Love and Hate In America

One of the online communities I helped to found has gotten a bit dull.

There's a lot of people there who really care about each other, know each other off-line, have shared meet-ups together, and who respect each others' differences.

Now and then, though, the cloven hooves pop out and somebody says somebody else is "mean."  People roll their eyes at each other and wiffle and snip about each other in private messages.  All very dull negotiations about who's on top and who's tiresome to whom.

It's got me thinking about how relationships and communities form, and at what point we disentangle from them, and why.  "The love of many will grow cold," Jesus says in Matthew 24:12.  But then, we live in a strange time when some forms of love can be as much at fault for wickedness as anything else.

One of the things I tell my students (and one day they'll realize that I'm sort of but not entirely being tongue-in-cheek about it) is that everything they need to know about their culture can be learned on Survivor and ElmiDate.

The contest-show traditionally aims to demonstrate the merits of the contestant.  But these two shows throw the history of civilization into reverse.   

Each begins with a coherent community that cooperates even as it competes.  This is, theoretically anyway, what human civilized life must attempt to be: controlled, rational, cooperative self-interest.

But each show whittles down that community until one is left standing.  The purpose of both shows is to gradually chip away at a community.

The sexual Darwinism of ElimiDate fascinated me (when I used to stay up until one in the morning and television had some appeal) because of the unusual form this took: inevitably the women would turn on each other and rend each other limb from limb (verbally, anyway) with words like "bitch," "whore," "skank," and of course "slut."  In other words, women who had agreed to compete sexually for a man employed words against other women that imply a willingness to, well, compete sexually for a man.

Muriel Shultz and Minju Kim have written on "The Semantic Derogation of Women" in English and Asian languages, respectively: the tendency for male dominated language to express anxiety about what women will do with their sexuality when our backs are turned.  In a world where physical violence is taboo, insulting a woman's sexuality is a means of social control, one that (ElimiDate suggests) women are happy to turn against each other if they stand to gain from it.  And so the community of women (four of them on ElimiDate) happily turns on itself using the tools of male domination.

Communities are fragile things because they are so necessary, and because the stakes are high.  Our evolutionary (or divine, if you prefer) hard-wiring demands that we be social because we are born from the beginning with needs we cannot meet ourselves.

Communities and relationships require alarming amounts of energy, and that energy is never unambiguously good.  The best marriage has contained spasms (at best) of desire to murder a spouse; the most tender mother has resented her motherhood.  It's axiomatic that the best things in life are so good because they are difficult and rare.

Judith Viorst writes in chapter five of her provocative book Necessary Losses:

Sentimentality.... serves no useful purpose. It harms because "it contains a denial of hate"... The most gentle and loving act always possesses some element of hate.

Viorst writes in this book about the foundational drive we all have: to be loved and yet to be differentiated from those who love us, to reaffirm the vows, constitutions, charters, rules, laws, and oaths by which we are not alone, and yet to struggle against the tyranny, large and small, that we exercise over one another simply by virtue of the fact that we have met one another's needs at some time.

When I look fairly dispassionately at the communities I've known online (and especially about Facebook), and their microcosmic slide towards chaos, I sometimes think that the real enemy is the haste with which we assume these relationships are actually beneficial.  They meet, we believe, a need.  They demand little, but give us the illusion of being in relationships, soothing an inner desire to feel connected that is itself irrational but is maybe the basis for ethical rationality: our need to not be alone lest we perish.

If only it were that easy. 

If only love were that free of hate.

If only sentimentality were love.

Comments

[Stephanie]

I think it often takes trials to really establish friendships. But the trust to include someone in your trial, or to value them enough to stick with them even when you'd like to throttle them, is formed incrementally in the pleasantries, the boring status updates, the daily victories and defeats.

I once heard a pastor liken the streets of gold in Revelation to friendships. They keep us from isolation, they have an eternal, transcendent nature, and they're incredibly valuable.

[Emma]

Community can teach, support, challenge, grow. One of the many problems with online communities is we only show them the parts of us we want them to see.

The problem with TV shows...everything. They remind of the the cultures that value deception and the killing of friends.

[Daisy]

Relationships that are built only on words are fragile in the way small children are: yes, they are easily wounded, but it takes a helluva lot to break them. And, like small children, such relationships, if nurtured, are pretty resiliant. The thing about modern technological friendships is this: everyone is purposely alone in the crowd, purposely hidden to some extent. That protection is necessary, but can have unfortunate circumstances when those words we build these relationships with rip people open or uncover scars we want hidden, and then we are left alone to tend the wounds.

My most important relationship is one built solely on the written Word. It has given me the deepest love and my deepest scars. And, it has taught me this truth: One is not irrelevant just because they are immaterial. You can touch, and be touched with words just as you can with hands.

[Sherry]

It's interesting watching my 10 year old daughter develop internet friendships on a kid's site. I shouldn't be surprised that she's following in my footsteps, but I am.
As for the allegations of being "mean," I find I am conflicted. I think there are people out there who do have a lack of respect for others. I might tolerate that in a relationship for awhile, when there is conflict. However, in a relationship, you work things out, and the respect eventually comes back. Online, the respect is never there, because there isn't a real relationship.
I think that is where the mean allegations come from - a faux relationship that can never include respect. The conversations may be more boring, but I'll be damned if I talk to someone who shows no respect.