The Social Gift

In addition to being a teacher I’m currently studying for a teaching qualification (a pursuit often frowned upon by teachers who know all too little about the importance of gaining a deeper understanding of their role). One aspect of the course requires us to engage in a number of online fora on set topics. One of the first of these was a task to collectively establish a set of ground rules for our online discussions. As soon as I saw this task my blood began to seethe. Of course, the immediate temptation is to suppress such emotions, but I've learned enough to know that this is an impossible fantasy. Emotions have a determination all their own to be either expressed in an eruption of incoherent nervous energy or to be fully and accurately articulated (sometimes both). I chose the latter route. This is very often an easy process, because most sources of anger tend to be very straightforward: injustice, inequality, insult etc, but this isn't always the case. Sometimes the source of emotion is very difficult to identify and in these cases there's a temptation to rationalise the situation - which is subtly but significantly different from accurately articulating it: rationalisations can be wrong. They might appease an emotional response temporarily but eventually a new and more persuasive explanation will be needed.

As my spleen began to vent itself in deliberations over ground rules, I attributed my feelings to my nonconformist tendencies and my unwillingness to accept rules of conduct. This kept me going for a while and gave me enough focus for a critique of ground rules. I put my arguments to the group last week in an attempt to persuade them with ideas about freedom, conformity and innate civility, supported by quotes from John Stuart Mill etc and it was even beginning to seem like I was having some limited success. And then, yesterday evening the moderator presented his summary of the ground rules and everyone seemed to rally round, chime in and forget that there was ever an alternative expressed or discussed. At this point my blood went from gentle simmer to boiling tumult. Rationalisations came thick and fast: your overreacting, this is a petty quibble, you're just pissed off that nobody agrees with you, you're being churlish, just accept the rules and get on with it etc etc.

Do I really have a problem with rules? Not at all. Art without rules is like cookery without food. Every artist’s medium is a set of rules which they consciously choose to engage with and which give dimension and character to their achievements. If this is so, then the source of my affront at the idea of accepting ground rules must surely lie elsewhere. At this point, abetted by subtle but, as yet, unresolved indignation, I began to reflect on another recent experience (too involved to describe here) but which enabled me to recognise with instant force and conviction exactly why I feel so strongly about this subject. The following is a section of my final post in the forum on ground rules:

The problem is that I believe very deeply in the idea of what I would call the social gift. By this I mean that civility gains its meaning and value precisely because it is given freely. If civility is enforced it would still exist of course, but it would become little more than a sham, a hollow thing which says nothing more of the person offering it than that they are conforming to the rules. If you are civil to me, I know implicitly that you do this because you value the meaning and purpose of being civil and this encourages me to reciprocate. I firmly believe that this social gift underlies our entire social fabric and without it we would be entirely without culture (art, literature, dance, music) and love.

A quote from Lewis Hyde has subsequently been moved to a follow-up post here.