5.8 Born to gossip
Ask random people if they think gossip is good or bad and the great majority will say…
It’s bad.
Then ask, “Do you like it when people gossip about you?” The answer will be almost universally…
No!
But then look at our news media and what do we see…
A nonstop gossip fest.
Pundits, reporters, and anchors talk about personalities far more than about issues.
What kind of people do they like best? The colorful characters, the more controversial and bizarre the better. They like the ones who are angry and attacking and acting out and making an uproar. They like the attention junkies and the drama queens. They’re thrilled to cover mainstream politicians who are psychologically immature and who blurt outrageous things.
And why? Because these news folk want heightened drama to hook their audience and keep them watching. They like huffing and puffing and relieving themselves emotionally on air.
Sometimes citizens protest and ask that news programs cover serious topics which have serious consequences for human life on this planet. Things like climate change, nuclear weapons, exploitation, and eruptions of civil war.
But the news organizations fire back with their own protest…
People don’t watch when we talk only about issues. Our ratings drop. We’re giving our viewers what they want. Not what they say they want, but what they want. What they actually watch.
The news media make big money from programs that are, if we’re being accurate, mostly gossip.
How did it come to this given there’s a broad consensus that gossip is bad? And why are we viewers so obsessed with gossip? Why does it have such a grip on us?
If we look at human history, the many millennia when we were living in relatively small hunter-gatherer tribes, the answer is simple…
We are a gossipy species.
For most of our time on earth…
Gossip was a necessity.
In his book, Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language, Robin Dunbar says our ancestors did not consider gossip a petty vice, because it was our gift of gab which gave us the ability to weave ourselves into stable, enduring groups…
Gossip was a fundamental instrument of human togetherness.
Originally gossip meant…
Talking about people.
And as a social group species we needed to do that a lot. Not just in negative terms. We needed to talk about the positive things people were doing.
So if someone was out of line, we’d talk about them and shame them and get them back on track.
But if someone was making an important contribution to the welfare of the tribe, that was just as important if not more so. And we’d want to support them and be there for them and point them out to our children as a role model.
Think about it for a moment. How could human society ever have developed without gossip? If way back when, we had all taken a vow of silence like monks in a monastery we could not have advanced like we did.
We were social animals living in a social web, so we needed every bit of social information we could get our hands on to help us make smart decisions about who to trust and who to watch out for. We talked about our neighbors and our relationships constantly so we’d know where we stood in our tribe. And so we could pull our tribe together in cooperative projects.
Gossip in this context is not a flighty waste of time…
It was serious survival business.
But in our current era, we’ve degraded our talking about people, our gossip….
We use it to hurt people we don’t like.
We use it to distract ourselves from the bigger, more urgent issues we’d need to take on if we were to have a chance to save ourselves. But those issues are too big for most of us and too painful and too depressing, and meanwhile gossip is great entertainment.
So just like tribalism, gossip which once helped to make us, is now breaking us…
Gossip once enhanced our survival but is now diminishing our chance to survive.
Instead of obsessing over sad, sick people who are dragging all of us down, it would be very, very good for us as a species to start talking nonstop about the people who are taking on the big issues, and doing so forthrightly, and with deep understanding, and with a fierce commitment to action.
