We are, all of us, in the midst of a natural experiment in what it is like not to be in the company of strangers, and it makes us all feel very weird, and so in the need of assessing whatever it is that makes even casual interaction with strangers a component of ordinary social life. I have my family around me and I communicate with friends and relatives via telephone and email, and am able to keep up with the news even more than I think I should and have sufficient books around me and an endless supply that Amazon can deliver so that I am neither lonely nor lacking in stimulation, but there is something else that is missing and it is, indeed, the presence in my life of strangers: either just the people you pass on the street who look like they have interesting presences and lives as you catch a glance at their faces or posture, and also the occupations you run into, such as the waiters in restaurants, the tellers at banks, the woman in the pharmacy who calls you “sweetie” because you are old, the young woman at the supermarket checkout counter whose first name you know and who looks out for you because you are an oldster, she an instant granddaughter, so I fancy, in that my own granddaughter also takes an interest in my welfare. Why are these relations important?
There is a precedent for such an analysis. It was provided by the arrival of the telephone which was, at first, used for business or emergency consultations, but soon enough, when it became cheap enough, came to serve as a way teen agers could call one another and continue to hang out together just as they had done an hour before at school or on the corner or at the malt shop. The startling thing about the introduction of the telephone in such social usages was how the existence of physical distance between speakers and the absence of visual contact did not detract from the social phenomenon of hanging out, of just enjoying the pleasure of one another’s company. The voice was real and it was happening in real time and that was enough, people communicating intimate things from which they might have looked away from one another if confiding in person, but not even needing to look away, because the person wasn’t there, but what was? Their spirit was, their self was; it was all in the voice. That is a marvel.
So here is an opposite marvel: that we need the presence of strangers, in the flesh, even if our contact with them is cursory or superficial. How is that? Look carefully at what we do when we interact with strangers. They are announcements of what you will not be when in their presence. You see a girl in the crowd of people walking your way on the avenue. For reasons that are very profound, her face or posture or expression hits you very deeply. What do you do? Usually, after a glance of just a split second, you turn away, because it is impolite to stare at people you pass on the street, and even if you catch her eye, she will turn her gaze elsewhere in that same brief time span, because otherwise it might seem that she is coming on to you or just wants to cultivate an exchange. If you are sufficiently intrigued, you might turn that moment into a brief exchange whee you ask her for the time or directions to get where you are going, though I know that when I was young I usually would ask an old lady or gent how to get somewhere lest my question were considered a pretext for extending my interaction with the person I questioned. And then, after the question, a person might speculate about how to extend the conversation, make it a plausible pretext for asking her for coffee, the ability to move from one item to the next a test of a person’s courting abilities in that it had to make sense even if it was just a pretext. But, like as not, you just move on down the avenue, that inclination just something so momentarily contemplated that you don’t think about it again, just as you don’t remember giving directions yourself to someone, and a week later not remember that you helped carry an old person’s groceries for a few blocks. So we make or break such possible connections often, they acting as potentials in a given situation, the basis for many story lines, such as she is a friend of a friend of a friend, or you come from the same small town, and that a coffee could lead to either friendship or romance or nothing at all. Everybody remembers the circumstances under which one met one’s true love, and that is always a coincidence however likely it was to happen because it was at a family gathering or a mixer or a college classroom.
And there are other stories that are not tied to romance. Stopping someone can lead to a job or just a polite interchange. There is also a potential narrative that a stranger on the street may be a troublemaker who might want to mug you. So you use whatever evidence you can to judge how safe it will be to pass too close to people. That information will include racial stereotypes and noticing whether a street lamp is operating properly. (Black people also size up who is approaching and will cross the street to avoid what seem to be hoodlums.) We all sort through possibilities and only sometimes do these arise to the point of emblemizing a social problem and so become controversial and contentious.
Now consider those strangers with whom one comes into contact because of their occupations. I have very limited communications with the people I meet at the diner I frequent (or met, before it went to take out only). I ask the owner if his back is better and he compliments me on what he thinks is a very elegant signature on my credit card charge. A waiter asks me if I like corned beef and cabbage because I am Irish, and I say “no”. It doesn’t go much further than that. There are regulars who have more extended conversations with the owner and the help but there is a whole table of Greek speaking retirees who gather every weekday morning for coffee and talk who are known to the owner only as the Greek Mafia, however much he may rely on their patronage. So the thing about being a customer is that one doesn’t tread very heavily on the relationship. one does not go beyond its parameters. When the pharmacist calls me “sweetie”, she obviously doesn’t mean that I am her sweetie, only that she is being pleasant and helpful to a customer, concerned about them to the extent that it makes sense to be so for a customer. If I collapsed on the ground, she would come to my assistance, but she doesn’t inquire about my family or what I will be doing with the rest of the day. Occupational interactions are thereby largely limited by a need to know basis, even if some professionals, like doctors, are permitted to ask intrusive questions, though they also try to be tactful when doing so. All of us constantly ask ourselves, even if only fleetingly, so that we do not remember having done so, whether we are stepping over the bounds of what these at-a-distance roles require.
In general, then, people interact with one another on the basis of what their roles suggest to them is appropriate under the circumstances. This is not a matter of values about privacy or customs based on prior usages. It is based on the practicality that you do not want to become too familiar with people you encounter on the street or the people you deal with in commercial establishments. You want everyone to maintain their place and you reserve deeper involvement to people who have been selected to become familiars, like friends, or people, like those in your family, whom you have always known. That is why family seems the most important institution to students. That is the institution in which most deep emotional ties are displayed, even if grocery stores are also an essential institution.
That perception is very different from the one offered by Emile Durkheim, who argued that society was an abstract construction, “living” beyond the lives of any population that lived within it, and yet uppermost in the minds of actual living people because whether aware of it or not they were always referring to it in deciding even such important things as how to respond to people who broke with norms (which was with derision or worse) or even with whether or not to commit suicide, which would happen when people were either too close to social norms or too far from them or ambivalent about which ones applied to them. Strangers are people who have placed themselves outside the social norms and are no longer explicable to the population at large. Their characters are opaque to you and so it makes more sense to think of them as enemies at the gates who are out to harm you, drug addicts, criminals and homosexuals like werewolves and zombies more than like ciphers, and so strangers on the street or those met in commercial establishments are not of much significance because they are all subject (except for the deviants among them) subject to the same social norms as everyone else. There are rules for courtship and picking up a woman on the street is not in accord with the rules.
In my view, however, there is this paradoxical quality about social life: we best understand social life when we forget about society writ large, reserving that for a concept that is cultural, something learned from school and church and ideology, rather than something that affects us directly or is necessary for understanding day to day life, which is best understood simply by referring to our social roles, which are not an extension of societally dictated social norms into regulations for individual conduct, but rather are the practices around which we organize our concept of how to get on with the practical activity of being a janitor or a doctor or a husband or a son.
This theory of mine also disagrees with Georg Simmel’s theory of the stranger. Simmel regarded strangers as a very special role in society. The category applied to people who were at once part of and outside the society, such as bartenders who listen to your problems because they are a shoulder to cry on and you will buy a beer while they hear you out and they not likely to disclose what you tell them, or Jewish moneylenders who can prove a valuable financial service to Gentile Europeans even while they are held in contempt by those who borrow from them. Rather, in my view, the stranger is someone who is everywhere around us, and we are strangers to most other people. What makes the present coronavirus pandemic important as an experiment is that we miss interactions with strangers perhaps more than we thought we would. It is not so much that strangers perform an important practical or psychological purpose, which may also be true, in that they are a pool of potential lovers and a way to go about the business of life, they playing their parts in the division of labor. Rather, it may well be that we are so used to dealing with strangers, with feeling the possibilities, with spelling out stories or finding ways to limit interaction, that we just are very unfamiliar with doing without those plays of free will and imagination to either alter or constrain our lives. I am not at all sure that our usual habits will come back to us, though I have been told that Athens bounced back to its old ways, according to Thucydides, as soon as the plague had passed. At the moment, it doesn’t feel that way, especially in light of the fact that a vaccine is a year or two away.