I’ve been in Paris since the first of November on a second extended stay in six months. I’m in the same Montmartre apartment and am experiencing the aftermath of the year of isolation and lockdown. In August I couldn’t get the pass sanitaire so I was mostly shut out of public places and could only enter to make a purchase and leave. My best conversations were with medical personnel at the poor people’s hospital Lariboisière where I had to visit repeatedly to have a cut rebandaged. Now, however, I have unlimited access to public places and much more opportunity to observe social life. At first I was rather disappointed that life here was so little different from life where I come from. But now I’m noticing something that sets it apart. There is a certain sense of citizen solidarity that I haven’t noticed as much in the German, Austrian, or U.S. cities I’m familiar with. People in the street might notice my backpack unzipped and kindly warn me against pickpockets. When I’m trudging suitcase in hand up the multiple staircases of the Place des Abbesses Metro station, young people offer to give me a hand. When my ticket doesn’t work at another Metro station, a friendly young black guy games the turnstile for me and helps me through. Laure the barlady at BiBiche told me that during a transportation strike the Parisians helped each other out spontaneously with ride sharing. In contrast to the spontaneous cooperation of these Parisians, a New Yorker I meet in BiBiche has a tone of being slightly suspicious of everything and everyone around him almost as if he were in enemy territory.
But the most interesting incident is on the night of my arrival in the one bar to which I had had free access in the summer. A French girl who is celebrating with her parents and foreign friends is carrying on in English in a voice so exaggeratedly loud and so shrill that the other customers exchange glances of dismay and discomfort. Finally, Karim the barman realizes he must intervene. He politely but insistently tells the father that the young lady must lower her voice or leave. The dad protests but then acquiesces and they leave. In the States, they would say that there’s no law against being loud and let it go at that. Here a tacit consensus is reached among strangers and the consensus is enforced.
I would say that the distrustful New Yorker and the helpful Parisians represent two competing paradigms of current social interaction. This is not to say that in America we have less capacity for disinterested cooperation. I can cite from my own recent experience a collective behavior in my hometown of Bloomington that struck me as evidence that people in the US are capable of acting for the collective good. I’m going to call it tongue-in-cheek “Church Lady socialism.”
Not long ago, I attended the final session of my training to tutor for adult literacy or for English as a second language, the former directed mainly to poor people who never acquired reading skills, the latter to immigrants without English fluency. In the earlier sessions, I was impressed by the practical training, free of pretensions. Now, in the final session, I can be more precise: What is striking is the total absence of bullshit, a word that I adopt purposely with David Graeber’s concept of “Bullshit Jobs” in mind. What I mean in this instance is that there is none of the status-asserting rhetoric that goes with such occasions in churches, social clubs, political movements, schools, universities, or professional organizations. In this training, function determines form, ends determine means with scarcely a word or gesture beside the point. All the students are motivated solely by their desire to learn, all the tutors solely by their desire to help the recipients achieve their goals. No one is paid, and no one threatened with failure. What if this behavior were valorized instead of its opposite—instead of our winner-take-all competition?
It occurs to me that this collaboration could be cited to refute the claim that we are too egotistical, too selfish for socialism or anarchism. Why didn’t I notice this before? Perhaps I didn’t notice because nearly all the volunteers are women and, though they are associated with no church or social organization, this projects the unfair association with do-gooder-ism, the officious type of the “church lady” satirized on Saturday Night Live in the 90s. Try to imagine how a Donald Trump might characterize this crowd: a bunch of pathetic losers. No one here has a tenth of the self-promoting officiousness of even the academic, let alone the realtor-huckster. Here is quiet Ruby who has been working as an auto insurance underwriter for twenty years. Here she can have an effect which is not contingent upon the ethereal system of laws, regulations, and metrics. Here is Carol, another retired insurance employee who is unpretentiously devoted to volunteer work—devoted to getting things done without motives of prestige or gain. No Soviet subbotnik, no Franciscan saint knew a purer motive.
Signed,
Andrew (Weeks)
Normal Thoughts 