The Stammtisch and Social Isolation.

It occurs to me that I'm lucky.  

I come from people who widely circulated, very well educated in history, and I have some close friends about whom I can say the same.  Some of them I meet mostly on line anymore, but I've met all of them in person and have engaged them all in lively conversations.  They includes geologists, geophysicists, businessmen, computer experts and infrastructure workers, who are self employed, industry employed, and government employed.  And it includes Catholics, Baptists, Calvinists and non denominational Protestants.

A sort of Stammtisch, if you will.

My Stammtisch is centered on horses and history.  Arguably, a second one centers on the outdoors and certain rarified sports.  That's not the point, however.  It's that I have them.  One, the one referenced above, is made up of Americans for the most part, although there are some people who stop by who are not.  The second one includes Americans, Central Americans, and Europeans.

At one time most Americans had that.

Now they don't.

And that explains a lot of the mess we're in right now, and what's going on right now.

One of the ways modern life really leaves us short is that we only associate, by and large, with our own kind.  Depending upon your station in life, that's more true for some than for others, but it's pretty true.

This has always been the case to a fair degree, but not as much as it is now.  Indeed, it's been the subject of entire books, Bowling Alone perhaps being the most notable.  Since the advent of television, followed by electronic media, we get up, we go to work and we come home.  With the enforced decline of family life caused by the Sexual Revolution and things that followed in its wake, that means that a lot of people really live that life exactly. They're not married, they have no family, they just come and go.

Friends have been substituted for "electronic communities" of the like minded.  People avoid and eschew settings where they mix with the unfamiliar.  For people who retain a faith, they often choose a congregation of the like minded.  For those interested in. . . well anything, they do the same.

This is incredibly dangerous as it means that ideas are never challenged in any setting.  Nobody really advances their ideas, or ever defends them.

This has become increasingly obvious to me over the last couple of weeks, in part because I'm finding I'm an exception not the rule.  I mix with people of other views a lot, and I have some very intelligent and thoughtful friends who hold a lot of my views. . . and a lot of views I don't hold.  

Elks Club annual outing, September 13, 1916.

On the danger first.

I'm a lawyer by training and trade.  The law is an intellectual field based in inquiry at its best, although the profession shows a lot of the worst anymore.  Be that as it may, I have tended to find that most really thoughtful active lawyers are appalled by recent events, irrespective of their political views. This view isn't universal, but it's quite widespread.  Being analytical by nature, and having had that reinforced by training, knowing the law in general, and knowing that developments in the law are constant and that it does not remain fixed in technology, it's overwhelmingly the case in the law that recent events regarding the election have been a horror to lawyers.

Lawyers by and large give no credit whatsoever to the claims that the election was stolen.  The facts simply aren't there.  Given that, it's been extraordinarily difficult for those in the law to grasp how anyone could possibly believe the opposite.  

Indeed, in one rare instance that I personally encountered the person's belief in the opposite was based on a faith in lawyers themselves, combined with a dose of Fox News, that most lawyers don't credit.  There were legal challenges in court, was their view, and therefore there must be merit.  That's charming, and it shows a faith in the nature of litigation that is based on the way it is supposed to work, but litigators certainly don't look at litigation that way.  Must have merit?  Lots of lawsuits are filed that have no merit whatsoever, and even less than that. We all know that.

Knights of Columbus group, 1914.

But what about everyone else?

Part of the problem here is what I've noted above.  People are in limited circles and they hear only what others in the same circles believe, and they have faith in certain social constructs that don't really deserve it.  If a lawyer can believe that merely filing suit indicates merit, regular people must surely believe that.  And lawyers know that.  Lots of suits are filed merely because they create a belief in potential jurors and the public that there must be a problem, thereby providing an incentive to the defendants to settle.  The law states that its always presumed that the plaintiff has the burden of proof on things, but regular people tend to look at it the other way around. The accused, they feel, must prove their free of guilt, not rely on the other side to prove their guilt.

Added to that, lawyers are highly adapted to things moving even when the law does not.  That's played a role here.  We as a society tend to believe we adapt well to technological changes, but we do a lot less than we imagine.  During the recent election voting by mail has been a big deal, and of course the Administration made it a big deal.  It made it a big deal in my belief is that its long been the case that Democrats often fail to go to the polls. The Administration's thought was, it seems to me, that if voting wasn't done widely by mail, it just wouldn't be widely done.

Sixteenth Head Camp, Modern Woodsmen of America, Buffalo, New York.  1911.

That turned into the outrage over what seemed to be the case that Democrats voted by mail and Republicans did not. That's not really completely true by any means, but there's an element of truth to it.  That's not surprising, however, as Democrats sizably outnumber Republicans in the country and voting by mail is easy.  Added to that, the Administration repeatedly condemned voting by mail and people who were highly loyal to the Administration naturally concluded that lots of mail in ballots would be lost, thrown away, or whatever, and therefore they should not vote by mail.  If you tell your loyal adherents not to trust the mail, they won't trust the mail.  If you tell everyone that the mail is not to be trusted, and lost of those people don't trust you, they'll use the mail.

Beyond that, Democrats, irrespective of the jokes about the Democratic Party not being "an organized party", are really good at organization. Republicans, with a strong ethos of independence, not so much.  That Democrats could exploit mail in voting through organization isn't surprising, but it isn't evil either.  It's strategic.

Mail in voting isn't new and again, to lawyers, its not even a big deal.  The thought that it is to others pretty much completely escapes us, as is now evident to me.  We have served pleadings by mail for eternity.  We were early adopters of things electronic.  Those from Western states, where mail in balloting has been around forever, already live in a world where people vote by mail.  We know that mail in voting can be trusted and frankly this is simply a natural evolution, in our view, in the process. Absolutely no big deal.

Apparently it is a big deal, however, in those camps where this was never thought of before and was really appreciated for the first time.  Victor David Hanson has an article expressing absolute horror that we've now arrived at a point where the American tradition is no longer "we all go to the polls on election day".  That tradition hasn't existed for decades, and indeed the American tragedy in elections was that most Americans didn't vote at all.  Cynically some Republicans opposed mail in voting for that very reason, often camouflaging it with concerns over the mail in process, but the real concern is that mail in voting is really easy, particularly if you live in a region where somebody has been proactive in sending you a ballot. Fill it out, and mail it back.  But if that's the case, most of those votes are going to be Democratic, by far.

Indeed, by a huge margin.

Which shows how well the GOP really did. The Republicans should have drowned in a year of mail in balloting. They didn't.

Anyhow, getting back to the circle of friends argument, it's now struck me how this has impacted the argument, by showing me how my thoughtful friends in the other camp view it.  But not to them quite yet.

Taking all we have above and processing it down for most people, what we have is this.  Most people don't listen to Meet The Press and This Week, check the headlines from The New York Times and the Washington Post, and read their local paper.  Not anymore.  Most people think they're informed if they watch a news channel. Television news has always been incredibly superficial, but even doing that people should have a good idea of what's been going on.

But most people who claim they watch a news channel are like people who claim they only have a beer on weekends. The weekend drinkers, with exceptions of all kids they make for themselves, extend the weekend to start on Wednesday and run through to Tuesday. We all know that this is true as we all do something like that ourselves.  People who claim "I watch CNN and Fox News", as if that were to actually make them informed, are actually watching only one, and only superficially.

Which means that people get armed with a narrow set of tailored facts, go to work with their fellows who are likely in the same station of life as they are, here the same views, and are never exposed to any others.

If, therefore, you work with people who believe that mail in balloting is really weird and will be full of illegitimacy, and its a plot, and everyone you know believes what you do, you'll believe that the election must have been stolen.

Indeed, in Wyoming, I've heard people say "that many people can't have voted for Biden". That's because in Wyoming in 2021 everyone in certain occupations supports only Trump.  Unbeknownst to them, there are entire occupations in the state where nobody will admit to every having supported Trump, they just keep their mouths shut.  What happens is that people are talking only to themselves, and reinforcing their own views.

I'll give an example of that.

I know a fellow who is a well educated very intelligent person, but who has no interest in politics and very little interest, if any at all, in history.  Mostly, he's interested in his family and religion, both of which are fine and admirable interests.  He's interested in his work.  

On a day to day basis he's mostly around his family.   An old fashioned Mid Westerner, he's highly gregarious, but his close friends are mostly drawn from his church.  He has work friends, and he likes to talk to them, but in a Mid Westerners sort of way.  When real Westerners talk, there's always a real element of seriousness to it. . . always.  Westerners don't really have casual conversations. . . not really.

This fellow's friends are all, as noted, from his church, one way or another. Which is fine.. . or actually not. They include a couple of politicians from the GOP.  Both of those politicians are hard line Trumpites.

So what, you may ask.  Well, it's simple enough, and it shows why Rod Dreher's acolytes don't understand him.

Another example that shows why.

I heard an interview at the start of the  Syrian civil war of a woman who had endured the earlier rebellion by Shia militiamen.  She noted, at that time, she was surprised to discovery, during the rebellion, that Syria wasn't a Christian country.  Her town was Maronite Catholic. . . she assumed everyone in Syria was because everyone she knew was.

Back to my friend.  He's exposed to one view, and the only political views he's been exposed to are from the hard Trump right.  He came into this assuming the election must have been stolen. And why wouldn't he believe that?  That was the only view, and therefore the majority view, of what he was hearing.  And people generally believe the majority view.

We could call it the Jo Jo Rabbit Effect.  For those who haven't seen the movie, it's well worth watching and a really eclectic comedy.  Set in the last days of Nazi Germany, the young German protagonist discovers that Jews aren't bad and that he's falling in love with the young Jewish woman his mother has been hiding.  I note it here, however, as the stories his fellows tell about Jews are bizarre, enough so that a German officer clearly doesn't believe them, but most people are have fallen for them.  It's the only news they're getting.

It's the same with my friend. His two politician friends, one of whom may simply in my view be adopting his positions for purely cynical self serving reasons, and the other who probably has adopted them simply because he's also only around his family and nobody else, have informed him the election is stolen.  Its the majority view where he is.  He's shocked to learn that other people think otherwise, and actually really shaken up about it.

Lets' contrast that a bit with how things used to be.  I'll go way back. . . to 1933 or 34.

33 or 34 is when my father started school as a four year old in Denver.  The first grade school he went to was a Catholic school in downtown urban Denver.  Suffice to say, a Catholic school, in urban Denver, even in the 1930s, was going to feature a really mixed set of ethnicities.  

When he was 7, his family moved to Scottsbluff and he was enrolled thereafter in public school.  I don't know if Scottsbluff had a Catholic school in the 1930s, but I do know that while Catholics weren't uncommon in western Nebraska by any means whatsoever, they were still a minority population.  He went to school with a lot of Hispanic kids (universally called "Mexicans" then, and while I was in school) and Indian kids as well.  When he moved to Wyoming and went to the only high school in town it contained kids from all walks of life and every local ethnicity.  He played football with one fellow that I later knew well whose first and middle names were "Robert Lee", named for Robert E. Lee, but who was black. They later worked together for a time at the Post Office and they remained lifelong friends.  My father left the Post Office, however, to go to university and then entered the Air Force.  Overseas his two closest, and lifelong, friends were two fellow officers, one of whom was black, and another who was Jewish.  My father, of course, was half German, half Irish, and Catholic.

Let's go to me then.  I went to grade school in Central Wyoming where Catholics aren't uncommon, but area also a minority.  Of the other two Catholic kids in my grade school class (there wasn't room in the Catholic grade school at the time) one was of Irish extraction and the other was "Mexican".  I went all the way through grade school with one kid who was Jehovah's Witness.  My closest friend in grade school was Baptist.  A good friend was Mormon.  

All schools in the county were by geographic district.  The districts were purely geographic, however, and therefore they mixed economics pretty well.  One kid's father was an ornamental iron worker.  Two kids had fathers who were lawyers.  One kid had a medically retired fireman for a father, and his mother, uniquely at that time, was the prime bread winner. She was a secretary (which my own mother occasionally was).  One kid had older parents who were already retired.  

In Junior High the mix increased with new elements.  The junior high I went to included the entire northern part of the city which was across the interstate highway and the railroad, the only solidly poorer part of town.  All those kids went to the same junior high.  The populations of Hispanic kids increased and almost all of the black kids went to the same junior high.  Most of us went on to the same high school.

After high school I went on to university, and also on to the National Guard.  My Army basic training and advanced training battery included men from the South and West and a large number of Hispanic men and African Americans.  My best friends in basic training were one young man whose had been raised by his grandparents and another who was married to a community college professor.  

At the University of Wyoming, this story continues.  Most of the students I knew at UW were white, as most university students were, but in the geology department there was one student who was a Turkish American.  My best friends in university included a lifelong friend who is a dedicated Baptist, another who is Lutheran, one who was a fallen away (and now reverted) Catholic, and one who was a non observant Protestant.  In college and university I dated a girl for awhile who was from the South, another who was from Central Wyoming, one from the town where I was born and raised and still live, and one who was Chinese Dutch (as in ethnically Chinese, but born in the Netherlands and a Dutch citizen).

That sort of experience is really broadening.  Theodore Roosevelt's biographer Edmond Morris maintained that Roosevelt would not have become President without having been a rancher in North Dakota.  It was there that he learned to speak to average people and to see their point of view and appreciate their intelligence.  Without that, he would have probably never risen above being a politician in New York.  

And as radical as it may sound, Hitler would not have become what he became if he'd stayed in Vienna, one of the most polyglot international cities in Europe in the early 20th Century.  Indeed, prior to World War One he's known to have at least one Jewish friend.  It was the isolation, both physical and intellectual, of German army life that allowed him to develop into the monster he became.

We like to think, for some reason, of the march of technology being every beneficial.  It isn't.  We've isolated ourselves from the natural world, an exposure to which is necessary in order for humans to really be humans, and we've isolated ourselves from ourselves.  Now, the Woke, with their absurd anti natural theories on human nature, aren't exposed to any humans save for those who agree with their absurdities. Those in the far political right, generally associate only with the like minded.  Qanon's (probably Russian backed) conspiracy theories sound absolutely absurd to anyone who isn't in the mix of them, but those who are tend to associate only with those who are.

And then add to that COVID 19.

COVID 19 accelerated the process of social isolation like nothing else. We were basically headed in that direction anyhow, as employers were steadily moving towards shifting things out of offices and into "homes".  The launched the process like an aircraft with JATO bottles.

Up, up and away. . . 

Or, rather, out, out and at "home", with that home probably being an apartment.

When the pandemic started some mused that it might serve to arrest a societal fall.  We had a long post on that which dealt with some of those views ourselves.  And maybe it will, but right now the evidence isn't great.

But for the Sexual Revolution and the absurdity of Wokeness, being sent home would have meant something a lot different than it tends to now.  Sure, not everything would have been great for everyone and the entire post 1950s view of the 1950s which tends to come up in such conversations never ever existed.  Probably part of what would have happened is that some guys who left their work to drink at he bar before coming home drunk to fall asleep at the dinner table would stay home, take to drinking and beat up his wife and kids.

But by and large they wouldn't have.

Now, part of that same generation isn't married and is having trouble getting married to start with, sucked into a hookup culture that was emotionally shallow in the extreme and which reduced human relations to the animal level. Stuck at home, they're taking to all sorts of vices as they don't know where else to go to satiate them. Booze, drugs pornography, you name it.  The sale of alcohol is way up.  Drug overdoses are way up.  Apparently visits to something called "Pornhub" are likewise way up.  Probably visits to Catholic Answers and Orthodox Christianity are as well, but they have to depend on donations and not pay pre view for addicted vices or soon to be addicted vices.

And some of those people, now really separated from the world, are going down some dark alleys.  Whereas in earlier extremely stressed time, the same people would have still had to go to work, and would have walked from their work to the train past some people arguing for extremism, but also past the Salvation Army seeking donations, Hasidic jewelers wearing their prayer shawls, and the two guys on the trains arguing the merits or demerits of the New York Yankees.  For some of those people now there are no interruptions, no matter how badly they may be wanted, and its an easy diversion to see what people you sort of favor politically are up to.  Pretty soon, you are deep into a conspiracy theory populated by people who really truly believe in it.

That wouldn't happen if the same people had a Stammtisch.

Most folks don't have, a Stammtisch such as I'm fortunate to have.

Well, what of this? 

I'm frankly not sure.  During much of human history this was the norm for most people actually.  If you were a Russian peasant, you know only Russian peasants, and so on.  

But most of them didn't live in a modern state like we do, and face the problems we face.  We're incredibly polarized in a way that we haven't been for a very long time, and have real problems to address.  Some of our conflicts are truly at an existential nature.  

I don't know how to cause people to have a Stammtisch.  Much of that culture is broken.  

And that's much of the problem.