Eric discusses one of my pet peeves in this post, probably benefiting his blood pressure by not delving too deeply in:

I hate the way Sunday has become official morality day.

I say this not in criticism of organized religion or morality in general, but because I don’t like trickery, and I don’t like the way Sundays have become the official day for media to play preacher and promote morality — especially the newly manufactured morality which appeals to the non-churchgoers with unacknowledged spiritual needs.

Fifteen years ago when I was in college, Camilla Paglia identified a certain kind of doctrinaire feminist as “desperate for a religion”; I assume from the way she discussed showily hip academic leftists and queer activists that she’d agree many of them have the same problems. At the time, I was just leaving the church in which I’d been reared. The idea that people would try to fulfill their spiritual cravings with trendoid politics struck me as weird. I guess it still strikes me as weird, but now I’m used to it.

Nevertheless, it makes much social and political discourse extremely tiresome, and I really wish people would knock it off. If you need shriving, by all means go to confession or send a tearful prayer heavenward. Please don’t inflict your ecstasies of guilt and dogmatism on me while I’m trying to make small talk with a glass of wine at a party.

I realize that Eric’s not really talking about polite conversation; he’s talking more about opinion pages and other spaces for serious commentary, where more serious value judgments are to be expected. I guess it would be nice if people whose scribblings are produced there could at least liberate themselves from formula a bit.

Exhibit 1 is this op-ed linked by Eric, which I unwittingly clicked through to. In terms of finger-wagging social commentary, it has everything: a crack analogy, an appeal to some think-tank expert whose qualifications aren’t at all established, and compulsive genuflection to a supercilious Brit decrying the decline of civilization. Since I’ve been making the transition from the cell-phone culture in to that here in the States, I’ve actually been thinking about these things quite a bit, and I think the writer (and his Brit) are full of it:

Sociologists and communitarians are somewhat obsessed with the idea of public spaces – places where strangers necessarily bump up against one another and form community. When we talk on cell phones in public, we are, as Rosen points out, intentionally removing ourselves from the public space in a form of “radical disengagement” with the public sphere. We’re participating in an activity that doesn’t just exclude those around us, it imposes on them too – in effect declaring our neighbors to be less important than we are. Or worse: It’s a little bit like telling them that they don’t exist.

Perhaps none of this is surprising. The sociologists Christian Licoppe and Jean-Philippe Heurtin have posited that modernity is constantly deinstitutionalizing personal bonds at every level. The effects of the cell phone are very much of a piece with their thesis. We have traded the rich tapestry of social cohesion – chatting with the cashier at the grocery store or with the fellow in the elevator – for these tiny, often useless, individual connections with those we already know.

Am I the only one who remembers life before cell phones? If you don’t, let me assure you that it was not a never-ending stream of chummy exchanges with new acquaintances–the grocery store clerk, the guy in the elevator, the woman you passed through the revolving doors on the way into the bank, and the janitor in the movie theater rest room–that left us all warmed to the core by our common humanity. Besides, some of us were brought up traditionally and disliked being chatted up while we were quietly going about our business. (Checking messages or the Internet on a cell phone is a wonderful deterrant in such cases.) And as for those who have very private conversations very audibly in very public places, they were no less bearable when they were talking to their friends across the table in a crowded coffee house ten years ago. Boors will find ways to use any communications medium boorishly; that’s what they do.

I’ve noticed no dearth of brisk-but-pleasant interactions between customers and salespeople or those sharing elevators since arriving back to New York. Otherwise, I’ve seen few people practicing “radical disengagement” with public spaces, but a great many people who just want to find out which kind of milk their wives wanted them to pick up so they don’t have to make another trip back to the grocery store (even if it means not giving their undivided attention to others who are contemplating the dairy case). Most people will check their phone if it rings in the middle of an ongoing in-the-flesh conversation, but they’re at least as likely to decide it can wait as to say, “Sorry–I really should take this.” Perhaps I just run in bizarre circles, but everyone I know seems to have figured out how to make the group with which he’s physically spending time his first priority.

One final thing: I find the disdainful use of the word “deinstitutionalizing” unsettling. Institutions are important, but one of the most precious things about our kind of society is that you get to choose those you want to belong to. You don’t have to stay in the church you were born into if you don’t believe its doctrines, you don’t have to become a member of your father’s guild, you don’t have to stay in your hometown and shoehorn yourself into a life that doesn’t suit you. You form your own associations if you wish. If you find that disorienting and yearn for the simpler and more traditional life in which we all know our assigned places, why not leave the city and embed yourself in a small town somewhere? Or find your spirituality and become a Buddhist or something? If you can’t control your cell phone and make it work for the kind of life you want to live, the problem is that you’re neurotic, not that it’s addictive. Sheesh.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 19th, 2008 at 18:28 and is filed under misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.