What is Gossip?
A Quarrel Between Ancients and Moderns
The major monotheistic religions all proscribe gossip.
Jewish texts liken it to murder (killing someone’s reputation), Islamic texts liken it to “eating the flesh of one’s dead brother” (a metaphor that implies both desecration and cannibalism), and Christian texts link it to sexual immorality.
Yet, gossip does not typically register as a vice at all today. On the contrary, there is even a sense in which the contemporary desire for “transparency” turns some forms of gossip into a virtue, a mechanism for establishing “social proof” and/or “accountability.” Consider phenomena like Yelp, ratemyprofessor.com, or the Uber notification you get after a ride asking you to rate your driver. What’s the difference between participating in these resources, one might ask, and rating a first date? How about every person you interact with? Are there any boundaries to the modern sense that we should constantly rate our experiences of others—and pursuing those that are highly rated by others? (Social media is highschool popularity contest politics on steroids.)
In the most egregious sense, gossip involves saying negative and untrue things about someone behind their back. In narrower cases, it involves saying negative and true things. Yet the core prohibition of gossip, according to religious tradition, doesn’t revolve around either the negativity of the statement or it’s truth-value, but around the fact that it is done about someone who isn’t present to respond. In a sense, even speaking positively and truthfully about someone can constitute a form of gossip—for the statement might be misheard, mis-interpreted, or mis-used. Gossip obstructs direct speech and clouds people’s judgments by triangulating them. In a world where gossip is the norm, nobody can have her own opinion of things. A cultural norm of gossip creates a panopticon effect in which everyone believes (correctly) that she is constantly being talked about and judged. Gossip is an instrument of consensus, a technique for flattening singular relations into an aggregated form. In an age where we can’t let the average be the enemy of the efficient, it’s not hard to see how socialized hearsay becomes the discursive version of the super-highway.
The thinker who, to my knowledge, best grasped the weight of gossip in its omnipresent and secularized form was Heidegger. Heidegger suggests that gossip is a “way of being.” It’s not something we can avoid, but a way of relating to things that defines us in our “average everydayness.” In taking at a neutral, descriptive stance of gossip as an unavoidable existential structure, Heidegger parts ways with the religious, moralistic tradition. On the other hand, insofar as he sees it as a degraded and “inauthentic” form of being, he positions himself as a critic of contemporary culture, which, by contrast, celebrates our ability to talk and opine about things and people 24-7.
On a spectrum from “it’s never good to talk about people who aren’t there to respond” to “it’s generally good to talk about people who aren’t there to respond” where do you position yourself?
Do you see a fundamental difference between reviewing/recommending things and experiences and reviewing/recommending people? What are the circumstances in which you would (or believe you should) hold your tongue?
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