A101 Team Senator Ben Sasse appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert last week to talk about his latest book, Them: Why We Hate Each Other and How to Heal. Here’s what he had to say about how the digital revolution is creating a politically polarized environment:
We’re decades into a digital revolution that’s going to take decades to finish. I think it’s on the order of the Industrial Revolution, and it’s – we’re lonely! It’s undermining place. We have shorter duration jobs. We have less relationship with our extended family. There’s been a halving of friendship in America the last 27 years. Local worshipping communities are thinner than ever before. I think we’re living through a time where local community is being undermined, and yet everything we know about happiness is driven by rootedness, and technology is screaming, “You can be rootless!” And we haven’t figured out habits for rootedness for the digital, mobile age yet. …
People are substituting political communities for actual, embodied local neighborhoods. And I don’t think it’s gonna work.
