What Keeps Us Human to One Another?

A viewer left a comment under one of RJ Starr’s lectures disagreeing with part of what he had said. The comment went straight at the idea. He answered, the viewer answered back, and the exchange stayed with the subject until it ended. Neither person had to be cast as foolish, dishonest, or defective for the other to keep a position. The disagreement did not need a villain.

In this piece from What Keeps Us Human to One Another?, RJ Starr asks what kept that disagreement from becoming a conflict. He follows the more familiar case, in which an argument slides off the idea and onto the person holding it. The person becomes a type, the type becomes the rebuttal, and a label answers in place of a reply. Once the subject stops carrying the disagreement, the people have to carry it, and the exchange becomes harder to leave.

The piece then tests that distinction against harder cases. Some ideas carry consequences for actual people, some statements reveal plain contempt, and calm, careful language can still treat a person with complete disregard. The line, as the piece draws it, is not between polite and rude disagreement. It is whether the other person remains larger than the position being argued about.

Written and read by RJ Starr.

Read the piece: https://profrjstarr.com/what-keeps-us-human-to-one-another/disagreement-without-conflict

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When Professor RJ Starr finished the last episode of Everwood, a television drama set in a small Colorado town, he expected some sadness. What he did not expect was the restlessness that followed. There were books nearby, a chessboard, a clock waiting to be reassembled, things to cook. The evening was not empty. Something in it had simply become unavailable.

This episode follows that restlessness to its source. A long story creates a small future for the person watching it: another evening with these people, another return to a place that has become familiar. When the final episode arrives, the story ends and the return ends with it. The same is true of people. When someone becomes part of ordinary life, some of the relationship lives in the expectation of seeing them again.

The explanation is then put under pressure. Other stories end and feel complete, so repetition and familiarity cannot account for it alone. Some stories become company while others remain experiences, and the difference may lie in how much ordinary life they hold: people eating together, arguing, disappointing one another and trying again. At the center is Edna, the character hardest to leave, a woman who loses the person her future was built around and still has people and a place waiting to receive her.

The episode also takes up two harder questions. How can people who never look back become so present through hours of attention, while actual people passed for years on a street or at a counter remain in the background? And why does watching the series again solve nothing? The answer it reaches is that returning to a finished story is not the same as continuing one, and that sometimes what hurts in a goodbye is the loss of expected return.

Read the essay: https://profrjstarr.com/what-keeps-us-human-to-one-another/when-a-story-ends

A man arrives by bicycle in a town where he knows no one. Someone who has never seen him before fills his water bottles, then sets a place at the table and hands him a towel.

In this opening piece of What Keeps Us Human to One Another?, Psychology Professor RJ Starr begins with the travel videos of Ryo Murata (HumanRevo) and asks what is happening in that moment, and why watching it is so affecting. The answer offered is not generosity. It is the point at which a stranger stops being a category and becomes a particular person in someone else's attention.

The piece then turns to the case that does not fit: the man on the sidewalk who is passed without a second look. Recognition, on this account, is an event that happens under conditions, and the same person can give it in one hour and withhold it in the next.

Written and read by RJ Starr.

Read the piece: https://profrjstarr.com/what-keeps-us-human-to-one-another/when-a-stranger-stops-being-a-stranger

#whatkeepsushuman #profrjstarr