Silencing the Echo

Are we bad? Are we a species of six-foot toddlers with no manners or decency, moving from one tantrum to the other with little regard for our neighbor, demanding contradictory things in increasingly loud voices? Evidence abounds. Many of the same people who are clamoring for the economy to reopen refuse to wear masks, delaying the time when it will be safe enough to do so. Many places are seeing increased reports of domestic abuse during quarantine (and some have seen decreases) and abuse hotlines fear the number of reports are dropping as spouses don't have offices or public places to run to (some abusers are apparently telling their victims shutdown measures mean they are forbidden from leaving the house). The amount of U.S. COVID deaths, which continues to rise, has become a statistic of celebration or derision for some, seeing as it is lower than the worst expectations two months ago. That we have lost more Americans to the coronavirus in the last three months than we did in combat in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan combined seems not to register—the number is lower than what the eggheads said so it's time to move on. If you are shocked by this callousness concerning preventable deaths, you apparently pay little attention to the gun control debate. 

As the crisis deepens, so do our divisions. For many of us, our neighbors are beta-sheep, giving up their liberty because Bill Gates (who engineered the virus in the first place, don't you know) and other billionaires tell them to. For others, our neighbors are walking petri dishes, potential bringers of pestilence. Under such conditions is it any wonder that we are diverting to our worst selves, returning to Hobbes' famed state of nature, where our immediate needs take precedence and life is "solitary, poore, nasty brutish, and short." We all know what people do when supplies and optimism is short, rendered so incisively by William Golding in The Lord of the Flies—we become animals, trust no one and create increasingly smaller tribes until its every beast for itself. 

I see it daily. When I bought a vacuum cleaner on CraigsList last week, I could feel the mask-less seller belittle me with his eyes at the sight of my protective gear. Defiant shoppers at the supermarket flaunt their less-than-six-feet distance in a childish attempt to court a confrontation. Even in matters unrelated to COVID, I see people being more selfish. 4,000 McDonald's hamburgers, the equivalent of a cow's worth of beef, are consumed every minute. I am responsible for a good portion of that. When I was at McDonald's last week, some guy cut me in the drive thru line. It was one of those drive thrus that have two different lanes towards the end, I was holding at the fork in the lanes waiting to see which one was going faster, which is standard, acceptable procedure, and this guy just zoomed by me. In normal times this slight would have irked me. Last week, it sent me into apoplexy. I was so mad at this guy I began screaming epithets that would embarrass me if I had been thinking clear enough to remember them. Shouted from the safe (and pathetic) distance from my car with the windows up, this was pure frustration running aground. As it turned out, the guy picked the wrong lane. The track he left to me went faster and I ended up with my food before he did, a fact that eased me but did little to abate my dim view of humanity.

I was angry enough to completely withdraw. I'm reading more news in the last two months than normal, paying closer attention to Twitter and engaging more in what is going on than usual and it can be tiring wading in the sea of negativity and devision every day. I understand the pull of saying "Hit me up when there's a vaccine, until then I'm putting my head in the Disney+ sand. I want to hear from my immediate family and a few friends, otherwise, you all are out of sight and out of mind."

Hannah Arendt, the finest philosopher of the post war period, would caution against this. As a German Jew during the war and then a refugee in America, Arendt was hardly unfamiliar with the dark side of human nature. Further, she would have every excuse to withdraw from society, recognizing its moral failures as so many of her contemporaries did and become a recluse. However, she found withdrawal to be an act of supreme selfishness, a willful entrance into a state she called worldlessness, defined by a the loss of shared common values, where the concept of a universal reality begins to disintegrate. By retreating from the global tribe, we inevitably create a tribe of our own. 

"The idiot is one who lives only in his own household and is concerned only with his own life and its necessities," she wrote. "The truly free state, then—one that not only respects certain liberties but is genuinely free—is a state in which no one is, in this sense, an idiot." I'm afraid there is some evidence that we may not be an idiot-free society.

During a time when most philosophers were focusing on death (including her lover Martin Heidegger, who was obsessed with it), Arendt focused her thinking on the concept of birth. Updating the thoughts of St. Augustine 16 centuries earlier, the fact that each of us are born is proof that we have the capacity to change and that society is malleable by new ideas. This concept is dependent on human connection, underpinned by humanity's tools for new beginnings: promises and forgiveness. When I make you a promise, I'm showing that I am planning on a shared future. By forgiving, I undo a past action for the sake of starting anew. 

I may never understand the "liberate" people, but if I refuse to try, I'm also refusing to extend a promise to coexist in this country with them. If I don't forgive the person who cut me in line at McDonald's (who most likely didn't realize he was doing anything wrong), I'm doomed to repeat my frustration. Was the CraigsList guy really shaming me or was I projecting? I'll never know because I wasn't interested in connecting with him. Think of those people you know who live in a bubble of their own making—the Fox News grievance crowd who won every branch of government in 2016 but still cry persecution, or the social justice Facebook junkies who inhabit the greatest time in history for women and people of color but undercut their own causes with their unchecked rage and extremism—why aren't they happier? It's hard to relax when "us" is always at war with "them."

This is counter to how people are. It would seem that right now would be a terrible time to be dating but usage of dating apps is up in practically every country with lockdowns in place (and declining in places where restrictions are being eased). Further, users are finding that their conversations are lasting longer, 25% longer on Tinder since late February. Given the panoply of options during the before times, dating apps were rife with players who would cut bait quickly, knowing that there were other fish. Now, people are taking their time to get to know each other. They want a connection.  

Getting out of any bubble is hard, and scary. It's immediately comfortable to have your own views reinforced. I read a newsletter (another one of those, UGH) called the Flip Side that takes a topic and pulls opinions from journals of all ideologies to weigh in on it. It presents reasonable opinions from opposing viewpoints side-by-side, which is a good way of shedding some cynicism that "they" don't share "our" values. 

In a bubble, cynicism about each other leads to self-fulfilling prophecies. Of course William Golding believed a group of boys deserted on an island would breakdown and kill each other—he was a bitter schoolteacher who hated his job. The reality is different. In 1966, when a group of boys aged 13 to 16 stole a boat to go day sailing off the coast of Tonga, they were shipwrecked on a rocky island for 15 months. When they were discovered they were found to have set up a commune with a food garden, gym and chicken pens. One of them had built a guitar out of driftwood and they even constructed a badminton court. They managed to keep a fire, which caused so much division in The Lord of the Flies, for nearly a year and a half. All of the boys became life long friends.

The truth is, of course, that all of us are capable of good and evil but we get to choose and its easier to choose good if we are connected and aware of each other. Humanity is wonderful because its goodness can best be exerted by communal action, its badness is almost always the weapon of selfish individuals. Case in point, the boys in Tonga worked together for good and when they returned home, after many of their funerals had been held, they were arrested when the man whose boat they stole pressed charges.