Ten years ago, I preached a sermon in which I referenced a NIMH researcher by the name of John B. Calhoun. Specifically, I talked about his very slightly unorthodox research into social behavior among rodents, all of which took place just a few miles from my little church in Maryland.
That experiment was simple: build a rodent paradise. Utopian societies are kind of hard to create, or so human beings have found out, so Calhoun chose instead to go simpler. He chose to build a utopia for mice. Mice would seem to have lower standards for paradise, as they generally don’t require jet packs and fairy castles, roller coasters and small independent brewpubs and a nationally ranked school in convenient walking distance for the kids.
Calhoun figured that what mice wanted was simple. First, no predators. So mouse utopia was entirely catless, which seems a good first step. Second, there was ample space. Calhoun’s mouse utopia was a large space with many chambers, plenty of room for the mice to live and make more mice, which mice seem to enjoy doing. The habitat included space for well over thousand mice, with ample bedding material that was constantly replenished. Articles about the experiment make no mention of whether there was a tiny little mouse IKEA nearby, but there may well have been. Third, no disease. Every mouse selected as part of the experiment was carefully vetted and illness-free.
And finally, Calhoun made absolutely sure that there was always as much food and drink as the mice could ever need. This wasn’t a Malthusian exercise, in which the mice would reproduce until there were too many mice and not enough food. Instead, it was like being on a rodent Carnival cruise, with open buffets 24 hours a day, all the food you can eat, whenever you want it. No matter how many mice there were, there would always be enough food. There would never be starvation or thirst in Mouse Utopia.
He named that space Universe 25, because, well, he’d done this before.
And then he set eight mice--four males, and four females--into that world, and watched. For a while, all was well. There was plenty, enough for all, and mice did what mice do. Eight became eighty, then eight hundred. Still, there was enough food, plenty for all. Eight hundred became a thousand, then two thousand, and though the world grew crowded, there was still plenty of food and drink for all. At five hundred days, the mouse-paradise reached a population of two-thousand two-hundred, nowhere near the theoretical carrying capacity of the habitat.
Then things came apart. Meaning, whatever secret sauce makes mice mice, what gives them their mouseness when they live together? That came apart. Mouse society collapsed.
Males stopped defending territory, and lost interest in reproduction. Most of the others, stripped of their usual social roles and without any purpose, became alternately listless or hyperviolent. Some of the males became what Calhoun called “beautiful ones,” only interested in grooming, sleeping, and eating. Females abandoned their young, fleeing off by themselves to empty habitat areas. With reproduction at a standstill, the population began to crash. Universe 25 never recovered, and within months, all the mice were dead. All of them. Even though there was still space, and even though the buffet was still open and stocked. It was as lethal as if Calhoun had gassed them. Just having plenty, it seems, was not enough.
It is possible, in fact, that hyperabundance was the reason they died.
There are many competing theories about why Universe 25 failed, and about its relevance to human goings on. Calhoun himself suggested that the society imploded into a "behavioral sink" because the social distance mice had evolved to require had been broken down. There were just too many relationships, too many scents, too many individuals present. In the face of an overwhelming tsunami of social inputs, the mouse mind shattered.
Which brings me back around to our two decade long culture-wide experiment with social media. Ten years ago, I was already wondering at the impacts of our newly synthetic, commodified sociality.
Homo sapiens sapiens is a social primate, to be sure. We need one another, need the support and engagement of others of our species to thrive. It is not good, as it was once said in a garden long ago, for us to be alone. We need social interaction in the same way that we need water to drink. Without it, we don't do well, real quick.
But there are limits. Too much water, all at once, and we die. Not by drowning, but by drinking. If we drink more than a liter and a half an hour, we can poison ourselves, as we simply can't process that much fluid. The neural processes in our brains become disrupted, our brains physically swell, and we go into a coma and perish.
That's hyponatremia, poisoning by water. What of too much sociality, hyposociomia? We need it, but is there a point at which it becomes toxic? Were we meant, as human creatures, to have social inputs that never cease, that hum and purr and ping in our pockets all day long, and that include many hundreds or thousands of synthetically amplified relationships? What would passing the boundaries of healthy sociality look like?
I look to the ways the mice in Universe 25 acted when they were overwhelmed by the presence of too much social input. Then I look at us, at our collective anger, at our paradoxical isolation, and our compulsion to check, to check, to check. I look at the mental health of our kids, the first generation to be wired by screen-driven interactions.
The utopian vision of our inescapably interconnected world starts seeming, well, a bit like Calhoun might have designed it.
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