Interactions with others (18)

Why is it so difficult to write stories in our world? I’ve answered this question three different ways, and here is a fourth: maybe there is something predictable and un-dramatic about our interactions with others. Not always, not completely, but enough to make our lives dull reading. There are some obvious reasons that might be true.

 

We hear a great deal about diversity and inclusion, but our social circles have never been so carefully curated, so uniform in terms of age, upbringing, education, political beliefs. We live in little cultural cubbies, where everyone has the same way of talking, the same baseline assumptions, and disagreements are confined to subtleties—though many are ready to fly into a rage over even these. The more people live in these cubbies, the more intolerant they are of disagreement, and thus the more loath to leave their cubbies. Only on the internet do they encounter the “other,” and here they excoriate him with rhetoric as ineffectual as it is supercharged. (In fact, the apparent agreement within group is becoming increasingly superficial: many people have more heterodox opinions than they would admit to in public, but they reveal these only when they are confident of a sympathetic ear.)

 

We interact less and less with strangers (because in public spaces, we only look at our phones and avoid stranger’s eyes), or when we do, these interactions are rigidly circumscribed. In ancient times, it was a mark of moral corruption if you did not invite the unknown traveler into your home, feed him, give him a bed, learn his life story, and send him away with gifts. Now, if we must speak to him at all, we keep it brief and stick to our prescribed roles: cashier, server, customer, panhandler. Within these roles there is sometimes room for a friendly exchange, conducted in an easy tone, almost as if these were only two human beings meeting in the agora—but these are rarer and rarer, and they are always carefully delimited. A more frequent deviation from script is when the smooth conduct of business hits a snag, and someone loses their temper; but in this case there is usually only one real person involved, for the other is only the representative of a company or bureau or other equally inhuman entity, and has as it were removed their soul from the encounter and stowed it away somewhere, who knows where.

 

We have only two modes: a smooth politesse that avoids saying anything personal unless it is a cloying affirmation; and a seething rage that must be childish because it cannot be effectual: either because the other person has become, through processes that perhaps they themselves do not understand, the faceless avatar of an institution; or because, in a very similar manner, we have made them into the representative of a cultural group that we despise. In any case, hardly any real human encounters are possible.

 

As usual, in following the impulse of my thoughts, I have ended up grossly exaggerating the situation; but the picture I’ve painted is one that anyone who wants to can easily recognize.

 

So if we wish to imagine a better condition, it must be one in which our interactions are less predetermined, more full of risk and the possibility of narrative. This means that free and non-delimited encounters must take place among strangers and between people with significantly different world-views and experiences. On the other hand, for a variety of reasons, this requires that there be some binding mores that all parties respect.

 

Communes, at least of the kind we usually imagine, will not answer to this need; they seem in fact more likely to exacerbate the problem than to correct it.