Polite Society

I recently remedied an absence in my reading repertoire. There’s a terrifyingly large number of books out there, so even though there are stories and writers you know you should have engaged with, it’s nearly impossible to keep up.

So when I last journeyed to the library, and saw upon a shelf a copy of Jane Austen’s PERSUASION, I thought, I’ve never actually read an entire Jane Austen novel. Excerpts, sure. Adaptations? They’re inescapable. But I’ve never read one, cover to cover.

And so I did. It took a little while. When reading early 19th century literature, you have to adjust your brain a little bit. The patterns of thought and writing aren’t ours, with compound sentences that spin endlessly outwards like fractals generated from a Mandelbrot set. PERSUASION was Austen’s very last novel, written in her late thirties and published at the very end of 1817, six months after Austin’s death. I’d say “untimely death,” but before antibiotics and vaccines, dying before forty wasn’t even faintly unusual.

It’s a romance, unsurprisingly, one between the thoughtful but suppressed Anne Elliot and the dashing but frustrated Captain Wentworth, who she’d loved passionately but whose offer of marriage she’d spurned years before after being persuaded by her family that it wasn’t a socially advantageous match.

Two hundred years ago, things were really, really different if you were of the genteel class in Britain, because all that mattered was society. Meaning, ninety-seven percent of the life of the Elliot family seemed to be going to visit people, and having people visit them.  

I found myself thinking, Dear Lord, do none of these people have jobs? Which, being aristocratic, they mostly didn’t.

Polite society meant everything was about carefully managed appearances and relationships, about everyone knowing who you were and…equally importantly…who was connected to you. 

If someone had more social influence, you’d do anything you could to establish a connection with them. In practice, it meant that you were constantly spending every last second of your life worrying about how you were perceived. Even though every moment was compulsively socializing, you were also strangely, paradoxically alone. Your real thoughts, your deepest feelings and fears? None of that could be expressed. All of it was posturing and falseness and striving for advantage.

So, you know, nothing at all like the way we “socialize” now in the social media era. 

 As false as it was, at least in British polite society you actually got to spend time with people, face to face. The smothering heights of Austen/Bronte-era society ain’t got nuthin’ on our commodified, algorithmic, Skinner-box social hellscape, which is antithetical to genuine intimacy, meaning relationships where you can be completely, deeply, utterly yourself.

If the net result of a new social paradigm is relentless interaction coupled with deep and paralyzing levels of human loneliness, you know something is very, very wrong. 

Without real intimacy, all we will ever feel is utterly alone.