The Ministry of Loneliness

T oday is the commemoration of Saint Valentine, a celebrated martyr who, in spite of that bedazzled skull with his name on it reverently displayed at a certain basilica in Rome, may not have technically quite . . . existed. Or there might have been three of them — Roman record-keeping, once rigorous, had declined somewhat by the third century, a victim of imperial torpor, so it is difficult to say.

In any case, I do not expect Tetsushi Sakamoto to join the many pilgrims who will visit Saint Valentine’s popular shrine (which is in Dublin rather than in Rome) today, but perhaps he should. It is a beacon for the lonely, and Sakamoto is Japan’s freshly commissioned “minister of loneliness.”

Sakamoto, a member of a Japanese political association described as “ultraconservative,” has much in common with a certain breed of American conservative: His current portfolio includes projects intended to revitalize economic backwaters in Japan and to reverse declining birthrates. The latter job is not an easy one: Japan’s pregnancy rate declined steeply in 2020, by more than 5 percent, a consequence of the epidemic. Another way of looking at that: Japan’s birthrate was hit almost exactly as hard by the coronavirus as was its GDP.

“The spread of the coronavirus has many people worried about getting pregnant, giving birth, and raising babies,” Sakamoto told the Straits Times. But this is a trend that long predates the epidemic. 

Japan has relatively few out-of-wedlock births, and its declining birth rate is in part a consequence of its declining marriage rate. In 1990, about 5 percent of Japanese 50 and over had never been married, and by 2010 that share had risen to more than 20 percent for men and more than 10 percent for women. The Japanese government projects that 15 years from now, nearly a third of Japanese men and nearly a fifth of Japanese women will go unmarried.

(It is a feature of many societies that the number of never-married men far exceeds the number of never-married women: From a purely evolutionary point of view, male reproductive capacity is expendable relative to the female.)

The marriage trend is not much more promising in the United States: Marriage has been declining steadily for decades, achieving a record low in 2020. The United States has more out-of-wedlock births than does Japan, but our relative promiscuity won’t save the fertility rate, which also hit an all-time low last year.

It is not good that man should be alone.

Writing in the New York Times last week, Melissa Kirsch explored “Cures for Loneliness.” None of them sounded very convincing. The rest of the week’s headlines contained much more of the same: a worrying study of the health effects of loneliness on elderly people in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, a similar study of young people from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, con artists using dating apps to victimize the lonely from the Netherlands to Turkey, “I Sexted with a Bot to Quell Pandemic Loneliness.” Well-intentioned people are distributing robot pets to the aged.

Japan appointed its loneliness czar in response to a sharp increase in suicide rates. The great weight of loneliness is too much for many among us to carry, from Tokyo to Baltimore. Between 2000 and 2016, the rate of suicide among American men increased by nearly one-third. In the same years, the suicide rate among American women increased by half.

Michel Houellebecq’s infamous novel about voluntary human extinction was published as The Elementary Particles in the United States, but in the United Kingdom the title was Atomised, which more economically describes the end state of an exclusively consumerist society, in which personal relationships are more like restaurant meals than expressions of a sacramental life. We live together alone, each at a table for one.

It is a life largely without any context other than consumption.

Here, surrounded by wealth and power that would have stunned a Roman emperor, our churches are full of women and men who are praying for husbands and wives, for family of some kind, or for a friend. And behind the doors that shut so many of us in are millions more who would be making the same prayers if they knew how. We could, in at least this case, answer our own prayers — not individually, one at a time on our own behalf, but together, as a people and as a civilization. The way in which we choose to live is not the only way to live.

Christians once studied the lives of the saints for examples of that. The lives of The Bachelor, picturesque though they may be, offer no such illumination.

Saint Valentine, if he existed at all, probably was unmarried. He is not remembered for his commitment to romantic love but for a passionate love of another kind, one that he would not abandon even under threat of torture and execution. A martyr dies, but he does not die alone, waiting helplessly for the Ministry of Loneliness to send the helpful Mr. Sakamoto around to give him that which he already possesses.

And if we are lonely because of disappointment in marriage and family, that loneliness is only a portrait in miniature of the more profound separation between atomized people who, having too much and too little at the same time, sometimes in despair take their own lives because they have forgotten how to live and why.