Four loves follow-up

Consider the following portrait, all of whose modifiers are meant descriptively rather than critically or even pejoratively:

A man in his 20s or 30s who is godless, friendless, fatherless, childless, sexless, unmarried, and unpartnered, and who has no active relationship with a sibling, cousin, aunt, uncle, or grandparent. We will assume he is not motherless—everyone has (had) a mother—but we might also add that he lacks a healthy relationship with her or that he lives far away from her.

This, in extreme form, is the picture of loveless life I described in the last post, using the fourfold love popularized by C. S. Lewis: kinship, eros, friendship, and agape.

Here’s my question. In human history, apart from extreme crises brought about by natural disaster or famine or war or plague, has there even been a generation as full of such men (or women) as the present generation? The phenomenon is far from limited to “the West.” It includes Russia, Japan, and China, among others. Young people without meaningful relationships of any kind, anywhere on the grid of the four loves. They lack entirely the love of a god, the love of a spouse, the love of a child, the love of a friend, even the love of a parent.

On one hand, it seems I can’t go a day without reading a new story about this phenomenon; it’s on my mind this week because I just finished Joel Kotkin’s The Coming of Neo-Feudalism. Yet, on the other hand, the crisis we are facing seems so massive, so epochal, so devastating, so unprecedented, so complex, that in truth we can’t talk about it enough. We need to be shouting the problem aloud from the rooftops like a crazy end-times street preacher.

But what is to be done? That’s the question that haunts me. Whatever the answers, we should be laboring with all that we have to find them. The stakes are as high as they get.