Seeing people whole — real relationships in a transactional age
April 17, 2018 | Raleigh News & Observer
Lawrence Akers in his favorite spot — on top of a mountain.
My grandfather made it to the end of his life without ever venturing onto the internet. Family and friends showed him the wonder of their phones and laptops, and I can remember occasional plans to get him an iPad.
But right up until the end, Papa was unmoved. The man didn’t need Facebook — he had a front porch, a walking stick, and a truck. His insistence on living fully in the non-digital world made him one of the best-connected people I’ve ever known.
Often as not, stopping by his North Hills home meant interrupting a conversation with a neighbor or finding a note on his wide-open front door that read, “Out walking. Back soon.”
Except that he was never back soon. He’d stop to talk with a jogger, chat with a kid on a bicycle, or trade neighborhood news with people on the greenway trail.
His eagerness to greet people, to talk to anyone about almost anything, used to bother me. We’d go on long trips through the North Carolina mountains in the summer, and Papa would chat with every waiter, gas station attendant, and trail hiker we met. I was — I am — a more reticent soul, and I’d do my best to wrap things up and move us along.
In the years since, as social media took hold and public spaces became an obstacle course of shuffling cell-phone zombies, I’ve come to see not just the wisdom but the essential humanity in my grandfather’s manner.
“Our challenge is to resist sorting and simplifying our fellow citizens, online and off.”
“We live in a world of perfectly impersonal transactions,” said Andy Crouch, a Christian author and thinker, speaking at last week’s Q Conference in Nashville. Through most of human history, Crouch pointed out, we were part of small, intimate communities. The idea of buying food from a stranger, passing by thousands of anonymous people on a commute, or sharing a neighborhood with hundreds of people we’ll never meet is historically weird.
In that context, it takes a radical commitment to treat the people we encounter with all the interest and dignity they deserve.
Our technology isn’t helping. Amid the outcry about privacy and manipulation on Facebook, we’re losing sight of a more insidious threat. The great risk of these platforms isn’t that they share our data with others. It’s that they reduce us to data in the first place.
Humans in the wild are messy and complex and demanding. That’s what makes real, sustained relationships so challenging — and so incredibly rewarding. People surprise you, reveal hidden depths, offer kindnesses and ask favors.
Online, friends and family become passive entertainment, another genre of content to be consumed in our idle moments. A cousin’s new baby rolls past, followed by a breaking news video and an advertisement for shoes. Not exactly a communion of souls.
Molly Worthen, a scholar of religious history at UNC Chapel Hill, describes this as “the erosion of flesh-and-blood, face-to-face bonds with other humans and the replacement of that with digital illusions.”
All the while, we are feeding algorithms designed to simplify and categorize us, to efficiently sort us into marketable consumer groups.
My grandfather was too stubborn and idiosyncratic to be algorithmically sorted. He preferred the people he met every day, whatever their own oddities, to the simulations available online.
Our challenge is to resist sorting and simplifying our fellow citizens, online and off. It’s tempting to organize the world as Facebook does, shunting the people we meet into neat divisions — liberals, conservatives, Millennials, rednecks, people who hog the left lane. It makes life easier to handle.
If we’ve learned anything from the digital world, however, it’s that convenience is a poor guide to value. “Some things were never meant to be easy,” Crouch went on to say. “We’re not formed by experiences that are easy.”
We’re formed by things that take time, by people we truly come to know.
Eric Johnson is a writer in Chapel Hill. He works in the financial aid office at UNC Chapel Hill, but the views expressed here are his own.
Originally published in the News & Observer.