The Social Contract

“Snow is fallin' on the corner/As my honey comes home from schoolShe don't feel right with the worldI always thought it was wrongBut it's gettin' harder to get along.Murray McLauchlan, “Harder to Get Along”, 1971.It is a very cold December morning in Toronto. At the gas station, I am filling up the car, while my son, half asleep in the passenger seat, is trying to stay warm. I just squeeze the nozzle and tune out everything else until I slowly become aware of a woman--red faced and full throated--yelling without pause. From what I can piece together, she has driven up to a pump almost at the same moment as another female motorist, and clearly feels she arrived there first. But the other motorist has already begun drawing gas from the pump in question. Amidst a torrent of vulgarity and hyperbole (“that is the rudest thing I have ever seen in my life” – surely not!), the first woman lets slip a particularly interesting complaint at the end of her rant: “And for a woman to do that to another woman!” And with that, she concludes.My son has heard this last riff as well, and we are both intrigued and talk about what we have witnessed for quite a long time. What does this argument tell us about how gender dynamics and social relationships are currently being performed? My son points out that beneath these trivial incidents, there is something momentous at stake, which is our competing visions of public interaction. Each of us has expectations about how we should be treated in a given social space, and the rules are often pretty clear. We give up our seat instantly and without a second thought to the old woman with the cane who just boarded the crowded bus. What hockey and football players do during a game would not be acceptable behaviour in the library.But what happens when each party feels like they are in the right and the rules are not quite clear. At that point in any potential dispute, like when two people arrive at a gas station almost simultaneously, we need to learn to navigate without a clear direction. And if my recent experience tells me anything, it’s getting harder to get along.Everyone feels it these days - everywhere you go the bonds that tie us together are fraying. People are getting angry very quickly, and often for the most trifling of reasons. Perhaps it is due to the isolation and tension of Covid-19, and yet one senses that this decline in civility was happening pre-pandemic as well. Maybe part of it is that we now often relate to the other only through a web of screens; for many people, human to human contact is becoming at best a luxury and at worst a hindrance. We are losing the ability to relate.The social contract is an idea that can be found in some form in antiquity but really emerges as a central feature of political thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, culminating in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s 1762 book of that name. And it is based on a premise that is eminently logical and yet, somehow, extremely sad. We need to hand over authority to a third party, such as the monarch or the elected government, in order to prevent our gas station combatants from escalating into full-out conflict and even violence.The social contract emerges out of a growing awareness of the horror of the alternatives. The English thinker Thomas Hobbes describes a mythical world that he calls “the state of nature”, in which the powerful, unchecked by anything other than their conscience, can often and invariably do lord it over the weaker. Given that set of affairs, rational people willingly submit part of their freedom to the public authority in order to have their basic liberties protected, a powerful reminder of our inability to self-regulate and respect the supposedly inalienable rights of others. For Hobbes, the state of nature requires surrender to a monarch with absolute power, to avoid potential anarchy.The ancient rabbis of Judaism were also preoccupied by the relationship between restraining one’s darker impulses, and how doing so might contribute to making a better world. In the words of Shimon Ben Zoma, an early second-century interpreter of the Bible, “Who is mighty? He [she] who subdues his [her] evil/darker inclination, as itis said: “One that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; and one that rules [their] spirit than one that takes a city” (Proverbs 16:32).” This incisive observation, found in the 4th chapter of Pirke Avot [Ethics of the Fathers], encapsulates much of what ails us in our contemporary predicament. It is not simply that Ben Zoma informs us that the hardest thing to do is to control oneself (which is also the only person whom one can control), but that “ruling the spirit” is superior to any amount of political bullying and conquest.We all know what it feels like when the person you chance upon—at the check-out line, in the coffee shop--is unable to comply with Ben Zoma’s maxim. In a strange way, those encounters do not happen in real-time, as we all bring the ghosts of the past, the baggage of our lives, into those meetings. We have no idea what or whom we are up against each and every time. Was her memorable comment—" And for a woman to do that to another woman!”—just a reference to feeling betrayed by the sisterhood, or was the real message that men, of course, cannot be expected to act with decency, or going further, that a particular man in her past treated her badly, or perhaps all of the above.Nobody wakes up in the morning thinking that a few hours later they will be stared down and screamed at in the most innocuous of locations, but that, it would seem, is the point we have reached in our present cultural moment. Whatever the circumstance, it will be up to each of us to try to exhibit patience and empathy, even if we arrived ten seconds earlier than the other guy and now feel cheated out of our just deserts. Because on the other side of our self-righteous need to win, to prove our point--amidst rising decibel levels and quickly accelerating rage--madness lies.