is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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Between Past and Future.
I�m the kind of person who, if I make a promise to someone, whether it be a promise formal or casual, if that person then emails me and asks me about it, I will write back right away or within a day and report on the status of my ability to keep the promise. For instance, if I can�t do it right away, I�ll let him or her know that I haven�t forgotten and that I will do it by X time. You know? It seems like a bare minimum. And that is why it distresses me that so few other people do the same.
I�m not setting myself above other people. I have many faults and there are easily identifiable moments when I fail to live up to the demands of politeness on a day-to-day basis. My point is that the thing I�ve just described�emailing back someone who has emailed you with regard to a promise you made or an obligation that has landed on you�takes 10 seconds, is worth a lot to the person to whom the promise was made, and is the right thing to do. So put your Nikes on and Just Do It, OK? It won�t even hurt.
I guess it�s an email thing. I can see it in two ways. One: email is everywhere. It has invaded our lives. We have wireless internet and iPhones and there is rarely a space free of the assault of email. So we protect ourselves by not responding. That explanation may make sense but it doesn�t work for me. By which I mean it is not good enough. The second way has to do with a person�s personal relation to work/obligation: sometimes promises you have made require that you do work that you wish you did not have to do. For instance, in the academic world, you may have said you would contribute a paper to a journal, or gotten a piece of writing done by X date, or organized a committee meeting on X theme, etc. Or maybe a friend is asking you to commit to a dinner plan and you aren�t sure what your schedule is and you feel overwhelmed by other obligations. And so the email arrives, it fills you with anxious dread, and you skip to the next email and put off dealing with it. And then you forget or you can�t go back to it because of the anxious dread. I understand. But still. 10 seconds. Be a good person and write back and give an update on whether you can commit or when the thing will be ready to go. Don�t feel guilt about it. Feel obligation, responsibility. It Is Not Difficult. And It Makes The World Better For Everyone.
For those friends and/or colleagues of mine who are reading this who DO tend to write me back and/or let me know what is up with their papers, etc., of course I am not talking to you right now. I thank you wholeheartedly!
It is my utopian dream to live in a world where my seemingly natural talent for organizing things did not have to be focused on repetitive tasks by the unwillingness of others to say yes or no (or, when they can�t say yes or no, to simply admit that and maybe even offer a forecast of when a yes or a no might be possible). (And I�ve learned from past mistakes to frame certain kinds of emails so that they require only the easiest of answers.) But has it really come to that? Does it have to be a utopian wish to live in a world where what is such a simple thing to do, and what is, in a no-duh kind of way, a basic requirement of having-made-a-promise (and simply being in the world with other people, or having a relationship with another person, is a kind of having-made-a-promise, whether we like it or not), would get done fairly often? Ugh, I tell you.
Say all you want about healthcare, gay marriage, the economy, jobs and housing, the seemingly unbridgeable divide between left and right in politics. These are all very distressing problems. But living a life that is better for everyone starts very close to home, in the tiniest decisions we make every day. No, I�m not saying that if you write back to tell me you can have dinner with me that we will get universal healthcare. But it does seem to me that all of the above-mentioned problems in some way hang on an inability or unwillingness of many people to try to imagine the lives of others, and act so that the lives of everyone are lived happily, freely, and with reasonably secure expectations about a necessarily unknown future. As Hannah Arendt said about promising (and here begins already the trial of the next few months where some of my books are in PA and others in NY�I�m guessing it will often be that I don�t have to hand what I want most in the moment, and so I paraphrase): promising allows us to stave off what is uncertain about the future by creating islands of stability�we promise to do X or we live up to our words and obligations, and that, in part, creates the world we live in, a bit more secure than it was before.
Of course, we will not always succeed in keeping our promises. Which is why Arendt also gives the concept of forgiveness a political meaning: forgiveness releases us from the unintended consequences of our actions, and lets us move forward instead of keeping us forever chained to a past that can�t be changed and was not what we wished it to be. Forgiving does not mean forgetting. It means looking toward the future, which is something that can be built, as opposed to the past, which is beyond our capacity to change.
So of course I forgive you when you don�t email me back when you should. But is that really how you want me to use what is in the end not an endless capacity of forgiveness? In other words, is that who you want to be, right now, situated as you are between past and future?
(I read this last night, in one of my favorite books, Frail Happiness by Tzetvan Todorov: �Nowadays we do not like to be preached to, even by people with good intentions.� And that, per Todorov, is why many people do not like Rousseau. But Rousseau never tried to tell anyone how to live. His aim was to illustrate what it means to think in different ways, and what different kinds of thinking mean for how we live together. I have a similar aim in mind, though it does sound like preaching �nowadays.� But I wonder: why? Why can�t we talk to each other about how we should think about how we should live together? Indeed, if we really want to find answers to the intractable problems mentioned above�healthcare, gay marriage, the economy, jobs and housing, the seemingly unbridgeable divide between left and right in politics�do we not, really urgently, have to develop a talent for talking to each other about how we should think about how we should live together?)
11:05 a.m. - August 20, 2009
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