Great long article about boundaries, intimacy and authenticity. Ever since the Industrial Revolution, cultural nostalgia for the bygone days of close social relationships has constantly attended our ideas of the past, in part to make it a more charmed place for blockbuster movies, but also in part to help shield us from what we see as the estrangement of the modern world. We have been led to think, through decades of middlebrow entertainment and high-minded social criticism, that the modern world is cold and devoid of emotion, whereby the impersonal mechanisms of post-industrial capitalism crush the cozy human spirit. We assume that people used to be closer to one another because of the necessities of their everyday survival — farm life, the local store — but that over the course of the 20th century we have drifted apart and become less emotionally close. Actually, the opposite is true. While social relations were generally closer in the pre-modern era, particularly outside of urban areas, emotional relations — the revelation of one’s intimate feelings to others, strangers — were far more restrained. The kinds of behaviors that have mediated social relations since time immemorial — manners, psychological distance, protocol, deference, interpersonal remove, playful social roles — are as necessary for a public or professional sphere to exist as they are to keeping our private selves shielded from the impositions of the political or commercial world. They are required for a healthy liberal democracy to flourish because they also allow for impersonal engagement with others — that is to say, working with others on like-minded political interests, strategies and civic or artistic projects, without having to share the details of our private lives. This is what it is to be social without being emotional, a distinction we find it difficult to conceptualize. Social masks, social play, acting and irony are not only essential components of a lively and dramatic public life, they are necessary for psychological health and a feeling of freedom and fun in our private lives. “Without a protective and supportive private sphere,” wrote the German sociologist Hans Paul Bahrdt, in 1958, “the individual is sucked into the public realm, which, however, becomes denatured by this very process.” The modern world, on the other hand, is an emotional world. It is more focused on sentiments and feelings, more obsessed with how the private self feels and “relates” to other people, objects, art and its own sense of authenticity.... salon/2014/11/16/lets_all_be_a_lot_less_honest_lena_dunham_naked_selfies_and_the_irony_of_oversharing/
Posted on: Tue, 18 Nov 2014 20:11:22 +0000
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