(gentle instrumental music) - In our human experience, we are constantly toggling back and forth between the needs of the group and the desires, the imperatives of the individual.

- Loneliness is the gap between the relationships you have and the relationships you want.

- I want to be able to connect with you.

I wanna remember what did you change inside of me that made me feel lifted?

- The ancient stuff in our brain, like tribal loyalty, we will never get rid of it.

It is baked into our brain.

- We have this tendency to group ourselves, but then we also have this ability through music, through dance, through food, to come together and make something new.

- [Jim Cotter] On this program, we'll explore the apparent contradiction between our need to be together and our desire to be alone.

With the help of artists and experts, we'll examine how this age old struggle to find a balance between singleness and togetherness has come to define us as modern humans.

(gentle instrumental music) Humans are a social species.

Our ability to thrive under harsh circumstances has always depended on our ability to cooperate.

Some existential threats, such as starvation and predation, are now less common, but those such as natural disasters still exist.

So the desire to be in community with others lingers in our consciousness and is often given its purest voice in human creativity.

(gentle instrumental music) ♪ The time has come to sail away ♪ ♪ I know you long for me to stay ♪ ♪ But I miss my friends of yesterday ♪ ♪ Oh, they're calling me home ♪ They're calling me home (gentle instrumental music) - [Jim Cotter] Having trained as an opera singer, and before embarking on a highly successful solo career, Rhiannon Giddens spent almost a decade in the Carolina Chocolate Drops, an old time trio.

- So I spent however many years in a chair playing banjo in a string band.

And that experience really counterweighted the being in a costume, and singing, and sort of being, it's all about the voice and it's all about me.

And you know, I just realized that I really liked that better.

You know, I liked the service, I liked playing for school shows and educating.

I liked playing for dances.

I used to play for square dances, contra dances.

I used to call contra dances, you know?

- I know.

- And that feeling of being in service to someone else.

♪ Don't get trouble in your mind ♪ ♪ Don't get trouble in your mind ♪ ♪ Don't get trouble in your mind ♪ ♪ Don't get trouble in your mind ♪ (gentle instrumental music) - [Jim Cotter] Today, she and partner, Francesco Turrisi, continue this service to collective culture, drawing from their own backgrounds and experiences, and each others, in the pursuit of something unique.

(Rhiannon Giddens singing in foreign language) - That's where we actually show the beauty of the human connection.

Because yeah, we have this tendency to group ourselves, but then we also have this ability, through music, through dance, through food, to come together and make something new.

(suspenseful music) - [Jim Cotter] Sebastian Junger spent a year moving in and out of a war zone.

A journalist, author, and filmmaker, he retold his experiences in a feature-length documentary, 2010's "Restrepo".

- I was quite a loner when I was young, but I've never been happier.

I mean, literally never been happier, I think, than when I was with that platoon in Afghanistan, because it was my first experience of being in a human survival group.

And it's totally intoxicating.

- [Jim Cotter] That experience of being in a human survival group was the start of Junger's exploration of what it means to be part of a collection of individuals, banded and bonded together by adversity.

- There are two very important imperatives and drives in the human experience.

One is to belong part of a group, because that's how you survive.

No one survives outside of a group, humans die in nature almost immediately.

But the other is to push your own interests, is to pursue your own interests and do things that benefit you individually.

And so in our human experience, we are constantly toggling back and forth between the needs of the group, when we need the group to survive, and the desires, the imperatives of the individual when we're okay for a while, and can pursue our own interests.

A group experience, whatever it may be, will be difficult, stressful, wonderful, will change how you feel about yourself for the better, in all likelihood.

If you can make your life within a humanitarian setting where they need you and you need them, now that's an ongoing project that will sustain you for your whole life.

- [Jim Cotter] And as we go through life, our connections to family, friends, and communities change, sometimes by choice, and other times because of the culture and conditions of the worlds we live in.

- At some point, being fearful of strangers was a good thing, it may have saved your life, you may have missed out on really great opportunities to learn a new culture.

(gentle instrumental music) - [Jim Cotter] Mahzarin Banaji is a professor of psychology at Harvard University who studies the innate and unconscious beliefs we hold about ourselves and others.

She's spent nearly four decades analyzing how these beliefs operate and how we form communities.

- We need it more than we need food and drink is what I would say.

I mean, it is a fundamental need, to be with others who agree with us.

People who say you are right, I too believe the same, in the same God as you do.

That is very deep seated.

But let's talk about two opposite sort of paths in our evolutionary history.

So we can show you, as experimental psychologists, that we can create these in- and out-groups rapidly, that our brains get to work really fast on that, and before you know it, I'm willing to kill them off, right?

Okay, so that we know.

But think about what we actually also do today that our ancestors would be shocked by.

That you and I are in one room talking to each other, okay, from these two very different cultures, and yet here we are, and I have not the slightest fear that you will kill me and you don't either.

- [Jim Cotter] And given the choice, we would rather live within the constraints of a tribe, which allows us to assert our identity and cement our belief systems.

Judith Jamison has sought meaning and connection within different communities throughout her personal and professional life.

- How have you moved me spiritually?

What have you done to make me recognize my humanity?

- [Jim Cotter] Jamison is an icon of modern dance.

Following a stellar career as a performer and choreographer, she became artistic director of Alvin Ailey Dance Theater.

(gentle instrumental music) Jamison grew up in a tight-knit community in Philadelphia.

Raised in the 1950s, she was always aware of the ways her family created connection with their neighbors.

- My parents surrounded me with so much care, and so much loving, and so much the idea that we're the same, we're all the same.

My grandmother and grandfather lived right next door to me, you know, so there was that complete surrounding of love.

My aunt and uncle lived five blocks away from me.

Upsal Street, you know, that everything was close by.

And I was comforted by knowing that my people knew who they were.

- [Jim Cotter] Community means safety, but this assumption isn't always true.

Groups we are born into often carry inherent risks, while others that appear to welcome us can be fraught with uncertainty.

- I was terrified by Harvard and I was terrified by these cultures of ease, and engagement, and exchange, and conversation.

- [Jim Cotter] As a teenager, the Inuit poet Joan Kane excelled at school.

At 17, she was offered a place at Harvard.

But this was where her upbringing and the realities of the wider world started to clash.

- I wasn't there for more than, you know, two weeks, not even, you know, a very short amount of time.

And I said, this is not for me.

I was not yet 18, so they sent my father to come get me, and I had to go.

I went back to Anchorage and I thought about it for a year.

Did I want to go?

Did I want to be part of this?

Could I do it?

Was it worth it?

- [Jim Cotter] Back in Alaska and searching for work, Kane foresaw a future of minimum wage jobs and the constant threat of violence.

- That was another kind of survival that I was also not particularly well suited for, you know, as a teenage indigenous girl, woman, you know, in Anchorage, Alaska.

One in three native women in this country is a victim of a violent sexual assault.

And Anchorage is a place where I saw that as something that would be inevitable for me.

And that was more far more uncomfortable for me than that feeling of completely being at sea.

- [Jim Cotter] And growing up, being at sea was a sensation that the writer and illustrator Kristen Radtke was familiar with, even when surrounded by others.

- Loneliness really has nothing to do with the amount of time you spend alone.

I think a lot of times we conflate the ideas of loneliness and isolation, but they're different.

(gentle instrumental music) - [Jim Cotter] Radtke was raised in a Midwestern town where she says she had trouble connecting with others, and has described herself as having been a pretty lonely kid.

She eventually settled in Brooklyn, but even though she made friends and established a broader social network there, she still struggled with feelings of loneliness.

And so in her late 20s, she set about trying to understand it.

The result was "Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness".

(gentle instrumental music) - [Kristen Radtke] "Loneliness is often exacerbated by a perception that one is lonely while everyone else is connected.

It's exaggerated by a sensation of being outside something that others seem to be in on, a family, a couple, a friendship, a joke.

Perhaps now we can learn how flawed that kind of thinking is, because loneliness is one of the most universal things any person can feel."

- One of the most surprising things that I found while researching the book was that everyone has a different biological threshold that's programmed into them since birth for how much time they can tolerate alone and how much interpersonal, you know, contact we need.

Like a lot of times we talk about it in terms of introversion and extroversion, but it's actually really a lot more simple than that.

It's like basically at what point does the alarm bell of, oh, I need to contact someone go off?

- You have an expected amount of social contact, you have a detected amount of social contact, and then you're computing the difference.

If there's a deficit, then you activate an effector system that drives you to solve whatever problem.

- [Jim Cotter] A neuroscientist at the Salk Institute in San Diego, Kay Tye has spent years researching the neurological basis of social behaviors, including our drives to seek and avoid social connection.

- If I was hungry, that would drive an effector system to focus on seeking food.

And if I was tired and I had a homeostatic deficit for sleep, then I would fall asleep.

And if I had a homeostatic deficit for social contact, I would be motivated to seek social contact.

If you look through the psychological literature, loneliness is generally characterized by four things.

One, that it drives a pro-social state, increased motivation to seek social contact.

Two, it is unpleasant.

Three, it's distinct from generalized anxiety.

And four, which is the really difficult one, is that it's subjective.

Sometimes I'm at a party and I feel alone or a crowded street in Manhattan, I can feel alone, or I could be alone in my room and feel just fine, or my office.

And I can entertain myself alone in my office for quite a long time.

But I think that it is subjective and that is the point.

- And I think that loneliness is different for everyone, but for me it does feel like just a lack of meaningful connection.

The way that I like to define loneliness and the way that a lot of scientists do is that loneliness is the gap between the relationships you have and the relationships you want.

So it's really that, that kind of space.

And loneliness does really feel like a gap, it feels like this blank spot, you know, where you're kind of listless and unsure of where to go.

(gentle instrumental music) - [Jim Cotter] Because we constantly seek a balance between social connection and seclusion.

One of the cruelest acts we can visit on another human is to condemn them to isolation.

(gentle instrumental music) - Sometimes solitude is nice.

Sometimes I've been feeling overcrowded and I haven't gotten a moment to myself, and I've just been talking to strangers or acquaintances all day, and I'm just relieved to just have some space to myself and have some solitude.

So I think solitude describes something that you've chosen, that isn't forced upon you.

And so I think that is absolutely different.

When something is out of your control, it inevitably becomes more of a threat.

- Banishment is second only to death in terms of punishment, 'cause it means you're cast out.

Like the first punishment anyone in the Bible receives is to be cast away and kind of be on their own.

But I think for the most of us, being cast out of society is probably the most painful thing that can happen because you're truly alone.

(gentle instrumental music) - [Jim Cotter] Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia was the world's first prison purposely designed to use separate confinement as a form of rehabilitation.

It was conceived of as an alternative to the brutality that had existed in jails for hundreds of years.

- They had these noble ambitions.

They would've thought we would be living today in a crime-free world.

I mean, that's the level of optimism they had about this whole experiment, that they were gonna solve the problem.

And to their credit, they were taking an approach no one had ever taken before.

You know, the history of prisons is pretty much, there are only so many strategies that have ever been tried.

And so the lock them up and throw away the key, and to hurt them physically, there are centuries of that going back.

- [Jim Cotter] Sean Kelley, the director of interpretation at Eastern State Penitentiary, says that the prison was established as a good faith attempt to rehabilitate law breakers.

- And so these guys, they had a genuinely new idea, let's try isolation, see if that will actually help the prisoners.

And they believed the prisoners were essentially sick.

And so they wanted to treat them with dignity, they wanted them to become better, healthy members of society when they left.

And so after centuries of just obnoxious, physical punishment, here comes a prison that they said, let's give them good food, teach them a skill so they'll have a vocation when they leave, and we're gonna hold them in this relatively pleasant experience.

- Relatively.

- Well, I say relatively pleasant.

I guess, you know, that's a question we debate all the time.

We ask little kids this, would you rather be in a typical prison of the 1820s, which would've been a large, open holding cell, everybody packed in together, almost no supervision, and they were notoriously violent, disease-ridden places of victimization, and violence, and disease.

Do you want that world or do you want this world of almost total silence?

Kids generally pick the silence.

- [Jim Cotter] This instinctual reaction to choose silence over violence was almost universally lauded in the 1800s.

And Eastern State's then-radical method of incarceration, known as the Pennsylvania System, became much imitated and quite resilient.

- There were prisons that were still operating under this system well into the 20th century.

Eastern State Penitentiary was the flagship of this whole movement, and it was copied all over the world.

But into the 1910s, there were still prisons being run like this, even later than that.

There were prisons being run like this in France in the 1950s.

There's still this belief that isolation was gonna help people look into their hearts, become penitent.

- [Jim Cotter] Systemic solitary confinement was abandoned at Eastern State in 1913, though the penitentiary continued to operate until 1970.

Yet despite being considered an extreme form of punishment, today many states and the federal system still detain certain prisoners in perpetual solitude.

- Solitary confinement is the punishment that is the go-to punishment to really inflict misery on prisoners today.

I mean, that in some ways is the lesson of Eastern State penitentiary, that people really, really hate this, to be isolated.

- [Jim Cotter] While 19th century penitentiaries used isolation as a means to rehabilitate convicts, a soon-to-be iconic American symbol of isolation was being forged: the cowboy, the archetypal loner of the Wild West.

(gentle instrumental music) - The American cowboy is very much about like brawn, and strength, and doing it on your own.

There's so many ideologies in America that are about doing it on your own.

But the reason that the cowboys like sexy and interesting is that everyone loves the cowboy.

Like he's not like some greasy, weird loner.

He's like some like very handsome, chiseled, you know, like Brawny paper towel man who can come in town and fix the problems, and then ride off into the sunset.

A cowboy is a hero.

You know, like there's so much, if we look at even like antiheroes or heroes on TV, it's hard to find a male protagonist on TV who isn't like a little bit alone or isn't a little bit lonely, but it's like he's lonely by choice.

You know, he's still like cool, and coveted, and you know, like women are always interested in him, and all these things, but yet he's kind of rejecting society.

You know, you look at someone like, really any - Don Draper, Tony Soprano, any of these really famous antiheroes we have, they're kind of just renditions of the American cowboy.

- That figure was not invented by the westerns.

- No, true.

- It was imported from medieval Europe when medieval Europe was scary, and you know, there was a frontier feel.

Then later, of course, Europe became more settled and civilized, so that character was literally forced out to where there was still a frontier, which was either Australia, lots of similar legends there, or America, of course, in the West.

- [Jim Cotter] The novelist Lee Child's most resilient character is Jack Reacher, a former US military cop turned vagabond.

Reacher is a loner who hopes for the best, plans for the worst, and always helps out the underdog.

- The classic avenging hero then.

- Yeah, and universal in world culture, actually.

There's a Japanese trope, the Ronin, who is a samurai, disowned by his master, and sentenced to wander the land doing good deeds, which is exactly parallel to Sir Lancelot or Sir Gawain, you know, this trope has been around for thousands of years, because we want it.

You know, if you are in trouble somewhere, sometime, you would love it if some guy would show up, solve your problem, and then, crucially, leave, because it's the transience that's really important to that myth.

They can't stick around.

The only time in legend or myth any one of them has ever stuck around was the Pied Piper of Hamelin, because he stuck around 'cause he didn't get paid, and then he killed all the children by marching them off the cliff.

You know, it's a nightmare if they stick around.

So the idea is they show up, they solve the problem, they leave.

And that has been happening for thousands of years.

I mean, you can trace it all the way back through Scandinavian sagas, Anglo-Saxon poems, ancient Greek stuff.

You know, religious myths, the savior myths, that suddenly somebody shows up.

So it is permanent in our culture.

- [Jim Cotter] Jack Reacher is a modern embodiment of this recurring hero.

A character for whom self-reliance is elemental.

- He never shows symptoms of loneliness.

I mean, he's never miserable, he's never lying on his motel room bed feeling sorry for himself.

The point I was really trying to make is he's an obvious example of that, he's very solitary, he spends most of his time physically alone, and so he's a good vehicle for it.

But I think we're all alone.

I think that, you know, I've got a fantastic marriage that has so far lasted 45 years, I've got a fantastic daughter, my brother is a close friend.

In no way am I disadvantaged compared to other people, and in fact, probably monstrously advantaged compared to other people in terms of the relationships I have.

But we have to accept, we will never know another human being all that well.

- [Jim Cotter] Bridging that gulf between ourselves and others is one of the imperatives of our lives.

And Sebastian Junger has found that the best way to approach it is to let yourself need and be needed.

- The more you need the other person to survive, the closer you're going to be to them, even if you don't like them.

There are examples of closeness, groups of people functioning in a sort of proper communitarian way.

The firehouse is one, AA is another.

It's very hard to stop drinking by yourself, with a therapist, it doesn't really work.

And AA works quite well.

A platoon in combat.

A community that's been hit by a devastating hurricane, There are examples.

What I would say is that those excellent examples of human connection and communitarian action are not brought to a sort of systemic level within modern society.

They remain isolated and amazing examples, but isolated examples of healthy human behavior.

But at a systemic level, no, we are not addressing that issue.

- [Jim Cotter] In most parts of the world, there's little choice but to cooperate collectively.

At a fundamental level, most people do not have the resources to simply pay for what they need.

- And there are stresses that come with poverty, of course there are.

But one of of the things you get with poverty is community, 'cause people need each other because they can't pay for the goods and services that a more affluent society would.

And community buffers people from mental illness and distress.

And so, I mean, in most of the world, people sleep in groups.

And in most of the world people share in childcare.

In most of the world, people, you know, walk when they need to go somewhere, they don't get in a car.

I mean, that's the sort of human norm, and it still is in most of the world.

- [Jim Cotter] In some western societies, average circumstances don't require natural communities.

So overcoming loneliness must be a conscious effort.

And for Kristen Radtke, the opposite of loneliness isn't simply being with others, it's trusting others to embrace us.

- If you can't trust other people, that's the most alone you can be.

Truly, I mean, it's fundamental.

Like you have to trust that someone has your back, that someone cares about you, that they're gonna be there when you go through something hard.

- We have figured out how to push back the threat to our lives and push back hardships so that they're not in our everyday experience.

And we have the illusion of not needing a group in order to survive.

And of course we do.

There's buildings all around us built by other people, we're driving cars that run on a gasoline, drilled by other people, you know, et cetera, et cetera, there's the police, the fire department.

And all the food we eat, almost all of it was grown by other people.

We are completely dependent on the group, but it kind of feels like we're not, which engages this other primordial instinct, which is to benefit yourself, which is also a very reasonable thing to pursue.

- But in the process we isolate.

Yeah.

- You know, the richer you get, the more land you have around your house, the further physically you are away from other people.

- Well, that's right, because the impulse towards individualism is unchecked by hardship and danger.

And when that collapses because - there's a war in Ukraine and the Ukrainians are suddenly, you know, the definition of being Ukrainian now in some ways is being in Ukraine and fighting the Russians.

Like that's the most important Ukrainian identity at the moment because the Russians are an existential threat.

Well, likewise, if a hurricane or a tornado hits your community, or an earthquake, your most important identity becomes how can I help the group which I need to have help me?

- [Jim Cotter] And this instinct to coalesce when the group is threatened has developed over tens of thousands of years.

Our brains still accurately see company as essential, even when we're not in danger.

So when real threats loom, we naturally act to ensure our group's survival.

- An infantry platoon is 30, 40, 50 people.

It's exactly the size that most human communities have been throughout the ages.

And when you talk to soldiers in that kind of environment, often they will resort to the language of family.

You know, my brothers, - Sure.

- right, this is my family.

You can't really create that feeling.

- Without being under duress.

- Right.

I mean, first of all, you have to be under duress, right?

It can't just be the summer camp you went to.

But also you can't really create that feeling, in say, a brigade, which is several thousand people.

No one says, my family, the 173rd Airborne, right?

I mean, maybe sometimes in a kind of cliched way.

But the real feeling that's behind that word of family starts to emerge in the squad, in the platoon, maybe in the company, which is, you know, 150 people.

- The general understanding is that we really can't know more than 200 people, like that's our limit.

I'm curious to see how our understanding of that number will continue to change just with the way that the world is now with social media, blah, blah, blah.

Because throughout all of human history, 200 was really the maximum.

- [Jim Cotter] Yet in this age of vast online social networks, we believe we are connected to far larger groups of other people, and the conventional wisdom suggests that this is damaging our real world connections.

Not so fast, says Kristen Radtke.

- What I do think is interesting is that since the beginning of technology, we've sort of demonized every new form of technology as sort of the end of everything.

And I think there is a lot of ways, I mean, if you look at what's happening with Twitter right now or something like that, when you look at what happened with our elections, because of Facebook, like catastrophic consequences, no doubt.

And I do not think that virtual connection is a replacement for interpersonal interaction.

It's truly not.

But I do think that there's a lot of ways in which it can keep us connected in a way we couldn't have been before.

I mean, my niece lives eight states away, and I can FaceTime with her, and when I see her in person, then she recognizes me.

She's like excited to see Auntie Kristen in a way that she probably wouldn't be before if I was just sending pictures in the mail or something like that.

So there are definitely ways we can use technology to connect with each other and to make our lives better, but it is 1,000,000% not a replacement for face-to-face or interpersonal intimacy.

And I think one of the reasons that that face-to-face contact is important is because it's just a way you can signal to somebody else that they matter to you.

- [Jim Cotter] Neuroscientist Kay Tye has learned that meaningful connections to others or the lack thereof have quantifiable impacts on our health.

- We know that social isolation can cause all these different mood disorders, is correlated with shortened lifespans, increased morbidity and mortality with cancer, heart disease, inflammation, all these different physical health factors.

- [Jim Cotter] Tye has also discovered that being in a state of seclusion can quickly escalate into chronic loneliness.

- People will call their friends, but at some point, if you keep exerting this effort, calling friends, trying to find other social contact, and you're putting out all this energy and effort to seek it, and you're not getting it back, no one's calling back, people are unavailable, whatever the reason may be that you can't have your need met, then something else happens.

And what it looks like behaviorally is giving up, stopping trying.

A certain amount of times that your friend doesn't return your calls, you stop calling, or they say that they can't hang out, you stop asking.

So now at some point, you know, with chronic social isolation, individuals, instead of being very pro-social and excited to reconnect, they become aggressive, territorial, get off my lawn, you know, like the kind of picture of someone who becomes a hermit.

They do not welcome social contact at a certain point.

They've readjusted their social homeostatic setpoint to their new normal, which is less contact.

If they were to then be reintroduced to their social group, what would previously feel like the optimal amount of contact, now that they've readjusted, it feels like a surplus.

- [Jim Cotter] Isolation and solitude are central themes that Lee Child relates to our difficulties in knowing others.

- Or even ourselves, really.

We are basically making our way through this world alone, and ultimately we are.

And so I wanted to use Reacher as a vehicle for kind of exploring that feeling.

(gentle instrumental music) - [Jim Cotter] Jack Reacher seems to revel in voluntary solitude.

He has no friends and little social interaction beyond the occasional small talk of casual daily interactions.

Neither does he have much in the way of worldly goods.

Just a passport, a toothbrush, and the clothes on his back.

- Why is he stuck on the whole no possessions thing, by the way?

- Because it's categorical for him, it's either all or nothing.

And you know, there's one of the books where they're in a store and he's throwing away his old shirt and buying a new shirt, and somebody says, "Why don't you buy two, and then you've got the next one ready?"

And he says, "Well, 'cause then pretty soon I'll have a spare pair of pants, and then I'll have to have a bag, and then I'll have to have a suitcase, and then I'll end up with a house, and car payments, and insurance, and all that kind of stuff.

It's a slippery slope."

And the only way he can stay off it is to be absolutely ruthless about it, absolutely categorical, nothing that does not fit in his pocket.

- [Jim Cotter] Life can be tough, but how tough depends greatly on fate.

The social class and wealth of your parents, the country, and even the region of your birth often dictate how much community or isolation you will experience.

- And then you get to an affluent western country and every child has their own bedroom in the house, and the houses are filled with like a single family that isn't that connected to the families around them.

And that neighborhood isn't particularly connected to the town or even to the nation.

And it's all fragmented, and there's a great liberation there, right?

I mean, there's a great benefit to having the ties, the obligations to your group severed by affluence.

There's a benefit there, which means you can do whatever you want, right?

And your sister can listen to her music in her room and you can close your door and listen to your music, and et cetera.

Like there's a great benefit there, there's a great liberation, but there's also an enormous cost.

And every society makes choices.

Like we want those benefits, we're willing to pay those costs.

- [Jim Cotter] And so in many western societies finding a balance between connection with our close circle and the greater community isn't easy.

Families have become smaller and more insular.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, industrialization and suburbanization made the nuclear family - mom, pop, and kids - the norm.

Yet these smaller social units were expected to meet complex social needs that a broader community had once fulfilled.

- There's unbearable pressure on the family, because the boundaries of the family are not breached often enough by other people.

There aren't cousins, and aunts, and uncles, and grandparents, and neighbors in and out of the tent, in and out of the shelter, in and out of the house constantly, helping with the childcare, you help someone else with the childcare.

The burdens of parenthood are almost impossible to fulfill because there's never any relief.

- [Jim Cotter] Still, there's a flip side.

In affluent societies like the US, our focus on individual prosperity means that other problems are getting solved.

- We also have very low infant mortality, maternal mortality, the average lifespan in America is like 80.

I mean, so there are benefits as well to living in this society.

So who's to say that a high depression rate is not worth a low infant mortality rate?

I don't know.

What I can say is you don't get it all.

- [Jim Cotter] We definitely don't get it all.

Even with our craving for connection to others, the levels of intimacy available to us are becoming more limited as the different communities where we can find this connection disappear.

- The way it's usually understood is you have your most central, most intimate connections.

Your partner, your children, your parents, your siblings, your best friends.

Then you have the middle ring, which is your neighbors, kind of like your people you see at parties that you're really happy to see, but maybe you don't call every day.

And then you have the outside, the largest rings, which is like, you know, the person you see at the bodega, or the your ramen shop, or wherever, you know, where you kind of have that like nice feeling of being greeted by your name, but maybe you're not gonna share your deepest, darkest feelings.

And so one of the concerns in the States in particular is that that middle ring has really fallen away.

That our inner circles are getting smaller, and we spend more time with those people.

But that that middle circle is still really important to feel a part of a community, and that's what's really fallen away.

And that's often attributed to, you know, workaholism, or really our busy lifestyles, things like that, the fact that we move around a lot more.

Our communities have definitely shrunk.

(gentle instrumental music) - [Jim Cotter] Rhiannon Giddens and Francesco Turrisi make music that is rooted in these so-called middle rings, music that evolved regionally, that was created as a way of underscoring values and traditions, and is part of the telling and retelling of the stories that strengthened collective unity.

- Unfortunately, like these days, music has been commodified so much that people forget its importance as a cultural, you know, lubrication.

Like for me, music, 'cause I mean, I'm coming from folk world, and so, you know, a lot of the songs that I sing or would be pulling from, or the traditions that I'm using for my own music, for example, they're all coming from like this idea of people, you know, it's people's stories.

They were written to express what's going on in the culture.

And I think that that's an important part that music has to continue to have, no matter whether we're earning money, performing, or selling CDs.

Like the music has to remark on what's going on in the culture.

- [Jim Cotter] Giddens plays the minstral banjo, an instrument brought to the United States by enslaved Africans, that has since become common in many musical styles.

♪ I've got a babe ♪ But shall I keep him ♪ Twill come a day when I'll be weeping ♪ ♪ But how can I love him any less ♪ ♪ This little babe upon my breast ♪ ♪ You can take my body ♪ You can take my bones ♪ You can take my blood ♪ But not my soul ♪ You can take my body ♪ Take my bones ♪ You can take my blood ♪ But not my soul (gentle instrumental music) - It's kind of like this idea of community, right?

You're thinking of not only present community, but past community.

And that's what goes into folk music is this like knowledge base from a group of people, from generations of dealing with this stuff that we all of a sudden had to deal with, like, you know, in the west, say, you know, we haven't had to deal with a lot of these things that a lot of other people in the world have had to deal with every day.

And all of a sudden we're in lockdown, there's a plague happening, there's all of these things.

And it's the music of our past generations who had to deal with this on a daily basis, who lost half their children before they were one years old, you know, that kind of stuff, that is the strength that we pull from.

- [Jim Cotter] Francesco Turrisi was interested in the forgotten origins of Sicilian music, and began playing the tamburello, a frame drum with roots in the Middle East and West Africa that is similar to the modern tambourine.

- I was always very attracted to the sound of various types of Mediterranean music, whether it's North African, or even Greek, or Turkish especially.

And finding all these connections, you know, and frame drum is definitely one of them.

But also, the more I researched into it, the more I realized that those drums had a very specific cultural function and community function which went beyond music.

You know, like in southern Italy, those drums were used to cure the bite of the spider, in theory, and the whole ritual and ritualized trance dancing of the tarantella, you know, which again, it's something that died, you know, was last observed in the '60s, but then had a revival, you know, later, 20 years later.

So it is always interesting to look at the instrument actually is used as almost like as a doctor's tool, you know, in the collective imagination.

And this is something that the frame drums always had throughout their history, they were very often religious instruments, very often associated with female divinities or goddesses of some sort, with all kinds of different functions.

But yeah, so definitely, you know, I'm not entirely sure how you can express this nowadays, because those cultures have mostly died.

(gentle instrumental music) (Rhiannon Giddens vocalizing) - [Jim Cotter] One such culture that has mostly died is that of poet Joan Kane.

Her Inupiaq ancestors survived thousands of harsh Arctic winters on King Island near Nome, Alaska, in the Bering Sea, by spending their winters hunting and fishing, and the brief Alaskan summers on the mainland.

This on the face of it looks like a very harsh environment indeed.

- Unless you a come from a culture of people who have subsisted on marine mammals for 15,000 years, in which case it is the premium place to live and to have an intergenerational healthy culture where everyone participates in survival and providing for each other.

(gentle instrumental music) In our stories, in our histories, we always left in the summertime because the name of the island, Ugiuvak, ugiu is winter, it means a place for a long winter.

So even in our oldest stories, in the summertime, as soon as, well, June, as soon as the ice was gone, the winter sea ice, King Islanders always left to go to the mainland.

- [Jim Cotter] In the mid 1900s the Bureau of Indian Affairs closed the King Island school, which meant that the children had to leave.

Without their help, the adults and elders eventually moved to the mainland year round too.

- They had a really hard time finding teachers.

And my grandmother and other women, King Island women, really needed access to a different series of supports.

I mean, it was a time of tremendous change.

- [Jim Cotter] Born in 1977 and raised in Anchorage, Kane absorbed the oral histories passed on by her mother and grandmother, and carried forward by her extended family.

- I think that my own ability to, you know, have insight on the particular issue of how one presents is really formed by the anger with which my mother insisted upon our identity and inhabiting our identity as King Islanders, as Inupiaq people.

I went with it, but I think it's because I saw something.

My mother insisted upon it, and the rest of my family, in particular my uncles, didn't so much as insist upon it as constantly inhabit it and bear it out through all of their actions.

(gentle instrumental music) - [Jim Cotter] Kane was carrying this community and cultural DNA with her when she joined the Harvard University community at age 17.

It was in a poetry class that she found an entry point into a university culture that had previously seemed so alien.

- I remember showing up as a freshman on campus, and you know, applying for Helen Vendler's freshman poetry seminar.

And you know, writing my letter and application, and going in to have a chat with her, and not realizing that 700 of my classmates had also applied.

But we fell right into a conversation that I was never able to have before.

- [Jim Cotter] Poetry became a space to reflect on her relationships with the Inupiaq community she knew in mainland Alaska, and her island heritage, which she knew only through stories.

- Part of what I have always been interested in, in terms of King Island and stories about the place, memories about the place, is actually when I find that there's some discrepancy between what the written records say and what people are willing to talk about, and where I can ask questions, or begin to consider, or reconsider the narratives that exist or the narratives that people share.

But I think that there is something that I'm still trying to understand and participate in when it comes to this physical experience or the human experience of places like King Island.

What it means to consider my own small humanity in the context of places with a long history or a much more complex or daunting physical terrain than the constructed environment that I inhabit.

- [Jim Cotter] Joan Kane's quest for these truths has to date resulted in four collections of lyric poetry and four shorter books, focused on the physical otherworldly beauty of her Arctic homelands and the adaptation and resilience of her ancestors.

(gentle instrumental music) - "The enemy misled that missed the island in the fog.

I believe in one or the other, but both exist now to confuse me.

Dark from dark.

Snow from snow.

I believe in one- Craggy boundary, knife blade at the throat's slight swell.

From time to time the sound of voices as through sun-singed grass or grasses that we used to insulate the walls of our winter houses- walrus hides lashed together with rawhide cords.

So warm within the willows ingathered forced into leaf.

I am called for your sister Naviyuk: name me apoK Surely there are ghosts here, my children sprung from these deeper furrows.

The sky of my mind against which self-betrayal in its sudden burn fails to describe the world.

We, who denied the landscape and saw the light of it.

Leaning against the stone wall ragged I began to accept my past and, as I accepted it, I felt, and I didn't understand: I am bound to everyone."

(gentle instrumental music) - [Jim Cotter] Judith Jamison also experienced the tension between her home community and the wider world.

Growing up, her neighborhood was a social haven.

But life was a lot different beyond it as the city's schools began to desegregate.

- I went to Henry School, which was predominantly white when I was going to that school.

My brother went three years before me.

And I never felt a feeling of being outside of it until someone would say something to me, and then it would kind of like go over my head, and I'd go like, yeah, what are they talking about?

And then I might go home and ask my parents, well, what does this mean?

And they'd say, "Nothing."

I did see how differently my mom was treated when she would go to a department store and the salesperson would be kind of like, oh no, you can't really put that on, and she would be totally indignant and have on what they said she couldn't have on.

- [Jim Cotter] Jamison has channeled her encounters with various communities, some nurturing, some less so, into extraordinary performances.

In 1964, at just 21 years old, she made her debut as one of American Ballet Theatre's first Black dancers.

She says she instantly knew how to nurture her own talent while also being a reliable part of the group.

- It's not a fit in, it's holding onto your individuality.

It's not fitting in.

The fit in is your introduction of how fabulous you are into the mix of how fabulous they are too, and how fabulous that person is too.

And all together, if we're working on being extraordinary at what we're doing, there's no way you're gonna look like the person next to you.

And it looks like a cohesive group, because it is, because we're all on the same plane spiritually, we're all on the same plane physically, but we're all individuals.

- [Jim Cotter] Looking back, Jamison says she never really internalized the prejudice she and her family faced.

The love she experienced at home in her community was a shield that protected her.

Yet it's possible that some of what Judith Jamison and her family experienced might today be referred to as implicit bias, a term coined by Mahzarin Banaji and her research partners that birthed the Implicit Association Test, an online survey that has been taken by millions of people to date.

Yet recent data from the test and her other research has convinced Banaji that we might just be getting better.

- I think we largely pass the test, we do.

We actually do live in the same country.

Like, I mean, there are moments when these stresses are visible, but as horrible as things were, they have been changing, - Right.

- And I would say largely the arc of the moral universe is bending towards justice.

I would not have said this to you a few years ago because I'm a curmudgeon and I'm really pessimistic.

You know, in the last 15 years, even on these biases that you can't control, it's not a survey question I'm asking you on which you could present yourself while if you wish to.

These tests, your response is not controllable.

It's gonna pick up what I call the thumbprint of the culture on your brain.

(gentle instrumental music) ♪ I am a poor ♪ Wayfaring stranger ♪ Traveling through this world alone ♪ - [Jim Cotter] Rhiannon Giddens and Francesco Turrisi came to a similar conclusion on their 2019 album, There Is No Other, that even between very disparate communities, it is our common humanity that may lead us away from our age old fears and suspicions of those who are not like us.

- It's not to say that we aren't diverse, it's not to say that we don't have different ways of expressing things from culture to culture.

But when you really get into the underlying sort of sentiment, the underlying experiences, they are all the same.

You know, whether you're here or 3000 miles away, or on the other side of the globe, you are gonna experience the same things as anybody else.

Now the way that you express that in your music's gonna be different.

But then when you look at the story of the human race, the story of the movement of culture, you realize that it's all very, very connected.

You know, and that anything that's connected to European, or American, or African, Asian, anything from any of those areas is connected in very, very intense and kind of forgotten ways.

(gentle instrumental music) Even though it seems like a very far jump on the map, it's actually a very short jump, you know, because all the instruments and the modes that are American or South American are all coming via, you know, another route, and kind of coming over it in different ways.

So there actually is a lot of commonalities even in the sounds.

When you play them together, you're like, oh, actually the core is the same.

And so it's not an attempt to erase diversity, you know, because that is an indelible part of our world.

But in the way that race is an artificial construct and genetically we are exactly the same, we just present differently, I feel like there's a lot of that in what we're doing.

It's like love and heartbreak is love and heartbreak is love and heartbreak.

(gentle instrumental music) - [Jim Cotter] And Giddens and Turrisi found that these commonalities between disparate groups are often demonstrated when musicians with little in common come together.

- I've found very often community in the music that I play and in the musicians that I work with, you know, and even when I moved into Ireland, I obviously was married to an Irish woman, so I kind of got introduced to her kind of more local community, but I made my own one in the music world.

And a lot of the people there are not necessarily Irish, right?

- So it's not an instantaneous, like, but I think it is an easier way into communication than say like our oral language.

Like, there's something about music that invites collaboration.

It's like if you wait long enough, you're gonna find a connection, but you have to listen and you have to wait sometimes.

But I do think music is an easier mode of transport for that kind of communication, which is why I think it's so important.

♪ I'll drop that cross of self denial ♪ ♪ And enter in that home with God ♪ (gentle instrumental music) ♪ I'm going home to meet my savior ♪ ♪ I'm going home no more to roam ♪ ♪ I'm just going over Jordan ♪ I'm just going over home (gentle instrumental music) ♪ I'm just going over Jordan ♪ I'm just going ♪ Over home (gentle instrumental music) (audience applauding) - [Jim Cotter] Creative expressions of culture carry and preserve the collective identity of communities, even those that have passed into history.

But even as this symbiosis between a community and its members benefits both the individual and the collective, it brings its own conflicts and challenges.

In our modern society where no topic is too small to fuel a polarizing divide, the tension between our biological drive towards community and an equally strong impulse to forge our own path is a tightrope we must constantly walk.

The diversity of our species is nowhere more evident than in the contrast between the communities we are born into, those we choose, and those we stand against.

And the sum of those choices and circumstances is what makes us uniquely human.

(gentle instrumental music) (gentle instrumental music continues)