APORETICS AND SOCIAL DISTANCING: STRANGER DANGER AND OBSERVATION BIAS Graham Townley, October 18, 2023November 1, 2023 Share This Post "If people stay within their bubbles and are no longer willing to leave these comfort zones, how are we, as a society, supposed to negotiate important issues and reach compromises that are the basis of all democracy?" The last two U.S. elections or the increasingly rapid spread of conspiracy theories show how real and potentially explosive this development is. My aim here is to explain why we, as human beings, sometimes create social distance between ourselves and others to alleviate the fear and challenges of engagement. Social proximity, or how close and familiar we are, can be understood as a function of social distance. I explored the idea of social distance and cultural safety in another post , focusing mainly on the relationship between social distancing policies and cancel culture as forms of social control that create barriers to social interaction and distance between people. The holy grail in all of this was shared understanding: the idea that we can and should try to see things from the point of view of others.While shared understanding may be a worthy goal, it is not simple to understand the perspective and lived experience of others, especially if they are remote or distant from us. We see this in the world today, as major powers demonise other countries and their leaders, abandoning diplomacy in favour of conflict and war. In a colloquial sense, they appear secure in the knowledge that their point of view is the only point of view worth fighting for or defending. From this standpoint, the divergent views and social distance between them constitute a metaphorical and literal gulf that divides and separates humanity, reinforcing the belief that no shared ground or values can or do exist.This degenerative process of conflict is perhaps the worst aspect of the human condition. Globally, this failure to subject our views and opinions to peer review in the name of shared understanding, peace and prosperity threatens not just the environment we live in but our security internationally. I will say more about the conditions for peace and prosperity in another article. Still, for now, I want to consider why we distance ourselves from Others to create a false sense of security that, in the end, does little for our peace of mind, let alone our well-being. Johannes Fabian is a cultural anthropologist who has written about the relationship between time and the other in ethnographic research. He argues that anthropologists should acknowledge the coevalness of their subjects and avoid temporal distancing. Temporal distancing is a psychological concept that involves thinking about a situation from a future perspective, like the meaning of fear projection. It can help reduce stress and negative emotions by making problems seem less important or less threatening. Temporal distancing can also refer to avoiding crowded places by changing the time of one’s activities, like agoraphobic behaviours. In psychology, fear projection is a type of psychological projection where a person displaces their fears and insecurities onto someone else or something else. Interestingly, fear projection and agoraphobia are both related to anxiety disorders in psychology. Agoraphobia is a specific fear of places and situations that might cause panic and feelings of being trapped, helpless or embarrassed. Fear projection, on the other hand, conveys the notion that we displace our fears or insecurities onto someone else through communication rather than recognising we are projecting. Stories and narratives may be a form of fear projection by displacement and, strangely, alleviate some of the anxiety associated with the underlying fears that are manifested. In anthropology, temporal distancing is the tendency to place the subject or focus of study in a different time frame than the researcher, which can create a sense of alienation or superiority for the observer who is distant from the Other. We can also think of this from a life-cycle standpoint. For example, elderly adults tend to focus on the past, coupling their lived experiences to expectations and projections about what might happen. Children, on the other hand, tend to live more in the here and now, in the present, dealing with everything in front of them as they say. This cognitive perspective allows us to think of learning as an open disposition; the brain and mind that are sensorially in the here and now are more connected to what is going on and, in a sense, less disassociated from the present. I guess that’s why they say the present is a gift. The phrase “the present is a gift” is part of a more extended quote with different variations and attributions. One version is “Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, and today is a gift: That’s why they call it ‘the present’.” This quote has been credited to Eleanor Roosevelt, Deepak Chopra, Bill Keane and many others, but the origin is unclear. Fabians also uses the concept of aporia to describe the paradoxes and dilemmas that arise from anthropological writing and inquiry. Aporia has different meanings depending on the context. In English literature, it is a literary form that expresses doubt or uncertainty about a question or a problem, often to persuade or impress the audience. In philosophy, it is a puzzle or an impasse that arises from contradictory or inconsistent premises, often leading to perplexity, dissonance, or confusion. Coupled with the idea of an etic, as distinct from an emic, perspective, we can use the term aporetic to understand the social distance created when the perspective of an observer deviates from the lived experience and subjectivity of participants. Emics and etics are different perspectives used to study cultures and societies from an ethnographic standpoint. An emic perspective is an insider’s view, assuming the insider understands the norms and values of the people being studied. On the other hand, an etic perspective refers to an outsider’s point of view, assuming a degree of distance between participants and observers in each social system.In Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object, Johannes Fabian (1983) calls attention to what he calls a paradox at the heart of anthropological practice: namely, the systematic denial of “coevalness,” an often misunderstood notion that he defines as the sharing of time that makes ethnographic knowledge possible. In Fabian’s terms, there is “a persistent and systematic tendency to place the referent(s) of anthropology in a Time other than the present of the producer of anthropological discourse”. If this coevalness is the very basis for writing ethnography, its subsequent erasure or disavowal makes the work of anthropology something of an aporia: " .. as soon as it is realised that fieldwork is a form of communicative interactionwith an Other, one that must be carried out coevally, on the basis of sharedintersubjective Time and intersocietal contemporaneity, a contradiction had toappear between research and writing because anthropological writing had becomesuffused with strategies and devices of allochronic discourse. (Fabian 1983:148)" I am most interested here in the cross-cultural dimensions or the cultural homologies & connections between cultures. Despite the assumption that these connections and cultural synergies exist, I am cautious about making assumptions about the degree of shared understanding that may exist or the extent to which specific values are understood between observers and participants. Realistically, there is often a gulf in understanding between people of different social or cultural backgrounds, reflected in concepts like social distance and cultural boundaries. This distance and cultural barriers between participants and observers leave a grey zone on the front line of cross-cultural relations, where social fragmentation and misunderstanding thrive. There is a quantitative dimension to social fragmentation in this space. Scientists at the Complexity Science Hub Vienna (CSH) have shown, for example, that the accelerating fragmentation of society—often referred to as filter bubbles—is a direct consequence of the growing number of social contacts. (Vienna n.d.). To avoid stress, there is a tenancy for opinions within a discrete group to become more and more similar aligned with each other over time. Shared understanding may well develop from shared experience but its not a given. The irony is those coteries of like-minded people may increase social fragmentation, creating the conditions for limited communication and understanding as coalitions of the willing emerge. Permeability,as the scientists say, strikes the impermeable membrane of political and culture wars, as the mainstream media reinforces and manufactures an inevitable march to war and conflict. There is of course, an economic dimension to wars that I will not go into here; suffice to say, selling weapons can be very profitable. We could argue that society fragments because there are too many social contacts, leading to divergence and divergent opinions between groups that spend less and less time together. To be true, through social media and technology, people seek out like-minded people online. Observation bias develops as the algorithms on which the technology is based reinforce identities and boundaries as essentially different. This is why the theory of schismogenesis forwarded by the anthropologist Gregory Bateson (1904-1980), author of Steps to an Ecology of Mind 1972, makes sense. Bateson asserts that institutions within societies and societies behave like a series of positive feedback loops. Two types can be easily observed: symmetrical and complementary (asymmetrical). The result of both forms of schismogenesis can be disastrous unless the ways the institutions or societies relate to one another are significantly re-structured into negative feedback loops. Competitive rivals, each mirroring the actions of the other, now redefine and redirect their relations with each other, perhaps becoming collaborators or enemies depending on the degree of social distance and shared understanding between them. This concept refers to a differentiation process in the norms of individual behaviour resulting from interaction between individuals. His point was that certain spiritual and ritual behaviours created cultural solutions to social problems; differentiation was resolved at a higher level through a shared understanding of the sacred. One might well ask, does social fragmentation and differentiation lead automatically to aporia, whereby groups are unable to resolve a particular issue or problem because they are too complex and they don’t have the cultural means or wherewithal to resolve the problems peacefully. For example, if individuals or groups interact in a way that reinforces and amplifies certain behaviours or certain misguided beliefs, then one would expect further social fragmentation and differentiation. Concepts like identity politics manifest the same idea, whereby a sense of belonging to a nation as a whole may conflict with the sense of belonging to a particular section of society or ethnic group. The neoliberal concerns here are that shared understanding between people of different cultural backgrounds is either too complex or next to impossible to achieve, resulting in cynicism about the prospects for social cohesion and cooperation. What concerns me here is the totalising nature of politics geared to erasing cultural differences or diversity simply because some view them as problems in a multicultural society. Assimilation policies thrive in this fertile ground, mainly because there is very little attempt to understand how people and cultures dynamically intersect and connect through relationship building. Suppose the link between social fragmentation, schismogenesis and aporia here is accurate. In that case, it is made all the more problematic because particular technologies and modes of communication reinforce boundaries and a sense of irreconcilable differences between people. The way to overcome this degenerative process is by balancing competencies and shared understanding of value and engagement. Understanding then becomes an essential tool in striking a balance between individual competencies, a better appreciation of differing subject positions and interpersonal relations generally. This may be done by sharing power, or empowering others and avoiding coercive means of control {Citation}. To be continued …………. Cultural Safety