A Toss with Friends?

Kipling Williams is a social psychologist who has spent decades studying what happens to people when they are left out. It began in the mid-1980s, when he was sitting on a blanket in a park beside his dog and a Frisbee rolled up and hit him in the back. He stood to return it to the two strangers who had thrown it, and to his surprise they threw it back to him:

> We formed a triangle on the grass, beginning a spontaneous game of three-way toss. But minutes later, for no discernible reason, they stopped throwing the Frisbee to me. At first, it was sort of funny, but when it became clear that they were not going to include me again, I felt foolish, awkward and hurt.¹

The idea he had on the way back to his blanket became Cyberball: a computer game in which we toss a ball with two other players on a screen until, after a few rounds, they stop throwing it to us. That is the whole experiment.

## A cartoon that hurts

The strange part came later. In 2004 Lisa Zadro, Williams and Rick Richardson went looking for the point at which the sting would stop. In one study participants were told the other players were the computer; in a second, that every player was following a script. That removed, in the researchers' words, "all remnants of sinister attributions." It made almost no difference. By the researchers' measures, being left out by a program that people knew to be a program was about as unpleasant as being left out by people.²

The sting is more than a figure of speech. In 2003 Naomi Eisenberger, Matthew Lieberman and Williams put people in a brain scanner and had them play Cyberball. When the ball stopped coming, activity rose in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, a region associated with the distress of physical pain.³ How far the overlap goes is still argued — critics ask whether the region registers hurt or only salience.⁴

Over the long run the cost is measurable. A 2010 meta-analysis by Julianne Holt-Lunstad and colleagues pooled 148 studies covering 308,849 people and found a 50 percent increased likelihood of survival for those with stronger social relationships. The authors judged the effect comparable with well-established risk factors for mortality.⁵ In 2018 Britain appointed a minister for loneliness.⁶ Governments do not usually appoint ministers for feelings.

So the question is odder than it looks. Why are we built so that being dropped from a game of catch with two strangers—or two lines of code—registers as injury? And underneath that: is loneliness a malfunction to be managed, or is it telling us something true about what kind of creatures we are?

## The best explanation we have

The strongest answer comes from evolutionary psychology, and it is a good one. The late John Cacioppo, who did more than anyone to make loneliness a scientific subject, argued that it works like hunger or thirst: an unpleasant signal that pushes a social animal back toward the others it needs in order to survive.⁷ He and Stephanie Cacioppo later set the case out formally, as an evolutionary theory of loneliness.⁸ For most of history a person cut off from the group was in danger, and a creature that felt nothing when the group turned away left few descendants.

This explains a great deal — why loneliness is universal, why it hurts in the body, why it costs us our health. It even explains Cyberball. An alarm that goes off for a cartoon is annoying; an alarm that stays silent while the tribe walks away is fatal. Natural selection would favor the hair-trigger. Zadro and her colleagues read their own data the same way, as evidence of a "very primitive and automatic adaptive sensitivity to even the slightest hint of social exclusion."

I think this is largely right about the mechanism, and Christianity has no quarrel with mechanisms. The live question is whether the mechanism is the whole story.

## Where it stops

Two things keep catching. The first is that loneliness is not the same as being alone. Cacioppo himself insisted on this: what marks the lonely is perceived isolation, the sense that their relationships do not meet their need. Here the hunger comparison strains. Hunger is satisfied by calories, and it hardly matters whose. Loneliness is not satisfied by people in general; we can be lonely in a marriage, in a church, at a party we were delighted to be invited to. What we want is to be known — and then wanted anyway. The two halves have to arrive together, and that is exactly why we dread the first one: to be known and then not wanted is the worst outcome there is.

So we send something else in to be judged. We assemble a self fit for the room — the competent one, the easy one, the one with the answers — and put that forward instead of the thing underneath it. A performance can be rejected and we can disown it afterward; it was only the act, and we were never quite in it. If what is actually there is rejected, there is nothing left to disown. So we hide the very thing we are asking someone to see, and spend real energy preventing what we most want. The hiding is old: the first thing the man and the woman did with their new knowledge was sew leaves together and get behind a tree, and the audience they were hiding from was God. Every human audience since has been a substitute judge, handed a verdict it was never qualified to give. Whatever finally meets this ache, then, cannot be mere inclusion. It would have to be a verdict on the self we were hiding — and not a verdict still out, which only makes us perform harder, but one already passed, already closed, already in our favor, so that the performance could be set down instead of improved.

The evolutionary account can go some way toward explaining why we want to be wanted, since deep bonds with kin and partners were adaptive too. John Tooby and Leda Cosmides sharpened the point into what they called the banker's paradox. Banks lend to the people who least need the money. A person in real trouble is the worst bet on the board — and that is exactly the moment when we need someone to come anyway. What we most need, then, is to be irreplaceably valuable to somebody: valued for the particular, unsubstitutable thing we are, so that when we are no use to anyone, someone still comes. That is a strong account of why we want to be known and not merely approved of, and it should be granted. But notice what it explains. It explains why we want to matter, past all usefulness, to someone who is in a position to help us. It does not explain the direction the desire actually runs: why we want to matter to the universe, or why we want the mattering to hold on the far side of death, where no help is possible and no alliance pays.

The same gap opens from another side. A group-survival instinct is well served by a good reputation, a managed self the group approves of, and most of us are rather good at producing one. But approval of the managed self does not touch the ache. If anything it sharpens it. And a longing that size does not wait patiently. It goes looking for someone to fill it, and then it quietly makes a god of whoever it finds: a spouse, a friend, a circle, an audience, a congregation. Every one of them will eventually drop the ball, not because they are especially faithless but because none of them was built to bear that weight. Though the judge is not finally the god. The god is the one in the dock — the assembled self, whose acquittal the whole arrangement exists to obtain. Which is why a kinder audience never helps for long.

The second catch is more basic. The evolutionary story explains why we have the longing; it cannot say, and does not claim to, whether anything answers it. On its own terms the desire to be completely known and completely loved is an overshoot: a signal tuned for a small band of hunter-gatherers, now pointing past anything that could actually meet it. That is coherent. It is also bleak, because it makes the deepest thing we want a misfire.

So we have two accounts, and both of them expect the ache. Where they differ is on what it means. The first calls it an overshoot — an alarm wired too hot for the world it now lives in. The second takes it at face value: a longing for something real that we have not got. We owe that frame to C. S. Lewis, who argued that a desire nothing in this world can satisfy may be evidence that we were made for something beyond this world.⁹ On that reading, being let back into the game would not fix us, because inclusion was never quite what we wanted; and religion would not fix us either, since what it offers is God's approval of the managed self — the one thing we have just watched fail.

Neither account can be settled in a laboratory, and I am not pretending otherwise. But one thing makes me lean. Three thousand years before anyone wrote a line of Cyberball code, a book said the loneliness came first — that it was already there in a world where nothing had yet gone wrong. An old date proves nothing by itself, and fit is not certainty. It is only this: of the two accounts, one has somewhere to put the overshoot, and can take the desire at its word.

## The first thing that was not good

The Bible's first chapter has a refrain. God makes something and sees that it is good, until at the end of the sixth day everything he has made is "very good."¹⁰ Then, before anything has gone wrong — before the serpent, before any sin at all — God looks at the man and says:

> It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him.¹¹

This is the first thing in Scripture that God calls not good, and it is not a sin. The man has a garden, meaningful work and unbroken fellowship with God himself, and still something is missing. Loneliness does not arrive with the fall. It is diagnosed in paradise, by God, as a need he means to meet.

The Hebrew word translated "help" is *ʿēzer*, and it is not a servant's word. Again and again in the Old Testament it names God himself as the help of his people — "my help cometh from the LORD, which made heaven and earth."¹² "Meet for him" (*kenegdo*) means corresponding to him. The nineteenth-century commentators Keil and Delitzsch put it memorably: a helping being "in which, as soon as he sees it, he may recognise himself."¹³ What the man lacks is someone to be known by.

Why would God say that a man who has God is still alone?

Not because God is insufficient; nothing is ever missing in him. The lack is in the shape of the gift. He meant from the start to give himself to us partly through one another, through creatures who could turn and look at us, so a man alone with God has not yet received everything God intends to give.

Notice, though, which way the word itself points. The *ʿēzer* given in Eden is a sign and not the solution, because the *ʿēzer* Scripture keeps naming is God himself. The woman, the friend, the church were never meant to be the thing we are surviving on — and that is what frees us to enjoy them. A gift can be loved. A lifeline can only be gripped. Not that the grip loosens on command. We let go only when we notice we are already held, and that the hand we were clinging to was never the thing keeping us up.

And behind the arrangement lies something older than any of it. The God of the Bible is not himself alone. On the night before he died Jesus prayed of a love older than everything: "thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world."¹⁴ Before there was a world there was love — the Father loving the Son in the Spirit, a circle with the throwing already going on inside it. Lewis reached for the same picture:

> And that, by the way, is perhaps the most important difference between Christianity and all other religions: that in Christianity God is not a static thing—not even a person—but a dynamic, pulsating activity, a life, almost a kind of drama. Almost, if you will not think me irreverent, a kind of dance.¹⁵

He is not denying that God is personal. He means that God is not a solitary person but three, in motion, loving one another — which makes a game of catch rather less trivial than it looks, something closer to a child's crayon drawing of the inner life of God. If that is true, relationship is not a late adaptation that helped primates survive; it is older than the universe, and our ache is a family likeness in creatures made in the image of a God who is a communion. The frame here is Tim Keller's: we are made for communion before we are made for anything useful.¹⁶

## The one who was never alone

For one figure in the Christian story loneliness ought to have been impossible. "The Father hath not left me alone," Jesus tells his critics.¹⁷ On the night of his arrest he warns his disciples: "ye shall be scattered, every man to his own, and shall leave me alone: and yet I am not alone, because the Father is with me."¹⁸

Then, in a garden, he asked three friends for company: "tarry ye here, and watch with me." He came back and found them asleep. "What, could ye not watch with me one hour?"¹⁹ A few hours later, Mark records, "they all forsook him, and fled."²⁰ And at the ninth hour on the cross, the one who had never been alone cried out in the words of an old psalm: "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"²¹

This cannot mean the Trinity came apart; Christian theology has always insisted the Son remained the Son, and the psalm he was quoting goes on to say that God heard the one who cried.²² But whatever else the cry means, it means that on Golgotha he took the exclusion that was ours, so that we could be taken into the circle that was his. The ball stopped coming to him—from his friends, from the crowd and finally from heaven.

And there the picture gives out, because what happened on that hill was not a snub. A snub is thoughtless. This was deliberate, and it was just: judgment fell, and he stood where we had been standing. Which means the ache being answered is guilt first and loneliness second. We are not merely left out. We are guilty, and the small sting of exclusion is the shadow of a larger exclusion we had earned and he absorbed. He was put out of the circle so that the ones behind the leaves could be brought in — seen all the way down and kept anyway, the verdict on the hidden self passed that afternoon, and passed in our favor.

Then on the third day God raised him, and that is the Father's answer thrown back — the public vindication of the one who had been cast out. It is why Paul can say what he says in Romans 8: that neither death, nor life, nor things present, nor things to come "shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." Not a feeling about where we stand. A fact about it, with a date and an empty tomb.

The first Adam was alone in a garden, and God said it was not good and brought him a companion. The last Adam was alone in a garden, and his companions slept, and no one was brought. He went into that abandonment so that a sentence no evolutionary story can promise could be spoken to us: "I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee."²³ Keller put the thing we are actually hungry for as well as anyone:

> To be loved but not known is comforting but superficial. To be known and not loved is our greatest fear. But to be fully known and truly loved is, well, a lot like being loved by God.²⁴

The cross is where we are fully known — our worst is on display there — and loved anyway. And the ones he gathers he does not leave scattered: "God setteth the solitary in families."²⁵ The church is meant to be that family. It often fails, and it was never the final answer, only the place where the final answer is practiced ahead of time.

## Back on the grass

Williams felt foolish, awkward and hurt when two strangers stopped throwing him a Frisbee. People in laboratories have felt the same over a cartoon ball they knew was not real.

The evolutionary account says the alarm is tuned too finely, a leftover from a smaller world. The Christian account says it is tuned to something: a love older than the world, which we were made to share and have wandered out of. On that account the alarm will not stop because we learn to ignore it. It will stop because it has been answered.

Someone once walked into the triangle where the throwing had stopped, and stood there on purpose, for us.