On Small Talk and Small Men

And a short word on manners.

It is common sense that we do not, at first try, meet people as they are. Which is why manners are a thing of social concern. Manners include the social consensus akin to a mask which every decent person ought to wear so that they might lubricate their social interactions. It includes small talk; those seemingly inconsequential superficialities. It includes pleases and thank yous. It is only through some extended interaction on the surface that we get to meet people in their depth. That is, in meeting them unadorned by veneers, veils, and disguises; meeting them in their personality and finding out in the starkest terms whether they are human beings; and what kind of human beings they are.

So one of the ways we meet people adorned is in the line of business. And I quickly illustrate with a plumber you have hired to fix your leaking pipes.

Say this is the first time you hired him. Perhaps on the recommendation of a friend—let’s call him Scamander. Collecting his phone number, you probably saved his name as “Joe The Plumber.” Thus, when you meet him at your house by 8 am Monday, you do not stand before Joe. You stand before Joe the plumber. In other words, you have not met at the very first instance, the person who makes up Joe. You have instead met with a one-dimensional identity qualified as The plumber.

But then, your friend who is a software engineer is not Scamander the software engineer to you. He is simply Scamander to you. And suppose you have another Scamander the architect, he is not Scamander the architect to you. He too is Scamander. You have surpassed the phase of one-dimensional acquaintances to know the person both Scamanders are. You do not confuse them even if they bear the same name because you have become intimate with their fuller dimensions that you can always tell them apart. It is the case that with friends, we can suspend manners and use them sparingly. Therefore what we know as being professional is just manners for business or a veil for the workplace.

Joe the Plumber too, sees you as Aquinas the customer. At this point, you have what we call a business relationship—a flat one-dimensional affair. He is plumber to you and you are client to him.

But suppose that you have your television on, watching a sports station, and you find that he supports the same football team as you—Arsenal for instance. I suppose that a new dimension of interaction will open up to you both, taking you past the superficial by one step. Now he has become Joe the plumber who is an Arsenal fan.

If as you keep chatting about Arsenal, the conversation drives you to find that your first sons are both named Adino—a rare name, you have found a new common ground. Maybe you chat about the inspirations for such a name. Then, you have taken two steps beyond a business relationship. Inadvertently, you are leaving a business relationship behind and gradually peering beyond the veil to find the human person behind the business tag.

As more dimensions open up to you, it becomes more awkward to call him “Joe the plumber.” It seems as if you have progressed beyond a thin business relationship to something richer and fuller than simply talking about pipes and him fixing them. It feels wrong to stay on the one-dimensional.

Yet suppose you did none of those above, you will never cross that line. Never reach a first-name basis. And, painfully, never actually search out the human person hidden behind the hired worker.

Thus this is the peril of the reductive mind, which collapses who a person into what he does and nothing more. Which never lifts its business veil. Which insists that the value of a man’s life is in how much he can ‘talk it business.’ Yet even worse, it is the peril of the person who sees himself as all he does and nothing more. In every instance he is a plumber; never a father or a football supporter. Even as he sits with his son he is a plumber, not a father. He is nothing else but a plumber. Such a person has failed to humanize himself and he surely cannot do it for anyone else. He navigates the world as a slave robbed of his personhood.

And so, what we call personality is simply an aggregate of different identities. He is a son, husband, father, uncle, grandfather, plumber, team supporter, mad hatter, adulterer, jogo bonito, Alice in Wonderland, etcetera.

But if he rests at one thing, to be nothing else, he becomes a bore, a plastic entity; perhaps a more sophisticated jukebox. This explains my ire for some men of business who I know are impeccable at their work. But to whom you can find nothing in them apart from business and the pursuit of goals. Who spend every moment in the ululation of the machinery of affluence. It is what makes the group of friends whose sole aim is to come together at all times to “talk about hustle” so shallow and wooden; their discussions tasting more wooden on your ear as it goes. They are empty of wits, half-trick ponies, addicted to fixing pipes, and they proudly tell you they have no time for small talk.

So I concocted a test in my little laboratory. Anyone who hates small talk with passion —because he’d rather be talking big things— is a small man. My test has not failed me yet.

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