How Not To Rant

One of the risks of social life is that we will in the course of an evening or in the

kitchen at a party end up trapped with a person of excessive conviction or, to put it more

colloquially, a bore. Bores can be found harbouring any manner of obsessions: they may be deeply

concerned about grammar (and the ever increasing misuse of the subjunctive) or believe that

modern architecture has alienated us from ourselves; they may be horrified by the predatory

nature of contemporary capitalism or disgusted by the whingeing of the environmental movement;

they might hate feminism or see misogyny in every corner of life. Bores aren't necessarily

wholly misguided, they may be making some very good points along the way; but our discomfort

in their company arises from the intensity and relentlessness of their manner. We long

that they might fall silent or, more realistically, allow us to run away. Part of the reason why

bores bore is that we sense they are not being entirely honest with us. They are certainly

upset, but the real reasons why don't seem on offer. We feel – in the midst of their

explanations – that their intensity is drawing heat from a source beyond the argument as

they define it. They may well be emphasising a range of studiously impersonal political,

economic or social factors, but we intuit that there must be a more personal story from

which we, and their conscious selves, have been carefully shielded. It's a general

truth, in no way humiliating, that our seemingly-objective adult concerns often have their roots in incidents

of personal vulnerability that unfolded long ago and that may be awkward to recover and

discuss. Perhaps, when we were young, our father lost his job to a corporation that

relocated their offices to south-east Asia: the pay-off was relatively generous but the

shame intense for the family. Or perhaps we have been passed over for promotion many times

by a young and conspicuously fashionable management team with an interest in contemporary design.

Or maybe there was once a woman we liked very much, who was doing a PhD in gender studies

on the work of Julia Kristeva and who showed signs of interest but then went off with a

rival. It left us quite upset for a while. We may not like to remember these incidents,

let alone tell new acquaintances about them at parties. Yet they are still active within

us and seek some way, however disguised, of expressing themselves. But all we know consciously

is that capitalism is the most abusive and unsustainable economic system ever devised,

that modern architecture has shamefully forgotten the nobility of the Classical tradition as

embodied by the works of Bramante and Schinkel and that feminists are out to systematically

destroy the foundations of male earning power in advanced economies. When we come across

such ardent views, it isn't that we want to hear less, it's rather that we would

ideally want to hear more – but in another direction, inwards rather than further into

socio-cultural and economic abstractions. And we want to do this not from prurience

but because social life is guided by a wish to encounter the reality of other people – which

is here being arcanely denied. Our boredom is at base an impatient resentment at being

held at bay from the genuine traumas of another's life. The bore is never just other people.

It is – in given areas – also always us. When we take a psychological audit of our

intellectual ideas, we all stand to discover that some of our concerns owe their intensity

to personal experiences which are hard to define and frightening to own up to. This

alerts us to how we might in the future respond to the speeches of the over-zealous. The task

isn't to engage head on with the matter apparently at stake, it's to gently try

to shift the conversation away from its official target to its origins; sympathetically asking

when the issue first emerged and what more personal associations might surround it. Even

if we never get there, the knowledge of the structure of the problem should make us careful

not to engage people of excessive conviction in too many prolonged head-to-head arguments.

There is no point trying to list why capitalism is not the worst system ever devised, why

modern architecture has its high-points and why feminism remains necessary. This would

be to believe that the other's rage was a kind of intellectual error that could be

magically resolved with the help of one or two deft ideas. The kind conversationalist

is more compassionately pessimistic. They accept that the roots of certain of our convictions

lie deeply tangled in frightened, anxious parts of the psyche unlikely to be accessible

outside psychotherapy. We're so aware that it could sound patronising to treat people

as less self-aware than they believe themselves to be, we overlook that it may sometimes also

be the height of generosity to keep in mind the complicated role that denied personal

wounds play in our ardent convictions. And we should hope that others will repay us the

favour the next time we find ourselves delivering long and ever more intense speeches about

the decline in handshaking, the colonisation of Ecuador and the corruption of the English language.

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