The Lives of Others

From my latest column for History Today:

‘One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other’, says the heroine of Jane Austen’s Emma, playfully trying to reassure her ever-anxious father that other people can enjoy amusements he would never himself like. In Austen’s novel Emma is often wrong, but she is certainly right about this. Over the past few months, it has been evident that there are some people for whom the pleasures of their fellow human beings are not only unappealing, but incomprehensible. As our society, like those across the world, has undergone rapid and disorienting changes within a short space of time, many have lost, at least for a period, access to the mundane pleasures that give joy to daily life.

Publicly acknowledging the painful, isolating effects of that disruption has not always been welcome. Whatever the activity – a visit to the pub, going to the beach, or browsing in a shop – the loss and then qualified return of non-essential pastimes caused storms on social media. Many on Twitter hastened to proclaim scornfully that they could not understand why anyone would want to do these things, not just in the middle of a pandemic, but at all. In ordinary times these are harmless pleasures, which many value not just for the sake of the activity but for the people they share it with: social joys of a kind social media cannot replace. Even if they are not to your taste, it is surely possible to hold two thoughts in your mind: that cancelling these activities might be necessary for the greater good, but that people can also justly mourn for their absence and wish for their return.

At the same time, it has been clear that one half of the world cannot understand the other’s troubles, either. The ‘new normal’ which some welcome is, and will continue to be, a real hardship for others. If you have a stable home, a secure source of income and a family situation which makes home-working straightforward, then your experience of this year has been very different from that of anyone who does not have those things. To see some in that fortunate position dismissing others’ struggles has been troubling.

Part of this incomprehension seems to be a lack of imagination. One person admits to finding a certain situation difficult to deal with; another responds by saying: ‘This isn’t a problem for me, so I can’t imagine why it would be for anyone else.’ The phrase ‘can’t imagine’ in such assertions is often a self-satisfied rhetorical tactic, but it is not anything to be proud of. Can we really not imagine why someone in different circumstances might respond differently to the same situation? Or are we simply unwilling to try?

Read the rest here.