Every so often you come across something and say to yourself, “Of course, why didn’t I think of that? This is a big deal.” And, because it’s new to you, you (wrongly) assume that it’s new to everyone else too. I recently finished a book titled “Twilight of the Elites” by Christopher Hayes. There are a lot of very good things in this book but none better than his analysis of the notion of “social distance.”
There are different kinds of social distance, and Hayes describes its contribution to the financial collapse, the recession and the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal. The social distance is enormous between elites, whether on Wall Street or in the church hierarchy, and the “little people,” the ones with mortgages or sitting in the pews on Sunday.
As a consequence, the damage that is being done to the victims of their actions – or negligence – is just an abstraction to those at the top. And it’s damage that they rarely encounter firsthand because they don’t interact much, if at all, with those “little people.” But their own suffering – lost bonuses or potential embarrassment for the church – are not abstract. Those are very real.
Several years ago, I led a project that required a lot of interaction with Wall Street executives. Although I didn’t know it at the time, it was a case study in social distance. This group of extremely successful, extremely wealthy people was convinced that they understood what was happening at the lower reaches of society, among the poorest people. And there was clearly no way to un-convince them, since they, by virtue of who they were, knew all the answers.
In this elite group’s view, the only people who deserved their help were those in what used to be known as “third world countries.” They were the deserving poor who merited a helping hand. As for those in the United States, they were lazy dope fiends who were beyond help. They deserved nothing, while another abstraction, the person in Burkino Faso or Bangladesh, was an incipient capitalist, yearning to build a company and take it public. No junkies or slackers there.
What was particularly scary was this group’s level of certainty that their views were correct. It was 100 percent. One of the hallmarks of our post-modern elites.
Social distance and reducing others to an abstraction is a bad and dangerous thing and, in our increasingly unequal society – with virtually every leadership position filled by a wealthy member of the elite – it is hard to avoid it. During the 2012 election campaign, we were hammered with promises and pleas on behalf of “the middle class.” If you listened closely, it became pretty clear that these candidates didn’t really know what they were talking about. And it was also very clear that they had little contact with social reality in our country.
This was true of Democrats and Republicans alike. Because they were uniformly rich, as were their donors, advisors and associates, the social distance between them and the voters they were courting was almost as great as that between the Wall Street guys and the “little people.” For example, there was a near total lack of awareness of the vast former middle class that now inhabits our country. Or of the suffering imposed by the collapse of the housing bubble.
Because of social distance, it was no accident that the banks were saved and that those who lost their homes were not. We take care of those closest to us.
Once you start looking, you can find social distance and its effects in a lot of places. In addition to vertical, class-based, social distance, there is horizontal social distance, the huge gaps between groups. In a recent unhappy example, Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi was found to have described Jews as the descendants of pigs and apes. This statement was made before he became president so, naturally, he claimed it was taken “out of context.” Must have been some context.
In India, social distance is both horizontal and vertical, with Brahmins being the “top” caste and untouchables on the bottom. In some ways, Joseph Stalin was a pioneering voice in defining social distance when he said, “The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.”
For an outsider, there seem to be different versions of social distance in the Virgin Islands. Outsider-ism is one of those versions. If there is an “us” and a “them,” the territory feels like a harder place than most to become an “us.”
Then there is the inter-group social distance, especially across racial lines. This distance feels a lot like other places in the United States. It has the quality of ships passing in the night. You can measure this form of social distance by the number and intensity of interactions across group lines.
Finally there is inter-island social distance. Here, people on one island believe that those on another island are different from them – and not different in a good way. The feeling is that “they” are getting away with something – or getting some benefit that we aren’t. Here social distance equals a belief that the deck is stacked against us. Sound familiar?
In his book, Hayes pounds home the negative effects of social distance, especially the effects that result from a loss of empathy for others.
In a recent discussion about the crisis of the Catholic Church, a bishop of the church tied the crisis to an absence of collegiality. He was right on target. Collegiality and empathy – putting yourself in the other person or group’s place – are the polar opposites of social distance.
The starting point in solving any problem is naming it. On the mainland, social distance and its consequences typically result from the entrenched power of elites who largely live in bubbles. In the territory, social distance is truly social. People live in close proximity and interact with one another, but often without great understanding.
What is the solution? I think the beginning of a solution comes from a realization that we pay a big price for social distance, and that everyone’s life would be better and happier if we broke down these barriers. Getting from here to there would be a huge step. My guess is that the next step would be to describe a distance-free vision of the kinds of communities that people – across all groups – would like to live in. Sounds simple. It isn’t.
