The professor called his field “the painful elaboration of the obvious,” and as we went through the semester, case by case, he and we elaborated the obvious. Sometimes painfully.

You may have already figured out that his field was sociology. But for all the grief sociologists take for being a “pseudo science” and for “proving what we already know,” I took at least one key lesson from that class at Rockhurst College (now University) 58 years ago.

That is the idea of “anomie,” first defined and explained by the founder of sociology, Emile Durkheim, a French scholar who worked in the late 19th century. Anomie revolves, basically, around feeling isolated, cut off from the rest of the world. And that “cut-offedness” can lead to resentment, to feeling aggrieved that the rest of the world doesn’t give a damn about us.

Here’s how Merriam-Webster defines anomie. On the level of a country, it’s “social instability resulting from a breakdown of standards and values.” Then, bring it down to us as individuals, and it’s “personal unrest, alienation and uncertainty that comes from a lack of purpose or ideals.”

Sound anything like where we are today?

Reams of research show that we have become more isolated and, thus, more alienated from our culture. Out here in the boondocks, our basic culture may even be one of alienation. Two books, one from 2000, the other from five months ago by two professors at Colby College, explore this trend that began about 50 years ago.

Robert D. Putnam summed it up keenly in the title of his book, “Bowling Alone.” He wrote, “For the first two-thirds of the 20th century a powerful tide bore Americans into ever deeper engagement in the life of their communities, but a few decades ago … that tide reversed and we were overtaken by a treacherous rip current.”

That rip current was the breaking down of institutions that brought us together across lines of religion, politics, occupation, civic works, economic status and the like.

To many who grew up before, say, 1990, the poster child for alienation was Holden Caulfield, the focus of J.D. Salinger’s novel “The Catcher in the Rye,” an over-privileged, under-achieving prep-school expellee in New York City. Critics may still argue whether Caulfield’s alienation was merely a “phase” — remember when our elders used to cluck their tongues and say something like, “Oh, she’s just going through a phase” — or was to be his lifelong state of mind.

But he stood in for the “cut-offedness” many of us felt during adolescence.

Happily, Holden Caulfield’s situation wasn’t mine. Scouting became central to my growing up after my mother was widowed when I was 10 years old. Scouting was larger than myself. But neither of my sons showed any interest in Boy Scouts, and neither felt any peer pressure to join.

Some of what is isolating us is the lack of choice. Look around our rural landscape. In 1995, Maine had at least 17 paper mills. Now we have five. Time was a papermaker could leave a mill for a better job at another. Now, no other exists within commuting range. Same with a lot of wood-turning mills (Forster Manufacturing., e.g.), shoe shops (Norrwock, Dexter, Bass). And so on.

Colby Professors Nicholas F. Jacobs and Daniel M. Shea have published “The Rural Voter,” a four-year study of voting behavior out here beyond the sidewalks. They find rural alienation is much deeper than just loss of economic opportunity, though I suspect that sets a lot of the other elements of alienation into motion.

Reviewing their book, Bob Keyes wrote, “It’s not about a single politician, party affiliation, age, racial attitudes, or even policy positions. It’s about community pride, a sense of place, and being heard. Rural voters feel disenfranchised and left behind, and they worry their way of life is threatened. Further, policies that benefit rural voters and address those fears likely won’t change their feelings.”

(Disclosure: Bob Keyes is a friend of nearly 40 years. We worked together between 1985 and 1988 at the Morning Sentinel. He wrote the review in The Colby News and works now at Colby.)

Those sentences may explain what perplexes a lot of Democrats, whether strategists or just D voters. Why do so many rural (and other) people vote against their own economic interests? All the economic indicators show we have the world’s strongest economy by any measure. And most of the massive spending from Biden’s packages has gone to Republican states and areas, such as subsidies for solar and wind farms in Texas, a leading state in both but a deep-red state in voting.

Anyone who has seen NCAA tournament basketball the past three weeks has seen a commercial by Coach K (Mike Krzyzewski, retired men’s coach at Duke University) arguing that we all need to be part of something larger than ourselves: a sports team, a club or, as in the ad, the Army.

How right he is. And how sad that so few of us still join or work at goals larger than ourselves. It’s no wonder we’re dividing into tribes if we don’t sit down and work together toward goals that cross the lines of politics, religion, ethnicity, occupation, social class.

Bob Neal feels blessed that he has always been part of something larger than himself, on school and select boards, at church, in farm organizations, even at picnics with other basketball fans. Neal can be reached at bobneal@myfairpoint.net.

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