world cushioned by savings, property, credentials, strong families, and social connections. When illness or crisis comes, there’s room to absorb the blow. Others live nearer the edge. Some may have made poor choices (who hasn’t?) but many inherited circumstances that preceded choice: genetic conditions, developmental differences, early losses and scars, poverty, violence, absent opportunities.

We are right to celebrate resilience when it blooms under such conditions, and right to cultivate it in ourselves. But to assume that resilience will simply appear and carry everyone safely toward the common good is magical thinking. At worst it is abandonment. Some members of our communities are expected to absorb the shocks of illness, poverty, and violence with almost no buffer. And if the ancient image of the collective body means anything, they are no less part of the common good than anyone else.

There is a kind of pact made by admitting this: If things go sideways, you can count on me. We may imagine this as charity, but over a lifetime the roles change. The caregiver becomes the patient. The worker becomes disabled. The parent leans on the child. The “self-made” person discovers, at an inconvenient moment, how much of the scaffolding of his life was held up by other hands.

We Depend on Each Other for Different Strengths #

People with disabilities, mental illness, or other vulnerabilities belong within the common good not because they can prove their usefulness, but because they are members of the human community. Their claim on us does not depend on productivity, efficiency, intelligence, or the possession of any compensating talent.

Once this inherent value is honored, another truth becomes visible. What we call weakness is not merely a lack. People whose bodies, minds, or ways of moving through the world differ from the norm often perceive things others do not. They encounter the weak seams in systems that appear seamless to those for whom they were designed. They create languages, cultures, relationships, forms of knowledge, and ways of solving problems. Sometimes the contribution of weakness is not an action at all but the motion it stirs around itself: what happens to our communities when they learn to make room for a wider range of dependence, ability, communication, and embodiment. Such a community can become more attentive, more imaginative, and less brittle.

By excluding people whose lives do not fit our definitions of usefulness, then, we commit two harms at once. We deny their inherent membership in the human community, and we impoverish the community that remains.

The issue may become clearer if we turn the tables. Imagine that a superintelligent machine emerged and came to regard ordinary human beings much as we regard Labrador Retrievers: affectionate, limited, occasionally useful, but plainly incapable of understanding the world at its level.³ What principles would we want to govern its treatment of us? Should our worth depend upon our productivity relative to its own? Upon our ability to solve the problems it considers important? Surely we would hope that it had discovered some conception of value more generous than comparative intelligence or utility.⁴

That is the principle we must put into practice now, but we must take off our blinders in order to do it.

Disappearing the Problem #

The common good is difficult. That challenge creates a temptation: rather than enlarge our systems and imaginations to accommodate troublesome forms of human need, we can make the problem easier by making the community smaller.

A culture that ties human worth too closely to productivity makes this narrowing almost natural. We begin to sort people, usually without saying so, into those who are useful and those who are not. Those who produce, earn, organize, and perform are easy to place. Those whose illness, disability, age, or circumstances make them less obviously productive are harder to fit into the story. The danger is not merely that they receive fewer resources. They begin to seem less central to our idea of what a human life is for.

This logic turns inward as well. If my worth depends upon what I produce, I must keep producing. Even ordinary conversation takes on this shape. Asked how the day went, we list what we finished or accomplished. The self becomes a small enterprise under constant review. Robert Sapolsky has written about the peculiar burden of human stress: while animals usually encounter stress as an immediate crisis, human beings can recreate and imaginatively prolong that crisis. A performance-driven culture supplies that capacity with unlimited fuel.

The same desire for order shapes what we do with weakness. Modern western societies have gradually tucked death out of view from ordinary domestic and communal life and into the hands of professionals and institutions. Dying became cleaner, more technical, more commercial, and less visible.⁵ Something similar has happened with mental illness, formerly termed “madness.” Western societies have repeatedly responded to mental illness not only by attempting to treat it but by separating it from ordinary social life, whether through banishment or confinement.⁶

Physical separation is only one way to make dependence disappear. Administrative systems can accomplish something similar by reducing a person to a series of discrete needs. When relationships are replaced by transactions, care becomes easier to count and easier to pay for, but often harder to experience. Fee-for-service medicine is an easy example, but the tendency is broader than a single reimbursement model. Whenever mutual obligation is reduced to a sequence of economic exchanges, the durable relationships that once carried much of the work can disappear.

If we hide weakness, isolate illness, outsource dependency, and treat care as a sequence of transactions, we can construct a remarkably clean picture of human life. In that picture, people are independent, productive, rational, and in control. They age somewhere else. They die somewhere else. They break down somewhere else.

This picture is a collective fiction that we are reluctant to challenge, perhaps because each of us suspects that sooner or later we may fail to live up to it. But it is a terrible storyline: simplified, safe, boring, and finally unfulfilling. We know we are deeper.

The Problem Grows in the Dark #

A false picture has practical consequences. When people understand that weakness threatens their social standing, they learn to conceal it.

Judgment doesn’t need to be harsh to be effective. It is enough that we absorb, from a thousand small signals, which forms of need are tolerated and which are embarrassing, which kinds of suffering can be spoken aloud and which may change how others see us. We edit ourselves.

But concealment has costs. Isolation deepens depression and anxiety; prolonged social defeat and exclusion can worsen the course of serious mental illness and may contribute to psychosis risk in people who are vulnerable to it. The person who fears being marked withdraws, and withdrawal itself makes participation harder. A vicious circle develops: the more isolated a person becomes, the more difficult it may be to navigate the institutions on which he depends, and the more likely those institutions are to experience him as difficult, unreliable, or unreachable.

What is missing in that darkness, behind the veil of our willed ignorance? Trust, connection, safety, hope? The route that got us here has been outlined broadly: difficulty, exclusion, isolation, erosion of social fabric. By the time the consequences become visible as homelessness, hospitalization, incarceration, addiction, or despair, we can be inclined to call them individual failures. The failure began much earlier, though, in the terms by which we decided who was worth seeing.

Today, social isolation is widespread and serious enough to have become a public-health concern, affecting more than simply those at the margins of communities.⁷ Yet I would argue that we cannot solve it from ’the center’. We have to reach out to the edges to restore the human community.

Coming Together in the Difficult Light #

If social isolation has encroached far past the margins, why begin there?

The first reason is moral. If there is a common good, it cannot be called common while some members of the community are treated as expendable. The old image of society as a body makes the point plainly: the parts that seem weakest are still part of the body, and their suffering belongs to the whole. How we treat people with the least power tells us what dignity truly means when it becomes inconvenient or costly.

The second reason is practical. Vulnerable people often encounter the failures of a system before the rest of us do. Someone with money can absorb a rent increase; someone with family support can survive a confusing discharge plan; someone with a car may never notice that a clinic is unreachable by public transportation. People with fewer buffers cannot compensate so easily.

This is the sense in which vulnerable populations can serve as a bellwether. They are not prophets, and whatever happens to them will not necessarily happen next to everyone else. But they are unusually sensitive to strains in conditions we all depend on: housing, care, transportation, trustworthy institutions, and social connection. Their worsening circumstances can be an early warning.

There is an intriguing historical example of how this bellwether phenomenon may appear. In the late nineteenth century, one popular diagnosis was neurasthenia, or “nervous exhaustion,” which some believed arose from the technologies that were collapsing distance and accelerating daily life (railroad, telegraph, periodical press) argued that the human nervous system was struggling to keep pace.⁸ While the causal pathways of the theory haven’t borne out, the question it posed was valid: What if some individuals’ distress is a signal that our human-made environment is compelling something for which we are poorly adapted? More than a century later, the technologies have changed, but the question has returned. A computer in your pocket now continuously streams news, comparison, entertainment, work, advertising, and social judgment. Among adolescents, social-media use is nearly universal and frequent use is associated with greater prevalence of sadness or hopelessness and some measures of suicide risk.⁹

This isn’t to say modernity is the single cause of mental illness. Yet when groups of people fail to flourish under the conditions we have created, we should not simply ask what is wrong with them. We should also ask what their suffering may be telling us about a world the rest of us have learned, for a time, to tolerate.

Conversely, their improvement can test whether the good we claim to be building actually reaches beyond those who can already manage for themselves. That is why repair should begin at the edges. We usually design from an imagined center: someone reasonably healthy, literate, mobile, connected, and able to navigate institutions. When the resulting system fails a person who is disabled, poor, mentally ill, elderly, or profoundly alone, we typically call that person an exception and add an accommodation.

But the exception may understand the system better than the person for whom it works. The person in a wheelchair notices the staircase. The person without a car discovers which clinic is inaccessible. The edges expose assumptions the center can afford not to see. People who encounter the hardest barriers should therefore help design the response, not merely requests tweaks after the fact.¹⁰ If we want to know what belonging requires, we should ask those for whom it is hardest: they encounter in concentrated form barriers the rest of us can work around.

Beginning there also changes what counts as a solution. No single institution can create this kind of belonging. A life does not divide neatly among a hospital, a school, a housing agency, a church, a Medicaid program, and a neighborhood. Those divisions belong to institutions, not to communities.

A system that works only for people who can compensate for its failures has proved very little. If it also works for the person with severe mental illness, the isolated elder, the child with a developmental disability, or the family one missed paycheck from eviction, then something more substantial has changed.

This does not mean solving loneliness only for a small high-risk group. A widespread problem requires changes in the conditions affecting everyone.¹¹ The principle is instead: design from the edge, build for everyone, invest according to need.

Perhaps this is what the old image of the body was trying to tell us. A body does not heal best by concentrating on the parts that are already well, or by cutting off the part that reveals the illness. Pain draws attention because something important is happening there.

Martin Buber wrote that “all real living is meeting.”¹² If our society has declined by excluding people who reveal its weakness, it will only be revitalized if we learn to see each other, and to make the common good truly common.