The Social

All night they talked, secretly comforting their hearts that longed always for Spain and telling themselves that such a symposium was after the manner of the high Spanish soul.  They talked about ghosts and second-sight, and about the earth before man appeared upon it and about the possibility of the planets striking against one another; about whether the soul can be seen, like a dove, fluttering away at the moment of death; they wondered whether at the second coming of Christ to Jerusalem, Peru would be long in receiving the news.  They talked until the sun rose, about wars and kings, about poets and scholars, and about strange countries.  Each one poured into the conversation his store of wise sad anecdotes and his dry regret about the race of men.

Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey

The word "social" is becoming utterly debased - social networking, social marketing, social media, social websites. What Thornton Wilder describes in this passage is the social that is worth having and worth demanding. Absent the sort of exchange that, no matter how light or heavy on the surface, has a serious and refined core, why bother socializing at all? I'm reminded of Robert G. Kaiser's account of the bracing late-night conversations of the Russia intelligentsia in his excellent 1976 book, Russia: The People and the Power.  The talk could be drunken, funny, morose, erudite, eccentric, or angry, but there was always something at stake. How piddling most interaction that gets counted as social today seems in comparison. For sociability of substance you need people of substance, and contemporary Americans in particular are trained for insubstantiality, right from the get-go. Signs of depth are treated with alarm.

Apart from continuing profitable exchanges in my active web-groups and with a few of my work colleagues, I feel like I am in retirement from society. I'm a bit of a lone wolf at the best of times, but I would not wish for quite so barren a social landscape. I teach the Enlightenment, after all, and with great enthusiasm; I know that what comes out of social gatherings can change the world. We all deserve our personal versions of Enlightenment salons and Bloomsbury dinner parties, but where in 2012 are they to be found?