Anomie, Social Fragmentation, the Politics of Recognition

I’ll typically check my social media between sets when I’m at the gym. It’s a bad habit, I know, but it’s harder to quit than smoking. Today, I’m training back and some boomer moron who probably watches CNN every night and hasn’t read a book in fifty years is calling me a “dumb kid” again.

C’est la vie.

It’s unavoidable. The more you learn, the more incommunicable that knowledge becomes, the more morons (boomer and otherwise) are prone to tell you that you don’t know anything.

“I think it’s funny that you expect me to take you seriously,” Frank (we’re gonna call him Frank) says.

I sigh, roll my eyes and go into the next set. This is so pointless. Someone ought to work out a universal flow chart for online conversations. Next I’ll ask Frank if he thinks that I have at any point taken him seriously?

“Why should I care?” Frank asks, “ You’re just a dumb kid.”

“Why should I care, Frank? You’re just a dumb boomer.”

“I don’t care,” he shoots back with all the caustic wit of a young Molière.

It’s at this point that a sane person would ask, “What is the importance of caring in this conversation? Why does it keep coming up? For that matter, why does this shit show keep going?” But the shit show does indeed keep going and the reason is that this is the politics of recognition at work.

In one way or another, it seems like most online discourse has begun to take on this tint. Oh sure, it’s rarely as obvious as it is in this exchange, but everywhere one can, if they have the facility for it, detect that conversations have very little to do with resolving differences and much more with scoring “dunks” on the other guy. Twitter sass and optics-management has replaced human thought in a shockingly large number of people.

Frank wants his disapproval to carry some weight with me. He wants it to mean something to me when he calls me dumb. But it doesn’t. I’m so used to being called “stupid” and “uninformed” by people who haven’t even mastered subject-verb agreement that I’ve gone numb to it. I want him to realize this. I want him to recognize that I am impervious to his opinion, but he can’t or won’t. If this were happening in the real world, this is probably the point at which we’d have to start maiming each other.

It must be fairly obvious that we both care, but holy hell, WHY?

The Ego Economy

Hegel’s story of the dialectic between master and slave begins with a battle, a conflict to the death in which both participants demand to be recognized as fully human and fully free. It is only by showing that they are willing to die for this recognition that they demonstrate their worthiness of it. Either both die, or one prevails and rips recognition from the hands of the other.

In 2012, Harvard published a study which showed that revealing personal information about ourselves activates the same portion of the brain related to sensual pleasure. Now, I didn’t know that until about ten minutes ago, but I and any other person who is remotely human know that it feels good to be seen, to be recognized, to be known.

(It’s the reason that I slipped in that little bit about me being a gym rat. I didn’t need to do that. But now, you know a little more about me, ha! Got you! Your brain is my playpen.)

In our Culture of Narcissism, recognition is more important and more elusive than ever before. Here’s an article from the Atlantic about it. You could read that, if you want (I guarantee some idiot in the comments is going to tell me that that article is achshually about anxiety because he isn’t capable of thought). Alternatively, you could check the social media of any woman you know. I can bet with almost 100% certainty (especially if she is in her twenties) that it will be populated with photos of herself (“selfies,” if you will) receiving hundreds of “likes” or hearts or upvotes or whatever, and the comments will be jam-packed with other women saying things like:

“OMG, how are u so PERFECT!!!”

“Ur so beautiful!!!”

“GODDESS!!!”

Why? Because these women in turn want and expect her to leave similar comments on their selfies.

Of course this will all be blamed on “patriarchy” or “social expectations” or whatever buzzwords are popular on Slate.com this year because that’s a lot easier than confronting the reality of it all.

People have come up with a lot of different phrases, clever and not, to describe the new social dynamics that have become salient since the advent of social media, but I think it ought to just be called the Ego Economy.

What Frank and I are engaged in is, rather than dialogue or dialectic, a kind of psychological boxing match where each of us is trying to land a shot to the other person’s ego, while defending our own. Frank’s primary weapon, like so many others, is his willingness to withhold recognition and respect. But that only has weight under certain circumstances.

As Alasdair MacIntyre explains in After Virtue, honor, dignity and the sense of what is owed to someone can only be coherent inside of an organized and shared social arrangement which makes it possible to mediate between people. The problem, the reason why both my and Frank’s refusal to grant this respect has no meaning, is that neither of us has any desire to be a part of any social arrangement that involves the other.

This is not a salutary state of affairs.

80% of online discourse is either attacking the egos of one’s ideological opponents, or fortifying one’s own by in-group virtue signalling — even outside of politics.

Popstar fandoms go to war with each other, their idols watching in a combination of horror and dark pride as grown humans debase each other and themselves over who has what position in the charts this week, who’s having sex with who, etc.

It doesn’t take a genius to understand that this all leads to greater tribalism, which in turn contributes to the further fragmentation of social norms, greater levels of anomie (the absence of guiding social norms and the sense of isolation, confusion, and directionlessness which afflicts individuals in their absence. Emile Durkheim talks about this a LOT in Suicide), which creates an increased need to turn to social media for validation, and around and around we go.

By distancing our social interactions from the material reality of those interactions, we have set a torch to the already dwindling reserves of the kind of social capital that Robert Putnam opined on in Bowling Alone. Technology often has the effect of enabling humanity to expend resources long before we are able to accurately take stock of those resources.

I’ve heard people speculate (and really what else can you do?) that the escalating purity spirals and “cancel culture” are a response to a social milieu which no longer provides obvious opportunities for the demonstration of real heroism, character or virtue or the recognition that demonstrations of those qualities merit. Some brainlet is sure to cry that virtue and character shouldn’t need recognition, to which I can only reply, “Ok, dummy. I’m sure that making sainthood the base requirement for moral behavior will go swimmingly; it worked so well for teaching as a profession.”

But regardless, without those opportunities, people are flailing for any kind of validation, while simultaneously having at least some degree of awareness (if they’re at all intelligent) that it’s all bullshit. We’re riding high on the surface of an enormous self-esteem bubble masking a (likely) irreparable divide in essential values. That bubble is bound to pop. What will happen when it does?

I don’t know.

But I suspect that it will be difficult to pretend not to care.