In Praise of Gossip
14th August 2010
We can’t meaningfully discuss virtue without recourse to ideas of honor, for honor itself is grounded in the recognition of performed excellence. Achilles took the idea so seriously that he was willing to let the Achaeans be slaughtered rather than bear the offense. He was not unjustified in doing so, for Agamemnon’s actions overturned the whole social order. The destruction of the interconnection between virtue as a public excellence and honor as its rightful recognition exacts enormous social costs.
Where honor perfects virtue, it creates deep ties between the participants in a mutual social order. Honoring one’s parents is, after all, the only one of the 10 Commandments that carries with it a promise – in this case, the maintenance of a stable and enduring social order. It need not be thought of in patrician terms, and becomes inordinately difficult to sustain as the size of the social order expands.
The first is endemic to the Dutch immigrant community in which I was raised and in which I live. I suspect a similar phenomenon will exist in other subcultures. It goes by the name of “Dutch Bingo.” Whenever we find ourselves in conversation with someone with an obviously Dutch last name, we immediately attempt to seek out persons with whom we are mutually connected or, barring that, to discuss known public figures of the community and start tracing their various connections through birth and marriage. It is a fun game and fairly innocent. I am not without skill at it, but I recently spent a riveting afternoon in the company of two true virtuosos. One of these virtuosi, a keen observer of human behavior, smartly pointed out to me that such games become more important as group identity becomes more fragile or threatened through assimilation. It holds off anonymity, and perhaps even anomie. The benefits of the game are obvious, and the costs seem low. No one is really harmed by such conversations.
People in the military do this habitually. The first thing one does at a new duty station is start finding out who you know that your new shipmates also know. (If you’ve been in for three our four years, you’ll only be about two or three degrees of separation away from anyone in your specialty.) It even works in civilian life — when I arrived at Indiana for law school I met a guy in the University Science Fiction club who had just gotten out; he had been on the Yarnell, the usual Task Group escort for my ship, the Kennedy, and his LPO had been a First Class ET who had been my LPO on the Kennedy. It’s a small world, if you let it be.