The most urgent challenge facing civil society today, according to Richard Sennet, is living with people who differ from us, whether this is racially, ethnically, religiously, or just economically, culturally and politically. If we continue to avoid engaging socially with people unlike ourselves this encourages tribalism not the “politics of the city”. To paraphrase Aristotle in The Politics, similar people cannot bring a city into existence – it needs different kinds of men and women.
Tribalism takes first form in the family and the community, then in the playground and the office, the organisation, or the clique, friendship circles or community of interest. The tribe is hostile to incomers, to different skin, to different languages, to different backgrounds, to different foods, to different aesthetics. It is conformist and feeds on a fear of the new and the unknown. A fear of nuance on the one hand and complexity on the other. Not surprisingly it is in the polis, the city – civis – where civil society and civilisation develops at a pace, and why it is dangerous to have metropolitan views if you live in the sticks.
In another volume Richard Sennett argues that “Athenian democracy is shaped by the surfaces and volume of the agora, for the movement possible in simultaneous space served participatory democracy well.” The agora is effectively an open space and invited casual participation in articulating a new democracy and antidote to the autocracy of tyranny. But it was still elitist, male, and urban-centric, a proto democracy, which had harsh conventions. Once a year citizens met to decide if power was concentrated excessively in any individual that they could become a tyrant. The whispering and gossip and the debris of political tides washed over the agora.
Today the whispering and gossip has moved from the internet chat room, to twitter and facebook – virtual communities or places – that encourage “click democracy”. Victims are sought out by the oxymoronic facebook “like” (how can you like something that you hate?). A bit like the Athenians once did, these folk articulate a pointless pub-democracy (where no one can hear you over the noise), but they improbably target the wrong sorts of people. Nor am I talking about unpleasant trolling by individuals who break norms of acceptability or indulge in the stupid or distasteful use of irony, behind the cloak of a screen name. No, I am talking about people who forget that it is simply indecorous to utter certain things publicly, who have found the power of their keyboard intoxicating (that or are just intoxicated and should not “type in charge”.)
Thinly protected by a moral tribe of similar indignants, probably idiotic Daily Mail readers if they even read at all, these people are united only by collective envy. They celebrate nd take pleasure in others’ failure. They instil in others their own sense of permanent anxiety. They’ve learnt to fear anything they don’t understand, including the imagination. The very idea that someone, somewhere, might be having more fun than they are is crippling. Often mean, narrow, nasty, spiteful and visionless, and we have them right here in our community.
I am reliably informed that our streets are now much safer than they have ever been, but it is the internet where you need to watch out for dangerous dogs and poisonous snakes. Now who is policing that?