Young Japanese 'decline to fall in love' - BBC News
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-16500768
It is a case study of one of the problems of democracy Tocqueville foresaw in 1835: the need to sustain the habit of forming groups in a democracy.
The social isolation in Japan today has for decades been huge problem here in the US as well. This problem has long been known to social scientists: in a democracy people are free to do what they want, so they sometimes lose linkages with other people if they do not actively seek them out. This habit of voluntary group-forming is what Tocqueville calls “forming associations” in his book Democracy in America written in 1835.
Democracy in America is often called the most important book ever written about American democratic life. Much of it is as insightful today (or more) than when it was written. He says Americans' habit of forming groups to achieve goals is totally different from Europe (he was French) where people are born into groups and have little say about what groups they can belong to and what those groups will achieve. He also says that without this group-forming habit, Americans would not be able to achieve much and society would lapse into “barbarism.”
To Tocqueville, voluntarily forming and taking part in groups, while always a messy process, is absolutely necessary to get anything done in a democracy; without the group-forming habit, democracy becomes a society of de-linked free agents who cannot agree on or work toward anything. Without voluntary action, nothing gets done—not even falling in love.
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Tocqueville quotes from Democracy in America:
Need for face to face interaction through groups:
"Sentiments and ideas renew themselves, the heart is enlarged, and the human mind is developed only by the reciprocal action of men upon one another. I have shown that this action is almost nonexistent in a democratic country. It is therefore necessary to create it artificially there. And this is what associations alone can do."
How Americans form groups to get things done that government would do in Europe:
“Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations. They have not only commercial and manufacturing companies, in which all take part, but associations of a thousand other kinds, religious, moral, serious, futile, general or restricted, enormous or diminutive. The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools. If it is proposed to inculcate some truth or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form a society. Wherever at the head of some new undertaking you see the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association.”
How American associations differ from European aristocratic endeavors:
“Aristocratic communities always contain, among a multitude of persons who by themselves are powerless, a small number of powerful and wealthy citizens, each of whom can achieve great undertakings single-handed. In aristocratic societies men do not need to combine in order to act, because they are strongly held together. Every wealthy and powerful citizen constitutes the head of a permanent and compulsory association, composed of all those who are dependent upon him or whom he makes subservient to the execution of his designs.”
The special need for the habit of group-forming in democratic countries:
“In democratic countries the science of association is the mother of science; the progress of all the rest depends upon the progress it has made.”
Alexis de Tocqueville
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