We’ve forgotten the old rules of conversation – and that’s no bad thing
Even the location sounded like a cliche from a novel that hadn’t aged well, though perhaps that was my fault: what I had written in my diary was: “Book launch, 7pm Burley Fisher (anarchist bookshop).” Is it even anarchist? They had copies of Ecodeviance – radical poetry for the coming wilderness – but they also sold wrapping paper, which is an open insult to anarchy. Anyway, there we all were, at a book launch (it wasn’t an anarchist bookshop), with an author (Luke Cooper) talking about his book (Authoritarian Contagion). It was wild, dreamlike; I was looking around, thinking, “How come I know everyone in this room?”, but I didn’t – I only knew some of them, the rest were just setting something off in my subconscious.
We could all, dimly, remember how things were supposed to be done: Cooper would talk about his book, and a panel would respond, and somebody – me – would chair, and then the audience would ask questions, which I would definitely remember, and nobody would have to use a wave emoji because we were flesh and blood, right there in the room. What we had all forgotten was how to strap on the armour that keeps everyone carefully relevant, with an overriding drive to not sound stupid. That is what belonging looked like, in the old days; show no ignorance or uncertainty, and you might just about get out of there with your ego intact.
Instead, the conversation went everywhere, from theology to corruption to Kosovo to the cosmic right, with regular breaks for people to say, “I actually don’t know what that means”; “I don’t think I know what theology is”; “Who are the cosmic right?” (That last is the easy bit: it’s the guy wearing bison horns who stormed the Capitol – once you’ve heard of them, you can spot them a mile off. There is work to be done figuring out what their game is, however.)
It was open-hearted, fraternal and naive – not about politics, a load of people knew a ton about authoritarianism, but about conversation, how it was supposed to sound, what it could do. Don’t get too optimistic, though. Apparently authoritarianism is still highly contagious.