105. MY SPIDEY-SENSE WAS TINGLING - Have We Forgotten How To Deal With Conflict in Civil Society?
At some point over the Christmas break a sense of fatalism set in. Everybody seems to be getting the omicron variant, I reasoned, even the vaccinated, so I’ll probably get it at some point. Even though I’m boosted, double-vaxxed before that, and had the OG covid back in 2020, before there were any vaccines, so probably have some natural antibody protection too, it just seemed like an inevitability. I don’t want to get covid again, and my wife and I had spent the entire holiday very safely trying to avoid it even as other family members fell ill. But it was one of the last days of the holiday - New Year’s Day - and we decided to take the risk and see Spiderman: No Way Home.
Even before omicron, our way of rating movies had changed since cinemas reopened. A movie no longer had to just be something we were interested in watching for us to leave the house and go to a theatre to see it, it had to be worth risking covid for. For example, Ghostbusters: Afterlife was worth risking covid for, if only for the sheer nostalgia trip. Dune, although not my favourite movie of the year, was at least a spectacle worth seeing on the big screen for the experience alone. But House of Gucci was such a tonal mess I knew within minutes that I would kick myself if seeing it ended up being the thing that got me sick. A mistake not worth risking the covid for.
To risk omicron - more virulent, more likely to infect - a film had to be really special. We decided to give many of them a miss in the run-up to Christmas. I hadn’t been alive to watch the original West Side Story on the big-screen so Spielberg’s new version would have to wait until I could see it at home too. Likewise withThe Matrix. The first one had been good enough to blow my tiny little mind in an A-level sociology class back when I was at school - a VHS cassette tape plugged into a serviceable television, long after the movie’s theatrical release. It’s Resurrections, if any good, should also hold up if watched at a later date on lower quality equipment.
But Spiderman…
As a kid, Spiderman was the superhero for me. An amazing feat considering the amount of Superman propaganda my mom had filled my young mind with. Don’t get me wrong - I loved Superman - but I knew I wasn’t an alien. There was no hope that I would one day find myself flying because I’d already been exposed to the yellow sun of the earth for many years now and nothing had happened. Likewise Batman, who I also loved. My own parents, at the time, were still very much alive, not gunned down in an alleyway after a night at the theatre, so I knew I didn’t have the deep motivating trauma - or the Wayne millions - to transform myself into a tech-laden ninja vigilante like the Dark Knight. But Spiderman? It was always possible I could be bitten by a radioactive spider. Spiders were everywhere - who knew how many of them might be radioactive? Spiderman was an actual possibility. Superpowers that might one day actually be mine (I also felt the same way about werewolves, and spent about a week of break times at primary school once willing myself to turn into one after the first time I watched Teen Wolf. I was a weird kid. But I digress…)
Even now, quite clear that I have passed the youthful Peter Parker friendly neighbourhood teenage phase, it theoretically still remains possible (though deeply unlikely) that I could be bitten by a radioactive spider and become Spiderman (though the more likely outcome would be radiation sickness and cancer rather than spidey-senses and the bizarre ability to crawl up walls despite wearing gloves and boots over my newly mutated hands and feet). So I’ve always had a soft-spot for Spidey. I loved his recent resurrection in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the previous incarnations before, from Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire way back to the old Nicholas Hammond version I used to watch on rented videos in the 1980s (although, I admit, the first time I rented these I felt ripped off as I thought I was renting a tape of the old cartoon series I loved watching on morning TV and fell about laughing as a decidedly un-superhero looking old man in a cheap Spiderman suit popped up on the roof of a grainy 70s building claiming to be my hero.) Hell, I started December 2021 off by getting a Spiderman tattoo around my elbow. I knew I had to watch the new movie before it left the cinemas, covid be damned, if only to make sure the new tattoo hadn’t been a huge mistake.
So we went on New Year’s Day. Early. The first showing of the day. The logic being that few people would want to get up early after late night partying and the screening would be fairly empty. Spiderman was definitely worth risking covid for, but we weren’t going to be stupid. The fewer fellow theatre-goers the better.
Despite the plan of avoiding the masses, by the time we arrived to our seats, the screen was already fairly full. Not crowded by any means, but more people than we had shared a cinema with at any point since their re-opening. Still, because of omicron signs were up everywhere telling us that face coverings were now mandatory. Hopefully that would be enough to minimise the risk.
Except it turned out that “mandatory” was merely a wish expressed on a piece of paper, not an actual state of reality. In reality, only a handful of us in the theatre were wearing our masks throughout the movie. The vast majority of people sat happily unmasked, breathing their potentially infected breath out into the communal air.
By this point in the pandemic I am used to this attitude in England. I can’t think of a time I have witnessed mass compliance on masks in this country in any public setting outside of a school (and even there enforcement is frequently woeful). I knew going in that the likelihood was that most people would be pretending the popcorn in their lap made them exempt from the mask rule, so was mentally prepared for the disappointing selfishness on display. It was what it was, and I was resigned to living with it.
But as the movie progressed I started to get angry. Not about the lack of masks in general - that’s old hat now. But about the lack of a mask on one man in particular.
He sat a row or two in front of us and a little to the left. Hopefully far enough from us that if he was infected with omicron we were out of his splash zone. But others weren't. He didn’t wear a mask for the whole movie and he coughed and coughed and coughed throughout.
It was this that made me angry.
It’s one thing to know you’re vaccinated, know you’re well (maybe you took a test that very morning) and choose not wear a mask. It’s another to clearly be sick - whether covid or not - and choose to share airspace with others for over two hours without doing anything at all to try and mitigate the spread of your possible disease, or recognise that at a time of pandemic, even if your cough is benign, the rest of the theatre don’t know that and it may be ruining their enjoyment of the movie, and so it is simply considerate to wear one (not to mention compliant with current law).
But this boring old why won’t people just wear a damn mask rant is not the point of this post (I’ve already done plenty of those). What made me stop getting angry and get philosophical instead was realising that as I considered confronting the man about his masklessness, like Doctor Strange figuring out all the possible timelines of the multiverse where Thanos could be beaten I couldn’t think of a way of doing that without the potential threat of violence ensuing. I don’t mean that I wanted to hit the man or fight him. I mean that any way I imagined interacting with him and asking that he considered the people around him and put on a face covering - passively, aggressively, passive-aggressively, through reasoned argument, through emotional appeal - whatever approach I considered, in my mind my spidey-senses tingled that a line would be drawn in the sand were I to speak: me against him. Masked against unmasked. Not a helpful suggestion, taken constructively. Not an annoying do-gooder but I guess I’ll do it out of obligation sense of politeness. But a battle, along party lines we have been unwittingly assigned to in a cultural war we have all been press-ganged into fighting without our consent.
Obviously this is just speculation, and may be completely wrong. We’ve already discussed that I am not (yet) Spiderman and do not (yet) have actual spider-senses about impending attack. But in that moment I felt like we were losing an important element of civil society: a way of peacefully dealing with minor disagreements. With images in my head of the 2020 insurrection on January 6th (a year ago as I write this), of angry people spitting intentionally on shop-workers who politely asked them to wear a face-covering throughout the pandemic, of anti-lockdown protesters in London calling the protection of the NHS and frontline workers “fascism”, and of anti-vaxxers attacking health workers trying to keep us all safe, I wondered about what had happened to the mechanisms of discourse in our society. How everything seems to have become a team-sport, more about winning and crushing the enemy than about getting along and recognising that sometimes living together means compromise and not doing exactly what you want.
I included myself in this fantasised exchange. While I didn’t see myself getting violent, and projected that possibility entirely onto the stranger, I also couldn’t see a scenario where I left the exchange happy that he wasn’t wearing a mask. I couldn’t see my mind being changed by anything he said or my crossing that imaginary line in the sand either. I would stay on my team and he would stay on his. Like getting omicron at some point - it seemed inevitable.
I’d like to think that none of this is true. That maybe the stranger and I could have had a lovely, peaceful exchange, where I somehow politely reminded him about the face covering rule and suggested that his persistent cough might be worrying others sharing the air with him as much as it was worrying me. Where maybe he would put on a mask and understand, or even tell me that he understood the concern but could assure us all that he was covid-free, had tested himself that very morning, and had a long-term condition that not only caused the coughing, but made wearing a mask impossible, and I would accept that and be understanding and sympathetic of why he wasn’t wearing his mask. But increasingly it feels like we are losing those abilities to listen, to understand, to back down, to agree to disagree or even agree that we were wrong.
It is, of course, easy to blame social media for this. We are told daily that our brains have been hijacked by apps designed to make us “like” the things we agree with, bombarding us with more of the same through monetised algorithms while encouraging us to react angrily to things we disagree with. Share and disparage ideas we find “other” while creating our own echo chambers of like-minded people, easily outraged at all the same things so we can stay in isolated cliques and share our data so it can be easily packaged and sold. But in a way that just kicks the problem down the road. We have to ask why it is we have been hijacked so easily? Why do we feel good when we immerse ourselves in those echo chambers and, worse, when we pile on to those we disagree with? Why do we change our minds so rarely? Especially publicly? Why do we get so defensive when criticised? Why do we continue to cling to the social media that can be so damaging, so time-wasting, and so knowingly awful, despite being fully aware of how problematic it is?
To blame social media for all our current social ills is to ignore the larger question of what social ills pre-existed social media to make these potentially liberating tools of communication and interaction what they have so disastrously become?
When we point out knowingly how the internet giants, in their bid to keep us engaged and making themselves money, use intentionally emotive clickbait and provocative calls to arms, why are we not also asking why we so frequently fall for these tactics time and time again?
When we ask ourselves these questions while watching yet another movie about good and evil - superheroes we are meant to identify with, battling against a team of supervillains we are supposed to revile - why are we not paying attention to the fact that this exact same narrative of us against them playing out in our heads is the same story that is playing out so frequently on our screens? How many times do we have to see the impact of these stories on our perceptions of the world before we admit that perhaps they might influence the way we think? That they may be only entertainment, but they might also be fairly damaging?
I enjoyed Spiderman and, as of my last lateral flow test nearly a week since I saw it, it was not only worth risking covid for, but the coughing man who irritated me so much as I sat there was a waste of my mental energy. He did not give me or my wife the virus, and as teachers it is far more likely we will catch it from our workplaces in the next few weeks than we would ever have done from that coughing man. But I do wonder about a world where I feel - whether rightly or wrongly - that any possible dispute with a fellow citizen is now fraught with the possibility of violence rather than the possibility of peaceful compromise. A world where instead of conversation and discourse, an argument is far more likely. Heels dug in. Positions defended. Insults hurled.
I wonder what we’re doing, collectively, to get better at empathising with each other. Listening. Understanding. Accepting difference. Accepting faults. Owning our own failings. Admitting that we are wrong sometimes, or even a lot.
The day after I watched Spiderman I read this article in the New York Times about a significant uptick in aggressive altercations between citizens at a range of different public-facing outlets (“There’s a lack of outlets for people’s anger…That waiter, that flight attendant — they become a stand-in for everything coming between what we experience and what we think we are entitled to.“) and it didn’t help the feeling that we were somehow losing our grip on how to interact. The day after that I read this article in the Guardian suggesting the US “could be under a rightwing dictator by 2030”.
As we start 2022 I think it’s incredibly important we start to think more about these lines being drawn in the sand for us all. About who is putting us into one team or another. Who is identifying certain people we interact with as “the enemy” and others as “allies”. And how we deal with differences of opinion with strangers without resorting to presumed stereotypical allegiances.
I have no idea what talking to that man about his mask will have actually led to as, bluntly, I didn’t do it. I simply imagined a scenario in my head, as fantastical as the one carrying out on the screen, and accepted what I felt about the imagined scenario as if it were some kind of truth. It wasn’t. For all I know, he could have politely put a mask on and apologised for forgetting to wear one. He could have explained all kinds of legitimate reasons he wasn’t wearing one and maybe I would have even been convinced by one of them?
Or he could have punched me in the face.
Who knows?
The point is - I don’t. So I can’t make judgements about the state of society based on an imaginary interaction. I can only make judgements about what I thought was likely to happen, and what seems to be happening more and more around the place. And I can worry that we seem to be losing something - or to have already lost it - when the first thought about asking someone to do what is right, what is required by law, and what is little more than a minor imposition, is to be worried that doing so might lead to violence, or at least an argument. Because as Spiderman up on that big screen shows us - you just need to imagine something fantastical enough times, and spread that fantastical idea to enough people, and it will stick around for a very long time, through a range of different incarnations. It will grow. It will persist. Generation after generation. So perhaps it is time to start imagining better worlds. Kinder worlds. Conversations instead of arguments. Discourse instead of despair. Ways through instead of dead ends. The kind of ideas we want to persist instead of the rotten ideas we keep being offered. Forget the dividing lines and imposed team-sports and recognise all that we share, good and bad. Resist the battleground narrative and start to rebuild a sense of community in all its diversity and disagreement. The Rawlsian “reasonable pluralism” of “overlapping consensus” to be found in any successful communal endeavour not coerced by the “oppressive use of state power”.
Before we can do better, we must imagine better.
I didn’t really know how to end this post to be honest. It’s not really a philosophical argument - just some meandering worries and observations after the Christmas break as I look ahead to 2022 and half-formulated thoughts. It’s my birthday this week and I don’t have the time I would normally have to write a new PU. But the day after I wrote the first draft, ending here and not knowing how to conclude, I finished reading Craig Adams’ interesting and misleadingly-titled book, The Six Secrets of Intelligence. Towards the end, Adams words spoke to me: “people will always disagree,” he reminds us, “but this inevitable disagreement - this natural and ineradicable spectrum of opinion - is made wider and worse by our inability to understand how the extreme ends of every argument are exaggerated. Citizens who are skilfully educated in logic and language, however, are harder to manipulate. They are steadier under the assault of extreme ideas. To the mind of the truly philosophical citizen, the fringes of arguments seemed frayed. If we are to become harder to manipulate and more understanding of other people, we need to be brought up in the habit of being able to interrogate what others believe and why they believe it. In the absence of Plato’s distasteful philosopher kings, let us all be philosopher citizens.” He also reminds us that “the power of our yearning for a better world is, alone, not enough to create one.” We have to actually go about the practical business of creating the conditions in which that better world can actually come to be.
Which, I guess, means teaching and learning philosophy. Arming others - and ourselves - with the intellectual skills to not be drawn into false narratives of us against them, and to be able to make - and receive - critical arguments against deeply held, or even superficially held, beliefs. To look beyond the cave, be it social media, our inner prejudices, or an imposed cultural narrative.
Another world is possible, as the anarchists often say. The way we get there, so says Adams, might very well be through philosophy.
Author: DaN McKee
My book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE and from all good booksellers. Read my Anarchist Studies journal paper on Anarchism and Character Education here. For everything else DaN McKee related: www.everythingdanmckee.com