Don't screen out relationships
Photo for illustrative purposes only
IN the pandemic years, many Irish were shut away from each other, unable to see each other in church or the pub, but even in “normal” years most of us live far more isolated and lonely lives than almost any of our ancestors.
The modern world isolates us in cars or cubicles, and we find it difficult to imagine how communal and intimate all life was for most people, in most cultures, as long as we have been human.
In Ireland, as in most cultures, people ploughed fields, footed turf and harvested hay together, making light work of many hands. Everyone celebrated and grieved together, their losses lessened because they were shared, and their joys heightened because they were shared.
Living uprooted the way most modern humans do, spending our lives adrift on a sea of strangers and rarely seeing loved ones, was for most cultures the worst punishment imaginable.
Ancient Greeks chose death rather than exile, condemned to be a stranger in a strange land. International law today condemns solitary confinement – being isolated in an enclosed space – as literal torture, but that is how many of us spend our lives. Whether on city streets, on buses and planes, in offices and bars, many of us are alone even in a crowd.
In every society, of course, there were people who left the village or the farm, often young males who needed to test themselves.
Even then, though, everyone acknowledged that being cut off from one’s own blood was a kind of death; when a son or daughter in rural Ireland left for America seeking work, everyone in the village held an “American wake,” a funereal celebration, as though the departing was already departed.
Those who joined the army, or a monastery, or who went to sea as Ishmael did in Moby Dick, then lived with a new family, a “brotherhood” like the brothers they might have left.
Even today, when people look back at the best times of their lives, it was usually when they were thrown together – say, in college – in the same kind of closeness, when we briefly felt as humans should.
When we must deal with others, we must stretch beyond our inner world, as they are beyond theirs, and create a new living thing – a relationship – in the space between us.
Relationships are more than the sum of the people, but create something new, as the green gas chlorine and soft metal sodium combine to become salt, completely unlike its component parts.
Different people bring out different things in us, and our identities subtly reshape to fit them, never completely reverting to their former shape.
As the number of people in a group increases arithmetically (3, 4, 5), the number of relationships goes up geometrically (9, 16, 25) and a community is born, an organic living thing with its own personality different than the people who comprise it.
Those relationships can also demand much of us, which is why we find it so easy to flee from them into screens. They force us to be kind when we don’t feel like it, to use diplomacy, and to put ourselves in the place of others -- to practice the qualities that separate humans from other animals.
They make us endure the quirky habits of others long enough to build an immunity to them, and perhaps even appreciate them.
We have all known people who hated each other at first and then became friends or romantic partners, and when loved ones pass out of this life, we have all fondly remembered the eccentricities that might have once annoyed us.
Our modern world of earbuds and phones, of social media and online chats, by contrast, lets us unfriend and shut out anyone that doesn’t immediately please us with their first impression, as well as all subsequent impressions.
We screen out most of the relationships that would truly help us grow into understanding adults.
As the new year begins, it would be easy for all of us to stare at screens, take Zoom calls, and never talk to anyone at the store.
Instead, I’d like us to make a resolution to knock on the neighbours’ doors and invite them for tea, to play ball with children instead of allowing them to play a video game, and to revive the kind of communities we once had one relationship at a time.
