The opposite of a great truth is another great truth. I was reminded of this, well, great truth by George Monbiot's claim that modern capitalism is creating loneliness. This is partly true.

The geographical mobility required by labour market "flexibility" can break up families and cause children to move away from their parents. The rare cases of upward social mobility cause us to lose touch with family and friends whilst feeling out of place in our new environment. And the pursuit of external goods such as money and power can generate zero-sum conflicts and fragile identities whereas the pursuit of internal goods, such as mastery of a craft do not; Richard Sennett's The Corrosion of Character is good on this.

But, but, but. On the other hand, there are ways in which capitalism has ameliorated loneliness.

To see one, try an experiment tonight if you are on your own. Turn off the TV, radio, phone, recorded music and your computers. See how you feel. I suspect you would suffer deeply from boredom and loneliness. You might take solace in a book - but remember that before the mass literacy of the 20^th century, few could do this. This reminds us that capitalism has provided the technologies for either overcoming loneliness or at least displacing it.

It's not just the more recent technologies that have done this. One reason why the second industrial revolution transformed lives was that the bicycle and radio expanded people's contacts.

But capitalism has done something else. It has caused urbanization and so rescued people from what Marx called the "idiocy of rural life". By this he didn't mean that peasants were stupid, but that they were isolated. Before urbanization, your world was pretty much your village - in fact the Russian language has the same word for both, mir. And if you'd upset your neighbours or were a bit eccentric, you'd be condemned to almost unendurable solitude.

All this is not mere conjecture. We have empirical evidence. Country music is chockful of references to loneliness; for me, the most harrowing expression of this is Porter Wagoner's Albert Erving. This suggests that loneliness was a massive problem in the pre-urban and, by extension, pre-capitalist era.

I say all this to raise two points.

Point one is that there might be (yet another!) fundamental trade-off here. The process of creative destruction contains a trade-off for loneliness. One the one hand, the new technologies it gives us can bring people together: we all have friends whom we wouldn't have met but for the internet. But on the other hand, it means jobs can be destroyed thus weakening friendships and communities. It's entirely legitimate to ask, as George does, whether this trade-off can be better managed - or, indeed, whether we have by now enjoyed all the feasible upsides of the process but still face the costs.

Point two is that music is not simply one note after another. Proper music - rather than mindless corporate shilling - gives a voice to the voiceless and a glimpse into perspectives that would otherwise be lost. From this point of view, whatever one thinks about Bob Dylan's personal merit, the Nobel committee's decision to award the literature prize to a songwriter was quite justified.