It's always baffling to me how quickly, once a plane lands, practically everyone reaches for their cell phones or gadgets and gizmos. It's the last thing I think about. There seems to be this desperate urge for authenticity: separated from terra firma by five or six miles of vertical lacunarity, separated from loved ones, friends, animals, flora, we reach for the very first thing that reconnects us to the world we know, our selected cocoon, the safety net and support system we hold close to ourselves, and, in some cases, guard and protect -- and maybe are even addicted to.
And yet, airplanes are completely silent, save the roar of the engines. People shunt themselves into seats, determined to survive the interceding hour or five between boarding and disembarquement, attached to everything around them, and always secretly disappointed each time they turn off their mobile device or gadget of whatever stripe. The roar of the body language says all: people hunched over a book, or busied with something business-related; arms folded, head down (or tilted far up, as though sneering from 35,000 feet would be assisted by tipping one's nose up a further few inches), legs crossed, compressing and hugging oneself, really, sheltering oneself from the audacious pursuit of human interaction and connection with perfect strangers, shuttering oneself and pretending the world around them is the only one they know, resigning themselves to ignore the potential richness or mundanity extant in the people surrounding them.
Yet we are so segmented, fragmented as a society. We have lost social graces and dignities and have become cool, reptilian, avoidant. We yearn for meaningful human connections, laud them when we think they arrive, and bemoan their absence or loss as though -- and perhaps rightly -- we have lost a family member. We do not know how to say hello, to be pleasant to each other. Is there a meaninglessness in saying hello or thank you to a complete stranger? Perhaps; there may be a naïveté here, true, but to persist in an environment where any sort of greeting or conversation -- even if it is wholly in passing and consists of nothing more than a word or two and therefore deprived of cerebral, academic, or deep spiritual or profoundly intellectual meaning -- is avoided, loathed, perhaps, or even feared (due in part to the righteous paranoia drilled into us for aeons) and is tantamount to slicing out our tongues, poking out our eyes, and treppanning our eardrums. In short, we exile ourselves to our personal Colonnus with greater sensory deprivation, and we furthermore lose the ability to find connections, find bonds, find the pleasance that is generally inherent in human beings. Everyone wants to fall in love; everyone wants to have friends and make friends. Yet we don't know how to talk to one another; we don't know how to explore the experiences of others in diplomatic fashions; we don't know how to be anything but guarded, isolated, against persons that are ostensibly strangers, all the while conveniently forgetting that at some point in the past all persons we know, love, desire, explore, and long for were all foreign to us, individual entities comprising part of a larger amorphous mass of humanity that we may or may not have sat next to on an airplane from Dallas to Chicago.
This morning, in friendly old Austin, I was procuring some coffee for myself at a coffee bar in the airport, bleary eyed and groggy. I ordered, and the relatively slowhanded barista staff took their time filling my paper vase with an artwork of jitters. On my left, a small-eyed white male in a suit and top coat, most likely a mid-level functionary for a company who at one time left his MBA program idealistic (in the Keynesian sense) that his service would become fruitful and his service would benefit the greater good of his company. About 35 to 40, closely-cropped hair. My mind wanders back briefly, thinking about a few people I love back home, thinking about the growing to-do list for the week. I see the barista put a tall cup of coffee on the counter; by this time, I'd traded places with the businessman. I reach for the cup, gently feel the scald potential as my fingers touch the paper. I hear a growly, surly "hey, that's mine!" in my right ear, and the fellow yanks up his cup, grasps his carry-on, a rotting American Tourister rollaway, and starts walking to the other side of the coffee bar for accoutrements. In a good humor, admitting I'd made a mistake, I say "sorry, guess I was too eager." Unaccustomed, perhaps, the guy wheels around and glowers at me momentarily with a half-angry, half-shocked look. It was bad enough I made an error and thought the coffee was mine; it was only worse when I admitted my fault and tried to establish a connection with him in order to simply apologise for making such a small, stupid error. How dare I break the perverse social contract that people aren't supposed to speak to one another in public if they don't already know each other! How dare I make a reversible error and attempt to make amends! This certainly does not fit into the schema of most people, and for me to doubly dissolve the bonds of this again perverse social contract is anathema to the lonely, isolating experiences so many people live daily, if not even look forward to. I wonder how many people who travel a lot for a living actually look forward to, seek out the pleasure in, checking into their hotel room for one, a room with the ability to be pitch black with the flip of a switch and flick of the wrist to close the drapes, a room with the ability to be silent -- sensory deprivation after being surrounded by persons for so many hours. I wonder how many people are physically repulsed by the thought of human contact simply by virtue of not knowing how to connect with others; I wonder how many people are loathsome of being surrounded by people simply because the isolation and fear of the other and Other deepens and becomes more pervasive and all-encompassing the more one is mired in it.
What do we have to lose? What are we so afraid of? Is it territoriality of some sort -- somehow asserting a yell of "hey, that's mine" in terms of space (which is shared, anyhow, and even private space is not "private"), or "hey, that's mine" in terms of somehow insuring and ensuring the continued integrity of our personhood? Does speaking to a perfect stranger somehow devalue us because it acknowledges the existence of another person and therefore increases their value? Are we that territorial over who we are that we are simultaneously petrified of invading someone else's personhood space by speaking to them, addressing them, acknowledging that they exist? Or are we afraid of divesting ourselves of what makes us fundamentally ourselves -- are we afraid that by initiating contact and perhaps engaging in conversation, perhaps even sharing life experiences to some degree, we lose control over ourselves? AH. That must be it. Certainly, there's more to it and no one answer (except in simple arithmetic) is ever fully correct, but this age-old, rather obvious conceptualisation of control and power. Foucault and Bauman write a lot about societal fragmentation, segmentation, and the concepts and praxis of control and power and how they are lorded over populations, loved and feared and needed by groups, shunned and hated by persons on the individual level while existing within the paradox of the social construct of total obedience and conformity to the societal order. "Society must be defended," indeed. But what is a society that doesn't speak? What is a society that validates, celebrates, even expects, a form of control where its individuals are forbidden from even making contact with each other, even for slight seconds? What is a civilization that refuses to acknowledge itself?
No civilization at all, or, the American marketplace of terrified loneliness and solipsism that is the early 21st Century.
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