Breeding Contempt

Internet-bred familiarity and how we see and treat one another.

A major part of aging is realizing how much useful knowledge is encoded in clichés you’ve ignored all your life.¹ Lately —and especially after watching The White Lotus and Phantom Thread— I’ve been fixated on the rather dark chestnut that “familiarity breeds contempt,” an ancient observation that runs against the grain of our confessional, self-disclosing, vulnerability-parading zeitgeist.

We are all much more familiar with one another than ever before. We “bring our full selves to work”; we discuss our private lives with our colleagues, with neighbors, with strangers online; we make symbols and memes to represent our innermost particularities, then broadcast those symbols as widely as we can. We form dynamic affinity groups around every aspect of selfhood, with the verb “to identify” doing heavy work for us all across demographics, whether we use the term or mock it. A deluge of novel words, acronyms, tribes, and sorting mechanisms all help us to exteriorize the self, to make it explicit, legible, and a matter of public record, and then to transact on it socially or otherwise.

You can visualize the situation almost spatially; I imagine our selves as spheres jostling against one another.

• For people to get along, some percentage of these jostling selves need to be congruous, capable of meshing easily, able to “interface.”²

  • For coworkers, this might be a relatively small percentage; so long as we work towards the same goals in compatible ways and are roughly aligned on how to interact in the workplace, all can be copacetic.

  • For friends or partners, a higher percentage of the involved selves must be compatible. It makes no difference if our coworker likes the same kinds of neighborhoods as we do, but it matters with a partner.

• In the past, social systems tended to be more formal; there were rituals —sometimes called “etiquette”— that dictated how everyone was to interact in almost all situations: what was and wasn’t acceptable to discuss, how people should address one another, how we should dress and move and eat, etc.

  • The degree to which formality governed interactions was inversely correlated with intimacy; one might be very much oneself with one’s partner while interacting rather stiffly with e.g. a stranger.

  • But even in relationships, strong (and varying) norms informed how “real” to be with one another; within some marriages a century ago there may have been more distance and privacy than exists today between office colleagues.

  • It is the nature of formalism to reduce the ratio of individuated content to generic content in any exchange. That is: in a very formal interaction, the particulars of the people involved are unimportant and influence little, as the interaction unfolds as it always does regardless of who is involved; in a very informal interaction, the particulars of the people involved are almost all that matter. And all of us have a lot of particulars!

• For several decades, the default attitude of culture has been to attack formalism and tradition and promote instead spontaneity, candor, authenticity, and expressiveness.

  • Today, we are profoundly informal and familiar; we do not obey norms or traditions, we do not e.g. “avoid politics or religion” in conversations, we do not follow traditional etiquette, we do not have stable boundaries, etc.

  • Thus: a higher percentage than ever of our selves must be compatible, or we come into conflict. It is no longer the case that our coworkers are mostly strangers. Now, if I and a colleague disagree about something as distant as national economic policy, we may not be able to work together without rancor. If my neighbor believes in things I do not, I might feel that I have to move. If the teachers at my child’s school do not share my values, it is a crisis requiring immediate intervention. And so on.

While none of this is without precedent, it’s all worse than ever. Modern mass telecommunications systems —including those that preceded the Internet— are a mirror for all society to gaze into, and none of us like what we see. The more of our fellow citizens’ selves we’re exposed to, the worse we feel about them: their hypocrisy, their stupidity and ignorance, their reactivity and error, their motivated and lazy reasoning, their cruelty, their shallowness, their self-centeredness. In the more formal past, we simply weren’t immersed in one another to the same extent. One might have had no idea what one’s neighbors believed or how one’s colleagues voted; indeed, when I started working, one usually didn’t!

The revolution against traditionalism brought some forms of liberation, but it also brought us the modern situation: every one of us must be taken “in full” or not at all, and we are all personally entangled with one another in ways we didn’t used to be. The reason hypocrisy is always the accusation of the moment is that we’re all hypocrites³, and we’re all forced to witness one another’s hypocrisy and deceitful self-dealing all the time.

Familiarity bred contempt.

The blue line represents where you and your neighbor are scrapping.

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One of my old psychiatrist’s most useful observations was that the closer we are to someone, the more we treat them as we treat ourselves. In my case, this creates a situation others in marriages may recognize (which I’ll overstate for clarity):

• to strangers, I’m like Mother Theresa; I would gladly die to avoid inconveniencing a waiter or an Uber driver, for example

• to new friends, I’m a pretty good person: willing to do nearly anything to hang out, always flexible and open, never reactive

• to existing friends, I’m so-so, a little introverted maybe and kind of inflexible about the things I’m open to doing, self-centered, perhaps touchy

• to my partner, I’m a rigid, anxious, cold, and even cruel person, outrageously narcissistic and incapable of generosity, explosively reactive

My psychiatrist’s point was that what’s happening as people get closer to me is that they’re getting inside of me, in the sense that they are more and more subject to the default dynamics of my mind (and less and less to the performance of my social identity). A crisp way to put this: you will talk to your partner as you talk to yourself in your internal monologue. My internal monologue is harsh. I have almost no compassion for myself —why the hell should I?!— and very little tolerance for my failures, which are many and which tend to be, if we’re honest, totally inexcusable. When I make a mistake, I rage at myself. When I see what I look like, I am disgusted by myself. I believe that I’m a bad person, perhaps even an evil person, and I feel worthy of contempt.

Horrifically, then, the closer Abby gets to me, the more my mind wants to relate to her in the same way. She is in my inner world, a world of brutal recriminatory malice and infinite persnickety criticism. So like many partners, she’s had the experience of noticing that I’m nicer to almost every single person on earth than I am to her. It’s reprehensible. (I’ve worked on it; I am working on it; but it’s there). I am most familiar with myself, then her, and then everyone else, and it shows in my behavior, shamefully.

While I’m perhaps an extreme example, my sense is that this is not uncommon. What varies among us is not whether we do as my psychiatrist describes, but rather how we treat ourselves and thus our partners. Indeed, if her view is correct, this all sums to a moral imperative to become generous, forgiving, and loving towards ourselves, if only so that we can be good to others!⁴

So: can we undo the contempt familiarity brings? Can we be less contemptuous of ourselves, and thus of others? If we cannot return to a formal world in which only small percentages of our selves are at stake in interactions, can we at least shift how we relate to ourselves and thereby improve our general social and moral capacities?

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In his introduction to Mikhail Bulgakov’s White Guard, Evgeny Dobrenko writes:

[If] literature does in fact exist for the purpose of “estranging” (or “defamiliarizing”) everyday life, then great literature is foreordained to challenge the great banalities.

Art seeks to defamiliarize everyday life because familiarity does something else besides breeding contempt. It also renders things invisible. As is true of the clichéd, the familiar flees our attention; we cannot pay attention to it; it dissolves into the background, is handled by lower-level systems in our mind, is disposed of like so much ambient street noise before we even have the opportunity to notice or understand it.⁵ Little by little, we replace the frothing, teeming, kaleidoscopic world and all the marvelous and irreducible selves in it with customary symbols and well-worn clichés; eventually, we see nothing at all. The old have a bit of a self-contained quality, which has its virtues but is at least somewhat connected to the gradual closing off of perception, the collapse of external attention, the nightmare process of all things becoming familiar and contemptible.

A task for art or for psychology, then, might be to defamiliarize us to ourselves. I cannot hope to treat others well if I treat myself poorly; I will treat myself poorly if I am familiar to myself; I must therefore be new to myself, somehow, even as the sclerosis of age sets in. Some paths I’m aware of:

• self-generated crises: whether the mid-life variety or not, forcing oneself to change through a breakdown, crack-up, or freak-out can shift one’s inner landscape like plate tectonics, creating new terrain from violence and heat; it’s costly, but a common-enough solution;

• develop our attention: through meditation or whatever other techniques, one can pay closer attention to oneself; if we’re diligent, we can begin to see that we’re not what we thought we were, and indeed that it’s hard to tell if we’re anything at all; it’s all still teeming froth in there, as surely as when we were teens, simply better-managed;

• inner formality: just as we might become more reserved in public, disclosing less, sharing less, we might also become more reserved internally; after all, the border between the inside and outside worlds is hardly stable for a human being. We might “let facts create us,” might fall for fewer moody inner illusions, might relate to ourselves less emotionally or intimately.

Even simply using the Internet less helps me a bit. There seems to be a peculiar relationship between being seen and seeing ourselves. The less public I am, the richer and more ambiguous my inner life becomes. When I don’t look in the mirror, I don’t really have a face; when I don’t fill out a Twitter profile, I don’t really have a “bio”; when I don’t follow and unfollow anyone, I am not mindful of how I might be followed or unfollowed. Perhaps we know ourselves only through others, and so we must free ourselves of others if we wish to unlearn ourselves, estrange ourselves from ourselves, and come to see ourselves without contempt once more. I don’t know.

But the problem of ever-fuller selves requiring ever-more congruity has steep costs.⁶ We now turn to various forms of administrative policy to adjudicate the inevitable disputes our expanded contact requires. But this cannot work, either, because the required congruity simply isn’t there; diversity is real. Whenever I see posts about e.g. how much someone dreads eating dinner with their family given political disagreements, I pine for my youth, when I actually had no idea what any of my relatives thought about anything. I remember going on dates with people I had no sense at all about the affiliations or beliefs of. When I entered new environments, everything was novel, mysterious, and local. I think I saw things a bit more lucidly then. I think often of what Marilynne Robinson once said:

“It may be mere historical conditioning, but when I see a man or a woman alone, he or she looks mysterious to me, which is only to say that for a moment I see another human being clearly.”

A person alone is unfamiliar, a mystery; without all the loathsome context that grows on us like some kind of fungus and that we then cultivate like weird ants, people can be seen faithfully; they are a marvel to us, as we might be to ourselves, if only we could arrest our categorizing and “sense-making” for a fraction of a second and simply pay bare attention. It would be good for us, of course, but perhaps even better for others. In a world of incessant legibility-seeking disclosure, a bit of mystery is very much in order.

1. The issue with clichés is not that they tend to be false, but that they tend to stupefy. By making the description of a truth so rote, they manage to anesthetize us to the perception of what’s being described; what we’ve heard countless times, we cannot attend to, cannot really treat as novel or fresh. Clichés substitute dead phrasing for often shocking living facts, and are thus an enemy of perception. But not because they’re false.

2. For many people, types, and situations, this isn’t fully controllable; that is, there are some ways we bother or disrupt one another that we cannot change, even if we want to.

3. Even if it were possible to have an adult’s range of opinions and positions and beliefs and commitments without being a hypocrite in some dimension or another —and it is not— it’s also the case that the universality of projection means hypocrisy is inevitable. You dislike in others what you dislike in yourself; quit lying about it.

4. I once told someone that I thought it was important to be happy so that we might be good, and she told me I’d wasted my education if that was the best I could come up with. She was right, but so was I!

5. Martin Amis writes well on this subject in his excellently-titled The War Against Cliche, but so too have many authors, including Milan Kundera.

6. There is a political parallel here: the more a government does, the more we all need to agree what it should do. The less a government does, the less it matters whether we agree. But nearly everyone wants government to do more today, as the conflicts from our increasing exposure to one another loom larger and larger and we hope the state can sort it all out.