Rethinking respect: Friendships and social life in the Coronavirus era

What is the meaning of the ways we now find ourselves interacting? How might our loves, friendships, and interactions with fellow citizens be changed by this, and perhaps for the better?

Physical distance and contact do not determine personal distance and contact. They only give it a certain form.

At this time, in being expected, and required, to keep a protective social distance from friends and strangers alike, what is emphasized in this as a relational trait is the attitude that is required to comply with the demand. That attitude is respect. Depending on how you would think of it, people have either more or a different kind of respect for people who either are above them in any hierarchy (something we Americans typically disavow while observing nonetheless) and for fellow citizens who as such are both equal and normatively strangers, and strangers we want to leave in their strangers, as friends also let their friends be as they are more than needing to change them, as one is apt to do with lovers, children, and sometimes very close friends. To keep a distance from the persons I like to be around or love and care about, and to do so because I care about them, is to emphasize respect over the causal enjoyment that drives many childhood and youth friendships. We all want to be considerate of our friends and their needs, and partly let them be and not try to interfere with and change them, but in this crisis this attitude is necessarily brought to the fore. In normal times, you might look up a friend to go to a party with and hang out and enjoy yourselves together. Now people must do this not only from a distance, in the way that we are distanced by media like the Internet; but we also are forced to thematize this distance and make it a special priority. If you could still go drinking with a friend, you would have to go to bars where people sit 6 feet part, and to date, that’s a rare restaurant and even rarer bar counter. If you “meet up” by mediation of a device like the phone or Internet, you know that you are doing so in order to meet in a distanced way, and because you and your friend not only want to share an enjoyment, but because the distance expresses both prudent self-management and kindness. This might be thought not unlike pushing relationships towards the formal, “vous,” pole and further from the casual and familiar “tu” one, and the reason would be the importance of the respect that leaves the other his distance.

In this and other ways, the coronavirus crisis will accelerate developments long under way of movement towards virtual social life and away from the gregarious kind, in employment, schooling, and elsewhere, where gathering in a shared space with other people engaged in a common project or set of tasks is defining of how people live, work, and interact.

The moment of the crisis itself involves an interdiction on most contact and proximity which obviously the human race could not long live with in an absolute way. This will pass, but for economic reasons there will be changes that begin to appear permanent when the world begins to go back to work more fully. The deciding question will be what is most efficient in organizing social life to get work done and, while the world remains capitalist, to enable work and consumption/leisure activities to be profitable leveraged in producing wealth.

II.

What is inefficient that a moral virtual world could do differently?

-Driving. It wastes time, enormously in cities with frequent traffic jams, and energy. It uses fossil fuels and contributes to global warming, though electrification could change that.
-Being in an office when work is sporadic. Many people work freelance on outsourced projects or at home already for this reason. It is more efficient, and more profitable.
-Phone calls to customer service operators. Especially when they are poorly trained to think in solving problems. Time is wasted on hold, with insipid music meant to soften up the customer by exhausting him, and with incompetent customer service reps.
-”Bullshit jobs.” Much work is bullshit. We could have either higher unemployment and more inequality in the class of people available to do paid work, or less work for all.
-Jobs managing and policing other people. A great percentage of American workers do just this.
-Jobs that are boring and are thus causes of illnesses, addictions, and other problems. This is best solved through automation.

Working less, working at home, and working at tasks that involve forms of adaptive, interpretive, or creative thinking with either people or informational systems or both are solutions. They will be used either in highly unequal ways that exacerbate the above problems for the unluckier classes and strata, or that are distributed so as to benefit everyone.

And respect? It is always threatened by frustrations. A society in which frustrations tend to be great and frequent may indeed be recognizant of an ontological social condition, which is in a way what Slavoj Zizek argues based on his “existentialist” reading of Hegel and Hitchcock (via a reading of Lacanian psychoanalysis as Marxist ideology critique). But it also is a bad thing to have if it could be lessened. A society in which frustrations are great and frequent will be one in which almost everyone needs therapy, which the above-referenced customer service personally parodically invoke constantly as managerial techniques. Our therapies today, like cognitive therapy and Dialectical Behavior Therapy, which emphasizes neo-Buddhist meditation and self-management mainly to counter the excess influence of emotional states that are themselves felt to be excessive. Intuitively, managing your psychical and emotional or interpersonal problems is a good idea if you have got any. But a society in which everyone needs therapy to frequently detox themselves from excess frustration and anger, that is a society that is as dysfunctional as they are. Of course, an ethics or rather morality of respect for others is no political solution to this, but if people somehow found themselves at once less annoyed by other people, less needful to quarrel with them, and less frustrated generally, finding ourselves in a world where there was less narcissism because people were not so encouraged to just want to get what they want, which is as nihilistic, because self-referential, as it sounds. The command to love the neighbor as yourself (as if he were like you or in the way that you would be loved, meaning perhaps to the degree) is no easy panacea, but the respect and therefore distance this involves could indicate a salutary use of the present seemingly extreme geophysical maneuvers we are all expected to adopt. One solution might be to have everyone drive, and alone, like people do in Los Angeles and so many places, but the car is a metal carapace that really closes people in and off, as you cannot easily speak with anyone in the other lanes or ahead of or behind you. People become, like objects, countable elements in a series, as Sartre observed. In Los Angeles where everyone lives in a box and moves around in a box that is a machine, the Cartesian question of whether other people or a world exist is more easily posed. Here in New York where I live, in the epicenter at least on this continent, fellow citizens and other strangers can get in your face. You can step away to keep them out of it. But unlike changing lanes on the freeway, this is a move that is essentially reciprocal. If I step back from you and keep my distance, it’s hard to fail to see that both I and you benefit. Such is market exchange in capitalism as ideology, but the Smithian paradigm is that we act for ourselves and a hidden God manages it such that this benefits others we don’t see. It may not, of course. The salesman moves towards you and feigns friendship or even, in some very American extreme cases, intimacy. The French would only find that insulting; Americans may like it, or fail to realize that it is more manipulative and less generous than it seems. When I step or stand back away from you or he or she, it’s true we are atomized here into individuals; there are no groups here in geophysical space, and a classroom or work unit that had to work together will have to find virtual ties and leave off the handshakes and much else, along with the water coolers where people tell stupid jokes to try to make themselves and others feel comfortable when they really aren’t, but are stick there all day, spending more time with office colleagues than family. The new situation is novel and its meaning and ultimate uses must draw from others with their purposes, but it suggests some changes. In what I am calling geophysical space, people are generally a bit uncomfortable, still, or so I find it. It will the potentialities of virtual social life that will be changed and endure.

III. If the neighbor is defined as the one who is near, at least in a physical sense; and the stranger as the one who is far, at least in a virtual or ‘spiritual’ sense, then how are proximity and distance, together with the physical/bodily and ‘spiritual’/mental woven together? Maybe Being, what is, is constitutively or in our language and culture, both distributed and concentrated. The limit of distance is, obviously, absence, and the non-Being of the Other or even of some mysterious origin of the self, which might be thought of as a void, an authorizing non-presence, as in some notions of metaphysical theology. The limit of proximity is a war of identity that would aim at the impossible fusion of different beings that could only mean the destruction of one or both of them; one of them alone would be destroyed if “I” take “your” place, fully, or you mine. One way to think of the adventure or romance of erotic love may be that it in delirious excitement aims to put self and other into question in a relationship that itself not only incarnates but expresses itself as a question. And in that process, it courts death itself, or imagines itself its equal or master (love as “as strong as death” in the Song of Songs), because it seeks an Absolute. Friendship is generally understood quite differently as based on a respect of the other person’s particularity and limits. The democratic, republican, and communist ideals of the fellow citizen, or the comrade (who in addition to being participant in the state is participant in a partisan cause), is typically imagined as like friendship established through a governmental or political ideology to the entire society. This society or community is constituted by the sharing of a “munus,” some common thing (as in res publicae, the public matters). As with any relationship between two terms that are both linked and separated, in which one can move towards one or other pole, and perhaps not fully occupy other one (hence suggesting an ethics of moderation, which lovers, at least in Western (and Japanese) literature, typically do not have, while friends and especially citizens require it), community is a political idea that problematically unites selves and others. It of course unites partly through speech, and not only through shared rituals. Even today, people often construct and maintain relationships based on a sharing of things and experiences that they affectively valorize. Language, through discourse, is more than sharing experiences and getting things done (“Pass me that brick, please,” as in Wittgenstein’s model of a language game, where use determines meaning because language and discourse are pragmatic). Language allows for contestation. It also endows people with an imagination by means of which only time and materiality, like that of bodies, prevents projects from being conceived and therefore, with perhaps the aid of tools that extend our physical capacities beyond our bodies, realized, perhaps to no limit of what is possible for good or ill. This may be the significance of Parmenides’ declaration that “what is for thought is for Being”: on the plane of possibility, if something can be thought or imagined, the limits to its realization are most likely not a priori but empirical.

Human beings could live and even reproduce without their bodies touching, but that would of course deprive us of certain pleasures, the lovers’ not alone among them. Right now the world is more or less consigned to distance with respect to bodies. So we are thrown back onto or perhaps moved towards great virtuality, reliance on other senses, meaning mainly vision and sound, which are mechanically reproducible as touch (and perhaps movement) alone is not, as taste and smell also are not; there is no such thing as eating or drinking virtually. A meal held together with friends or family but where everyone eats separated behind a screen is of course a virtual communication of people eating separately. Speculations on the future of AI suggest their relevance obviously.

If power becomes more virtual, physical punishments including incarceration will became rarer, and that will be a good thing. We already have a world that is highly integrated and organized around uses of writing, and visual and audio documents. This is obviously a world where governing entities including privately owned corporations can more easily control people. It is easy to say that with everyone in principle under an almost total surveillance, certainly extending to every visible or audible statement or movement, if not expressed thought, anyone whom a state decides its enemy does not need from its point of view to be arrested and taken away. All they need to do is shut you off. True, your interest connection and utilities and other things are not literally, physically, life support systems, but they come close for anyone who is wired as all but the poorest of the world’s people are. If you are shut off electronically, you would not die from lack of nourishment, but you would likely panic and that would make you more vulnerable, just as you also try to figure out how you will survive or continue to do whatever you consider important. States would like to control everyone, and we certainly know that the real reason why this is as it is capital. Enormous amounts of energy and labor and wealth, through wars, policing, informational, educational, medical, and other practices, are engaged in controlling populations that the governments of the world also fear. This would be neither necessary nor possible were it not for the exploitation, leading to extreme inequalities of wealth and income, which has always underlied practices of domination, which people worry so much about.

They should worry less about it. Almost no one outside governmental agencies directly oppresses anyone else. For all the apparent realities of class conflict and difference, the world has never been closer to a situation in which it really is the case that almost every person is in the same boat.

And the current virus crisis emphasizes that. Capital in the end is distributed and used to support forms of life and survival itself, but as persons with mortal bodies, there is a sense in which everyone alive is equal.

We must look for new capacities to organize and resist state and external powers, but also to affirm our being-with or being-together under the current conditions. A totalitarian dystopian could be a society where individuals are as if rendered naked in the face of a bureaucratic power that they directly or in imagination relate to more effectively and determinatively than to other people. With the world as connected as it is, at least for the rapidly growing global urban and suburban middle class, rethinking and rewiring how we are all both separated and potentially united has never been more possible or urgent.

Perhaps the crisis will further the polarization of the world socially and politically as it would be all too easy for financial and infotech-based elites to use the opportunity for greater virtualization to simply increase their own social and class power. Many people do and will continue to share in some of the ethos, because some of the educational and professional practices and forms, of this elite, while being marginalized in terms of wealth, income, and chances for a good life, or even survival. The business elites will want to move towards more efficiency, which will mean more wealth produced but distributed in the same unequal pattern as increase in the last 50 years. Pressures for concessions from governments towards more egalitarian distribution could meliorate that.

Many of us are forced to work at home, and able to through employment arrangements; while others, including writers like myself, were already in that position. I don’t think greater physical separation is the world’s greatest problem. If the virus crisis ends and there is a return to work but with more freelance or work-at-home arrangements, that result could be more or less happy, depending on who benefits. At a minimum, the good thing about crises is that they offer occasions to rethink what we do. I suspect, however, that while the European Black Death of the 14th century surely did hasten the Renaissance and the end of feudalism, pressures in the direction of those changes were already well underway, and so might have happened even without one-third of Europe dying.