Episode 139 - Neighbors

Transcript

Ellie: 0:00

Hey Overthinkers. I'm here to share some exciting updates before we get into today's episode. First off, you can now get double the Overthink. We've moved from a biweekly to a weekly episode cadence, so you'll now get four episodes per month rather than two. We're also now recording in person with video, so if you'd prefer to watch our episodes rather than just listen to them, you can check us out on YouTube and Substack where the episodes will be posted for free. Speaking of Substack, it's now our one-stop shop for our subscriber only content including extended versions of every single episode. If you want more from us, that's the place to find us. we'll also be doing periodic lives Q and A sessions, short written posts about our episodes and more. And some of you may already know that I've also recently started my own substack, where I'm currently offering a video-based lecture course on intimate relationships. Hello and welcome to Overthink.

David: 1:13

The podcast where we ask you, won't you be my neighbor.

Ellie: 1:17

I'm Ellie Anderson.

David: 1:19

And I'm David Peña Guzman.

Ellie: 1:21

Okay. David. We've lived in a lot of places over the courses of our lives. We've had a lot of neighbors. Tell me about a neighbor experience that you've had.

David: 1:30

During grad school, you know this, I lived in the attic of my dissertation advisor.

Ellie: 1:36

yeah? Yeah.

David: 1:37

So our professor from Emory University, Cindy Willett.

Ellie: 1:40

Whom we've interviewed on Overthink before.

David: 1:42

Yeah. She's been with us.

Ellie: 1:43

She's great.

David: 1:44

She lives in this beautiful home in Atlanta, near the Emory campus.

Ellie: 1:48

Oh, it's so beautiful.

David: 1:49

It's like a quarter of an acre of land or something. Like, I don't really know acres or measurements of land

Ellie: 1:55

on a beautiful, big plot of land.

David: 1:56

Yeah. It's a big chunk of land.

Ellie: 1:57

Lots of trees,

David: 1:58

And also a little river that runs through the front yard. And so when I was moving to Atlanta for graduate school, I was looking for housing and it was very difficult 'cause I was doing it from Reno, Nevada as an undergrad. And so I didn't know exactly how to secure housing. I had never secured housing on my own either, 'cause I lived in the dorms before that. And, it so happened that by serendipitous circumstances, she was looking for somebody to move into her attic. She turned her attic into a real apartment. It was not just an attic. And so for several years I lived above her in her house, and so it meant that I had this blurred relationship with her. Where she was my teacher and later my mentor, but she was also my landlord and my neighbor

Ellie: 2:43

Yeah.

David: 2:43

At the same time

Ellie: 2:44

You had your own kitchen and bathroom. This before we, we met each other. You'd already moved to the weird apartment in Emory Woods. Yes. But with wonderful friends.

David: 2:51

Yes. At some point I realized that our fireplace connected us to their living room, and so you could hear everything that happened in our apartment. And I really mean anything that happened in my apartment in her kitchen. And similarly, I could hear whatever happened in her kitchen, in my living room. And so it really gave us a sense of proximity and intimacy that was accidental and unexpected. Yeah, but it was a wonderful time except that at that time I lived with an ex. Yeah. We lived together in this apartment and Cindy's daughter, when I announced to them that I was moving out because me and my partner were separating her daughter, who I think was like 14 at the time, was like, I knew it was coming.

Ellie: 3:37

I heard you.

David: 3:38

She heard all the fighting and all the disagreements, and eventually the breakup.

Ellie: 3:42

Oh my God. She had a front row seat. She did not need to watch TV, she was just listening or podcasts.

David: 3:47

And it was like, girl, I've heard things too when your mother hasn't been home. So

Ellie: 3:52

but I love that idea that you just kind of had to pretend up to that point that you hadn't heard anything, right?

David: 3:57

Yeah, no, just like her staying up late and things like that. But yeah, this is something that I cherish but also makes me think could have gone horrific, had it been a different person as my neighbor.

Ellie: 4:09

Totally.

David: 4:10

Totally. What about you? I wanna hear one of your neighbor's stories.'cause you're right, we've moved a ton. Yeah.

Ellie: 4:14

Well, since you gave one about Atlanta, I will also give one about our time in Atlanta. Do you remember that apartment that I lived in, in Poncy Highland on North Avenue. It was really cute.

David: 4:24

Yeah. With a gay

Ellie: 4:26

I had a few, I lived there with three different roommates

David: 4:28

Yeah. I just remember there was a gay guy with really, with a strong eyebrow game.

Ellie: 4:32

Yeah, he had strong eyebrow game. Adam loved him. Loved him. I loved all my roommates there. the apartment building has actually since burned down, which is very strange. Yeah.

David: 4:40

That's horrible.

Ellie: 4:42

No, it, it is horrible. I don't think there were any casualties, but still very sad thing, you know, a decade or so after I moved out. The walls were really thin, and it was one of these buildings that looked beautiful from the outside, but kind of cheaply constructed, and the walls were super thin. And so I was on the second floor of a two story building, so we were upstairs and you could really hear what happened below.

David: 5:07

Okay.

Ellie: 5:07

Like really hear what happened below. And there were a couple of girls who moved in who were probably around our age. This was when I was living there with Issa, whom you might remember. She's an overthink listener, so shout out to Issa.

David: 5:18

Okay. So you better say something nice. Love Issa.

Ellie: 5:20

No, she's truly incredible. I have nothing bad to say about her. She and I were living together and these two girls moved in who were probably like also kind of early to mid twenties, and they partied. They really partied and in particular they would come home kind of like screaming and shrieking. Three, four o'clock in the morning often on weeknights and bring home sexual partners. An episode about neighbors. There is gonna be a story about overhearing somebody having sex, and we could basically hear everything that happened. They made absolutely no effort to be even a little bit quiet, when we had work or school the next day. And so we agonized about what to do.'cause on the one hand, you know, like. Live and let live, let them party, let them have sex in the comfort of their own home. On the other hand, it was really not done with like any modicum of respect for the fact that we had somewhat thin walls, and it was so loud, so we decided to write a note to them, and it was kind of a respectful short and sweet note, if I'm recall recalling correctly. Just basically being like, Hey, heads up, like the walls here are pretty thin. We would appreciate if you could adhere to quiet hours or something like that.

David: 6:32

Had you ever spoken to them?

Ellie: 6:33

We didn't, no. We'd actually never even seen them. We kept pretty different hours

David: 6:39

I would imagine,

Ellie: 6:42

and so they then we get a note under our door. And it's addressed to pot. It's addressed to pot. And we're like, okay, what? Where's this going? And it was signed kettle.

David: 6:57

The pot calling the kettle black?

Ellie: 6:59

The pot was calling the kettle black.

David: 7:01

Oh,because you also were super loud sexually.

Ellie: 7:04

So this is the thing. This is the thing. Their evidence? It was this total false equivalency where they were saying that the pot was calling the kettle black because they could hear our footfalls. They could hear us walk around. And so I just had this really strong sense of injustice. I was so mad. They were like, you walk around and it's really loud, you have very heavy footfalls. And we were just like, that is not equivalent.

David: 7:33

And for our listeners who don't know Ellie personally, there is nothing that she hates more than a mild injustice.

Ellie: 7:39

Oh yeah.

David: 7:39

A mild injustice.

Ellie: 7:40

A false equivalencies, filed injustices. I hate them all.

David: 7:49

So yeah, I mean, technically there is an equivalence here insofar as if the complaint is just noise, then who cares if it is originating in a sex act or in the falling of a foot through the act of walking. But there is also a false equivalence here, insofar as one is happening at ridiculous hours of the night. one is inevitable unless you don't go anywhere. So I kind of get your point, but I do think there's a little bit of Hello Kettle. Here is pot. Today we're talking about neighbors.

Ellie: 8:24

How do relationships with our neighbors differ from other kinds of relationships?

David: 8:29

What does it mean to love thy neighbor?

Ellie: 8:31

And to what extent should we aim to be a good neighbor?

David: 8:45

Ellie, we have a very peculiar relationship to our neighbors.

Ellie: 8:49

We just established that.

David: 8:50

Aside from the sound complaints and the violation of city ordinances, I mean just structurally a neighbor is somebody that is an acquaintance, potentially even a stranger. somebody you wave to outside of your house, maybe in the elevator, but somebody that doesn't really know you well and that you don't know well. At the same time, a neighbor is somebody that has a really. Powerful and unique access to your life, right? right They know your routine. They see who comes and goes from your house. They hear as in my case, living with Cindy, what goes on in your house as well, and so they have a front row seat to your life. And so there is an interplay here of. Distance and intimacy. That is really difficult to unpack.

Ellie: 9:40

And I think this is especially true for people living in modern cities, especially in apartment buildings. So living in rural areas means you have less interaction with your neighbors. You might not see them at all. And if you live in a small town, then I'd say you're more likely to have stronger connections to your neighbors, especially if your family has lived in that town for multiple generations. But the urban condition of being a neighbor is roughly anywhere from complete anonymity to what the sociologist Mark Granovetter famously calls weak ties, and this is in his 1973 paper, the Strength of Weak Ties. Weak ties  Granovetter suggests are important to your social network, but they're not people you're very close to. And I would say a lot of us have weak ties to our neighbors, those of us who live in urban centers.

David: 10:29

Yeah. Like they're always there. They provide a sense of comfort and support, but it's not your inner circle.

Ellie: 10:35

Yeah. And you might, they might like pick up your mail when you're out of town or water your plants, but they're not somebody that you actually maybe aren't necessarily having over for dinner and confiding to all the time.

David: 10:47

Well, and I think that's a really important observation because it violates the public private distinction, or at least it relates to it in a really difficult way. So when I think about the private space, something like a dinner. I don't invite my neighbors for dinner. Especially'cause I'm an urban kid. You know, maybe I don't have those very close relationships with my neighbors. Yeah. But also, if I see a neighbor in public outside of the space that we normally share together, like the sidewalk or the grocery store at the corner, I always worry about what to do. Or what to say, like, do I say hello to them? Do I acknowledge them? Do I give them the kind distance nod like, we're here. Yeah, we see each other, and that's because they are neither, I was gonna say suitable. They're neither suitable for a public encounter, nor for a private one. Right? Yeah. It's somewhere in between. And it largely, for me, has to do with just the fact that we happen to share space. Yeah, in terms of living,

Ellie: 11:45

and I don't think that's necessarily always the case. I definitely don't think that's always the case for me. But I think what you're speaking to is the way that in addition to this troubling of the public private distinction, neighbors often have a mutual parasocial relationship with one another, right? Like this is something you were getting at in your anecdote about Cindy's teenage daughter, like she was having a parasocial relationship with you and your partner's drama and you know, listening in and then kind of breaking that fourth wall and being like, I heard it, was strange for you. You know, it meant that suddenly you were faced with the fact that she had been listening all along. And I think in a sense what this means is that our neighbors are witnesses to our lives. This might mean that maybe there's something nice about not knowing your neighbors too well. Like maybe you didn't wanna know that Cindy's daughter had overheard all of this.

David: 12:41

Yeah. No, that's right. And I wonder how much of this depends on the details of the built environment. Because for example, when I think about the times that I've lived in a big apartment complex in a city, like when I lived in Paris, there were no spaces for me to interact with my neighbors or to see them. Other than transitional spaces,

Ellie: 13:00

like bad urban planning.

David: 13:02

Yeah. I mean, it sounds like the urban jungle experience, right? Yeah. We would cross each other on the sidewalk when we're both going to our separate destinations in the elevator or in the stairs. That's it. And those are not spaces that are conducive to meaningful social interactions. Whereas when I lived with Cindy, also in a city, but in a house with a yard, we would see each other w hen we were outside, when we were like sitting reading in the yard. Yeah. So there were more spaces. So whether you have a patio, whether you have a backyard, whether you have a public park nearby. All of this kind of guides and shapes and canalizes the relationship, making it reflect in a way, the built environment.

Ellie: 13:44

But then I'm curious in those cases, so you mentioned you're not having dinner with your neighbors, you probably were having dinner with Cindy sometimes.

David: 13:50

Yeah. I was, yes.

Ellie: 13:50

Yeah. And so I'm curious about those situations even in urban centers where we are not just having mutual parasocial relationships with our neighbors, but we are building relationships with them, or we have preexisting relationships with them, and so. For instance, my apartment building. I lived in a fourplex during COVID and I didn't interact with my neighbors much before the pandemic. But then like many individuals and group, like many people during COVID, we started having weekly happy hours, socially distanced, happy hours. And then we kind that kind of begot like a little mutual aid group amongst the neighbors. And it meant that we ended up having stronger ties than before. And then in my last place, so I've just recently moved, but in the last place where I lived for the past four years, I got to know my neighbors well, A number of my neighbors. We were in this little eight bungalow court. And a number of my neighbors were already super close friends with each other, and so they'd have like happy hours on the patio all the time. They'd be hanging out and so sometimes I would join them. I did also feel like there were a lot of nice boundaries where I didn't necessarily feel obligated to join them. People had like really healthy and respectful boundaries, and so a lot of times, you know, I'd be like, Hey guys, and then head up to my place. In fact, my neighbor Ben, listens to the podcast so he's like an amazing neighbor who Yeah. Was really a part of, he was like, one of the reasons that I moved there to begin with.'cause I saw the neighbors hanging out and I was like, this is a great environment. And then a year into my living there, one of my best friends from childhood moved in, somebody I've known since I was three years old. And so she and I also had a really different relationship where I would go over very often to her house for dinner or we, you know, watch TV together. Maybe less often than you would expect.' But I think in that case, there's a way that having those kinds of relationships means that it's not just like parasocial, but I still think part of what I'm talking about when I say there are boundaries that like very common word, is that there are also different hats that we would wear in relation to one another. Like there would be sort of a distanced neighbor hat, and then sometimes we'd have like a party together and then the neighbors would come into a different form of relation. And obviously that's shaping how we're relating as neighbors. I think it's actually helping cultivate a lot of compassion and understanding of one another, especially if we overhear a neighbor fighting with their partner, right? And we're like, oh, but they're, you know, good people. I know them in these other ways, but I also think there is kind of a, still a difference. Like my relationship with my friend Kelly, whom I lived next door to, was a bit different qua neighbor. We then also developed a neighbor relation. That was, you know, not totally separate from our close friendship. Yeah, but that was a bit distinct from it in a way. Maybe I'm just like weirdly compartmentalizing.

David: 16:36

No, but I think it's natural to compartmentalize when we live in different living compartments. Right? And I do think it makes a difference whether you have a preexisting relationship to your neighbors or not. Yeah. But also one thing that stood out to me over the course of my various interactions with various neighbors in different places and in different living circumstances is just how magically quick, the transition from stranger to acquaintance can happen with a a neighbor because I can go, and this is on me entirely, not on the neighbors because I am also a solitary kind of distanced character. As a neighbor, I can go for months and years. Not really interacting with my neighbors, but then if something forces an interaction, then I suddenly feel like we've crossed the threshold in the course of a few minutes, that now changes the character and the texture of the relationship. And so I have had situations where, you know, I had a neighbor for a long time, and then from one day to the next one, we became good friends. And there was nothing that was needed for that other than a small catalyst like. Realizing that we have a shared hobby. Yeah, this happened not too long ago to me in San Francisco when I learned that one of my neighbors played volleyball. And yeah, it just completely transformed the the relationship. And so I think there is this ambiguity, but also this sense of possibility with neighbors that is always unrealized and on the verge of possibly leading to a new kind of relationship.

Ellie: 18:07

I think that new kind of relationship, like you said, is beautiful and exciting, but also something that I tend to be a bit cautious about because it's one thing for a neighbor to knock on your door asking if you have like an extra onion. It's another thing for them to sort of like invite themselves in at any hour and in, you know, any different kind of way. And so I feel like I'm also really interested in the ways that we kind of hold up those barriers between ourselves and our neighbors. And interestingly, there was a 2024 survey on interactions with neighbors. That found that more than two thirds of respondents hid from their neighbors at least once. And so here a few of the most common neighbor avoidance techniques. Alright, number one is pretending you don't see them. Followed closely behind by number two, which is staying inside when they're outside. Number three, acting like you're not home. That was one I used when I was studying abroad in Paris and singing extremely high. I was trying to hit a high sea at midnight. One night after choir, my neighbor knocked on the door with, he has a small baby, and I just was like, pretending I'm not home, like as though he couldn't hear me. So those are a few of them. I'm kind of surprised by pretending you don't see them being number one.

David: 19:24

No, that makes sense to me because that is my default mode of interacting with neighbors.

Ellie: 19:29

What? Like where and when are you pretending not to see them? In the elevator?

David: 19:34

On this sidewalk where it's like, I will pull out my phone sometimes. I know this is. This sounds like something that we shouldn't do, but it is something that I do and that I've done.

Ellie: 19:45

Okay.

David: 19:45

And so I will pull out my phone or I will just magically be very interested in the leaves of the trees, or I will be so lost in thought, kind of like Thales who fail into the well, and I'm looking up at the stars philosophizing so that I don't look at them eye to eye.

Ellie: 20:04

Oh my God,

David: 20:05

But I mean, part of the inner monologue that motivates that really weird behavior is that I worry that due to this strange, pure sociality, I won't know what to talk to them about, especially if we're not

Ellie: 20:20

Yeah, yeah.

David: 20:20

So it's an anxiety of contact where it's like, okay, we live together, or we live next to one another, but if we interact right now, it's going to feel like a very forced social interaction. What are we gonna talk about? The weather. The other classic neighbors, you know, I, I'd kind of rather just not, I'd rather skip that. And I here wanna add that even though I do that, I also recognize that our neighbor relationships also have this power over us, just by virtue of their duration. Because when you think about a neighbor, it's somebody that you've shared space with and shared concerns and cares with sometimes for months, years, even decades. And so, especially when we're getting to the longer end of that duration.

Ellie: 21:11

Yeah.

David: 21:12

The temporality alone forces an intimacy in a sense of mutual interest that is undeniable. And that coexists paradoxically with the, I'm turning my head to the side if I see you in public. And that's what I find so fascinating about our relationship. To neighbor is that it's both of those things at

Ellie: 21:31

Thankfully, I didn't live below or above the kettle girls for very long, but yeah. And I think, you know, the, the duration that you're speaking of, it's reminded me of how long I've known the neighbors from my childhood home for and how they, they've seen me through so many different phases, but I wanna think too about how the ethical and political views of our neighbors and their values really affect you. So maybe less like in terms of the duration and more terms of the breadth of their present values. Yeah, it spring to mind because I have pretty different values than some of the neighborhoods, neighbor, neighbors from my childhood neighborhood, but they're still meaningful people to me. And so here's what I'm thinking, I think the values of your neighbors in some ways affect you less than the values of the people that you choose to be close with, but in some ways affect you more than the values of those people. So, okay. So for instance, if I'm not having dinner with my neighbors frequently, they're ethical and political views aren't likely to come up. They're not ones that I'm gonna have to converse with them about, right?

David: 22:40

at the elevator.

Ellie: 22:41

yeah, like I've had a neighbor who's TV watching habits I would see and who had like, was watching some pretty scary right-wing podcast bros. And luckily that those watching habits didn't really affect me. Whereas if I were close friends with that person, that would be bound to come up, that would be uncomfortable. We would kind of like, you know, maybe have to talk about it or change our relationship. It does not matter to me at all that my neighbor was watching those videos. However, in some ways I think the values of our neighbors might affect us more. And so, for instance, if I have a racist neighbor and a friend of color comes up the driveway and the neighbor like asks them what they're doing there, you know, that's gonna, very much affect me, not to mention my friend, or if you know, I have an unhoused neighbor and one of the other neighbors is sort of wanting to marshal us together and like maybe call the authorities. Their views towards unhoused people are actually maybe gonna affect me more than the views toward unhoused people of a friend of mine, because it's actually kind of involving neighborhood action. Does that make sense?

David: 23:50

No, it does. It makes perfect sense and it actually, it's something that happened to me when I lived in Atlanta that I invited one of my friends at the time to come hang out at my house, and he kind of got lost in the apartment complex that you mentioned. I lived in

Ellie: 24:01

Emery Woods. That place was a shithole.

David: 24:04

It shit hole, but it's what I could afford as a graduate student. And my friend came over, he kind of got lost, and one of my neighbors who was a white man sort of stopped him

Ellie: 24:13

Oh yeah.

David: 24:14

And was threatening to call the police, because he was convinced that this guy was somebody who had been breaking into cars, I guess, at night

Ellie: 24:21

Oh my God.

David: 24:22

And, there, of course I was mortified for my friend. But I also then experienced what in Spanish we call pena ajena. This, like, I felt ashamed for my neighbor. I his shame that he was not living in the flesh. And it really took me out of my element in the moment and decentered me.'cause I had to take care of my friend and I just didn't know how to even explain to him what happened. Because on the one hand, I'm not responsible for my neighbor, that guy I don't even know. But on the other hand, he is my neighbor. And so I am partly responsible for this experience that an innocent bystander had. But this brings into focus an important point that the sociologist, Hannu Ruonavaara makes in an article called The Anatomy of Neighbor Relations, which is about agency in relation to our neighbors. In some ways, we don't choose our neighbors, you know, it's like a lottery system. When you move somewhere, you don't have that information ahead of time, but in some ways, we also do choose our neighbors, because especially if you have enough money, you can choose the kind of neighborhood that you move into. So that's another kind of paradox of individual choice versus social determination.

Ellie: 25:36

Yeah. Well, and the more wealthy you are, the more choices you have, right? And so if you're poor, you have a lot less individual choice in this matter. I mean, for example with school districts, like choosing, ah, I wanna choose like the good school district and where I live in all of that. And then you also get like the NIMBY effect there too, where it's like, oh, if I can afford to live in this really nice neighborhood, then I don't want there to be low income, let alone unhoused people around me. Because like I can afford this, so it should just be other rich people around me. And that's obviously so toxic. And you know, the wealthier you are, the more choice you have over which neighbors to have. But I also think you have more choice about whether to have neighbors at all, right? And so, you know, obviously not all people who live in rural areas are wealthy by any stretch of the imagination. But when we're talking about about choice, like you could choose to sort of hide in a gated community or have an estate where you have no neighbors around. You like to buy a large plot of land. And so I think like, we see there that a marker of extreme wealth is the ability not to have meaningful contact with others. And this also brings us to the point that when you're not rich and you can't sequester yourself in a mansion or a state, you're necessarily exposed to difference through neighbors, especially if you're in an urban center, right? And so there's a kind of social mixing in a neighborhood.

David: 26:58

Yeah, and I think that social mixing happens in all neighborhoods to some degree because you literally can't pick your neighbors unless you are that super wealthy person who is sequestering themselves, you know, in an estate

Ellie: 27:11

There's also co-op rules where, you know, you have to vet like in fancy co-op buildings in New York City. You have to vet potential new residents so you can choose your neighbors there. But anyway,

David: 27:19

Yeah, that's the exception to the Exception. to the rule. And so I think the social mixing happens most of the time, but within bounds. And the bounds here have to do with large scale sociological patterns of the relationship between class and neighborhoods. Right. Where if you're living in a neighborhood that is predominantly a particular race or a low income neighborhood. There you are exposed to less difference in relation to those variables. Than in other neighborhoods where there is more mixing, of classes, nationalities, religions, et cetera. And it makes me think about that claim that you often hear about the importance of your neighborhood as a social determinant for things like educational opportunities for positive health outcomes for upward economic mobility. really wanna know what somebody's chances of quote unquote success in life are, look at the zip code.

Ellie: 28:20

Yeah. And so I think what we see here throughout this discussion is that neighbors are somewhere in the middle between being same versus being other. And I think this explains some of the ambiguities of proximity and distance that we were talking about earlier. And it also explains why we sometimes click with our neighbors and sometimes we don't, but we never know ahead of time which people we're gonna click with. Right?

David: 28:42

Is there a kettle? Is there a pot?

Ellie: 28:43

Yeah, I know, right? So there's a lot of uncertainty about that. I mean like, like I mentioned, I chose my last place in part because I saw the neighbors hanging out outside and they seemed awesome. But you know, there's still uncertainty when you move to a new place about whether you're gonna click with the neighbors and which ones you're gonna click with.

David: 28:58

Yeah. And I think this depends partly on the kind of person that you are. You know, some people are really friendly with their neighbors. They leave the basket to their neighbors when they first move in to precipitate an encounter.

Ellie: 29:08

Thanksto my neighbor Anna, for my chopsticks.

David: 29:10

If I had gotten chopsticks, I would've been friendly with everybody.

Ellie: 29:32

In the book of Leviticus, love thy neighbor is one of the commandments. And when Jesus was asked which of the commandments was the most important, he named love thy neighbor as one of the top two. First was loving God, but second was loving your neighbor as yourself.

David: 29:49

And I mean, I'm here going back to my catechism classes because you see this very clearly in The Parable of the Good Samaritan from

the Bible, which is in Luke, 10: 29:57

30. I wanna read the parable. Just a little bit of background to the context. Jesus is being questioned by a lawyer who tells him, Hey, Jesus, how do I gain eternal life? And Jesus says, the answer is love thy neighbor, to which the lawyer responds, but, what does that mean? Who is my neighbor? And then we get the following story of how Jesus responds to this question.

Ellie: 30:22

So it's a response to a definitional question. About who or what is your neighbor? Ooh.

David: 30:26

How do I know who is a neighbour in this sense?

Ellie: 30:29

Yeah, Okay.

David: So this is Luke 10: 30:30

30. In reply, Jesus said, A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho. When he was attacked by robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him, and ,went away, leaving him half dead. A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man he passed by on the other side. So to a Levites, when he came to the place and saw him passed by on the other side, but a samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was. And when he saw him, he took pity on him. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn and took care of him. The next day, he took out to Denari, gave them to the innkeeper. Look after him. He said, and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have. Then Jesus asked the lawyer after telling him this parable, who do you think was the good neighbor in this story? And the lawyer response, of course, it's the man who showed mercy, rather than either the priest or the Levite.

Ellie: 31:45

Okay. And the Samaritan is from like the, there's less of a physical proximity, right, between where the Samaritan is from and where this person's story is from. And so that's part of what the surprise of the story is. It's like, oh, it's not the person that you would expect

David: 32:01

Yeah, like a priest,

Ellie: 32:02

Yeah. It's the Samaritan. It's the person from farther away. And so we see the theme. Of the neighbor as not being about physical proximity or ethnic similarity, but as being about moral obligation and mercy and, here. Right. It's the complete stranger who was the real neighbor.

David: 32:22

And I want us to think about this in connection to the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. Because in Levinas's philosophy, the concept of the neighbor is really central. Levina writes a lot about the concept of alterity and difference in relation to morality and, and he talks about the radical alterity of the other, like in the case of the Samaritan, the fact that when I encounter another person, another being, that other being is so radically unlike me that I will never be able to capture who they are, their essence, their meaning, their significance with any concepts, with any ideas, with any preconceptions that I bring to the table. And so it means that I'm always in a relationship of lack or lack of understanding and mastery, in relation to the other. And that alterity for him is the ground of all ethics. And which, in philosophical discourse, his approach to ethics is called Alterity ethics. When he writes about this difference, he uses the term neighbor to capture the figure of the other. So it's about the difference of the other as the condition for the possibility of ethical relations altogether.

Ellie: 33:34

and I'm so glad you bring this up because when you told me that you wanted to talk a little bit about Levinas in relation to the neighbor, I was like, where does Levinas talk about the neighbor? I had totally forgotten, even though I'm really familiar with his philosophy, because he's using the neighbor so differently from how we usually think about it, as you just described, right? The neighbor is the figure of absolute difference or otherness. And you know, I mean, you could, based on what we talked about a little bit ago, just be like, well, that's a weird idea of neighbor because it doesn't track with any way that we ordinarily use it. But if you go back to, I mean, and you know, Levinas is very deeply drawing on the Hebraic tradition and the Old Testament tradition. I guess, you know, the, the Good Samaritan comes from the New Testament story of Jesus. But still, I think there's this sense that. The ethical obligation doesn't require any similarity, shared values, feelings of compassion toward the other, or even a sense of duty. It's really just like a sheer response to the presence of the other, or what Levinas sometimes calls the face.

David: 34:41

Yeah. The face of the other, as he puts it, for example, in his book otherwise than being, is that when I encounter another I, I encounter their face, which by that he doesn't mean literally their

Ellie: 34:53

Eyes, nose and mouth?

David: 34:54

Yeah, he means who they are. Yeah. He says that in my encounter with the face of the other, I see that the face of the other already has inscribed within it, the commandment, thou shall not kill. Mm-hmm. And so Levina is trying to ground ethics in the phenomenology of intersubjectivity and that is sort of his critique of theological conceptions of morality, where the commandment thou shall not kill or love thy neighbor is not something that we get from a divine source. It's something that we get from our relationship with other people, and it's just something that we see there in the flesh. The very moment that we look at the face of the other.

Ellie: 35:38

Yeah, and I think one response you sometimes hear to this view that Levinas articulates is like, okay, but how helpful is this from a day-to-day perspective? Right. If I'm just responding to the sheer alterity of the other, rather than being like, Hey, that political flag that you have that I really disagree with, that's inching on my lawn, is pissing me off, or like you're parking in my parking spot. You know, it, it doesn't seem evident how Leno's framework can really help us with those day-to-day interactions. He thinks that communication and justice are sort of downstream of our ethical relations, and so I'm curious sort of what response you have to that. And I ask in part because I was really enamored of Leno's ethics when I was a grad student, and then by the end of grad school I had sort of fallen out of love with it. And I think there's a lot of great stuff in Levinas, but I'm just like, I find myself bumping up against the idea that his ethics is just sort of overly abstract to be helpful, even if it's grounded in this phenomenology of, you know, being faced with another person.

David: 36:46

Yeah. So I might agree with the claim that it's not a guide for how to interact with people who are, you know, encroaching upon your space and for dealing with literal neighborly conflicts and relations. But I do think it's a way of orienting ourselves morally in the world and to see. Other individuals as more than we could ever imagine them to be to ground respect for them and in a sense that kind of moral servitude toward them. Because there is a passivity that is emphasized in levinas and ethics in the fact that they are beyond my reach. And so for Levinas, my first encounter with the face of the other is always somewhat of a trauma. It's not like I'm encountering a friend that I recognize. It's not a positive encounter. It's something that on grounds me, that unsettles me, and that in doing so, opens up the possibility for ethics. so I would say that it's not. A practical guide for ethical interactions, but it is a phenomenal, logical condition of possibility for those relations. So it's deeper than the practical day-to-day interactions.

Ellie: 37:56

And that, I think you mentioned the unsettling I think is important to this. I'm just having a look back at some of what he says about the neighbor in otherwise than being, you probably know this already, David, but I have so many issues with the Alfonso Lingus translations of Levinas, but I'm going to be reading from it now. I don't have any marginal notes correcting the translation in this paragraph, so we'll just go with it here. But, he says, the neighbor concerns me before all assumption, all commitment consented to a ref. Used, I am bound to him. Him who is, however, the first one on the scene not signaled, unparalleled. I'm bound to him before any liaison contracted. So what he's saying is that I don't enter into a relationship with the neighbor based on a sort of mutual agreement. Rather I find myself always already bound to them. And he goes on to say, the neighbor assigns me before I designate him. This is a modality, not of a knowing, but of an obsession. A shuttering of the human, quite different from cognition. And so like I feel hailed or known by the neighbor, or maybe not known, but

David: 38:58

or called into question.

Ellie: 39:00

Yeah, by the neighbor before I even, I'm sort of like. Looking at the neighbor as they are right. And knowing them.

David: 39:07

Well, and I think that's a really important point because the experience of the face of the other IE the neighbor for levina is not a conceptual moment. It's not even. A theoretical moment. Yeah. It's something that we, I think shuttering is correct. It's something that shakes us to our very core and that it's just part of the very nature of intersubjectivity where when I encounter another person, I recognize in their very being ontologically that they are not a chair, that they are not a table, that they're not an inanimate object. And that in not being inanimate, they are a moral question for me, how I ought treat them. How? I comport myself in their presence, and I really like the way the philosopher and sociologist Anna Strhan talks about our relationship to the neighbor in Levinas because she has this reading of Levinasian and philosophy where she says that our relationship to the neighbor's a relationship of proximityc for Levinas, because there is an encounter, but the proximity in question is not spatial, it's rather a movement where I feel pulled toward the neighbor. That's what you were alluding to with the notion of interpolation or feeling addressed by the neighbor. Where I am being pulled toward the neighbor morally, and the closer I get pulled to them, the more my responsibility for them grows. So there is this logic of the infinite approach of me toward the neighbor, and that translating into an infinite growing responsibility where I am over the course of time, more and more and more morally bound oo this entity that surpasses every category that I could apply to them.

Ellie: 40:50

Yeah. And seemingly surprisingly, at first glance, this proximity isn't getting to know the other better or being similar to them. It's actually a revelation of their fundamental alterity to you. And I think, biographically speaking, part of this levinas is drawing from his own Jewish identity and the fact that he was taken as a prisoner of war by the Nazis, as well as the fact that most of his family died in the Holocaust. And so his idea of the face of the other as what demands, I wouldn't even say respect, it's just like a response because respect is too cony encoded. But that's his response to the Holocaust because he thought the Holocaust represented the most brutal violation of Alterity. And I would say also of proximity, right? It's a denial of proximity and a violation of alterity. This refusal to recognize the otherness of the other and to respond to the otherness of the other.

David: 41:43

Yeah. And I think that failure is seen in the instrumentalization of life, in the Holocaust, right. That what the Nazis did was not just reduce the other to the image that they had of them, but that they reduced other living beings all the way to the status of Non-living entities or inanimate objects that could be disposed of at will. And so the failure is a failure of ethics on an ontological level. They failed to see the face of the other. They've, they failed in this most fundamental ethical sense. And I wanna say here also in terms of now I'm thinking about your question earlier about, you know, how helpful is this in terms of the practical day-to-day versus a more general ethical reorientation in our mode of ethical being that Levinas has two different terms available to him for thinking about neighbors. In romance languages like French, Spanish, and Italian. There are two terms for neighbor. There is a term for a literal neighbor, like somebody who literally lives next to you, you know, like your friend

Ellie: 42:48

Voisin.

David: 42:49

Yeah, voisin in French or vecino in Spanish.

Ellie: 42:53

Oh like vicinity.

David: 42:54

Yeah. Vicinity.

Ellie: 42:55

Whoa. I never realized that. Cool.

David: 42:57

Yeah, and there's another term for referring to a neighbor in the moral, religious, spiritual sense of the term as a fellow human being, which is the sense in which it's used in the love thy neighbor commandment. And in French, that term is prochain, in Spanish it's projimo and it means the other person with whom I share the world. So I think this linguistic distinction, which unfortunately doesn't exist in English. In English, we just have the one word neighbor, so we can't recognize that important difference. Levinas's philosophy is oriented toward the prochain, not the voisin. And so it's not an ethics for voisinage, for like living with other people in physical space.

Ellie: 43:39

It's not an ethics for the kettle girls.

David: 43:41

Yeah. It's an ethics of, as you said, call and response in the face of radical alterity. Craving more Overthink? Subscribe to our substack for an extended version of our episodes, community chat, and additional bonus content. If you'd prefer to make a one-time, tax-deductible payment, you can learn more at our website, overthinkpodcast.com. Your support helps cover key production costs and allows us to pay our student assistants a fair wage. We've talked about how Levinas's ethical philosophy is a philosophy of the prochain rather than the voison. But, I think it's important to recognize that although we should ask what our ethical duties are to the religious sense of the neighbor, we also should ask what our ethical duties are to literal neighbors. So what are our ethical duties to the voison?

Ellie: 44:40

So I think this is tricky for a number of reasons and for a number of reasons that we've already discussed. One is the fact that many neighborly relations are at least somewhat parasocial in nature. I think it's also tricky in certain respects because some of our relations to our neighbors are mediated through rules and regulations such as a lease, you know? And so I could tell the kettle girls, Hey, there are quiet hours between this time and this time. And then they, I mean, could illegitimately respond. Well, you're allowed too. Right? And so I actually, I find the rules and regulations governing neighbor relations, actually, to be really helpful in certain regards. It's what allowed me, I had, oh, I used to live to the next door. I think I've talked about this in overthink. I used to live next door to this, just like egregious nursing home, just like the apotheosis of the evils of the American healthcare system and they had deliveries at like crazy early times. This is definitely not the worst thing that they did at all, but it was what affected me most as a neighbor. And I was able to advocate for the changing of the times of the delivery by continually appealing rules. So there's that, you know, but then of course we get into the muddy gray areas of, well, when our neighbor relations are not governed by rules and regulations. Sort of what duties do we have? What can we expect of our neighbors in return?

David: 46:06

If you follow the news cycle, you know that the thing that San Francisco gets targeted for a lot by the conservative national news media is the problem of unhoused individuals San Francisco and. What I want to allude to here with this comment is that who counts as a neighbor in the literal sense is an open question. Because when I first moved to San Francisco, you know there are some clear candidates that just count by definition as neighbors, like the ones that share a wall with you. But there were also a number of unhoused individuals who lived in my neighborhood, who I saw as neighbors, and I spent a lot of time wondering what my ethical duties were to them in particular. Because they have very different needs and even the relationship I have toward them cannot be equated to the relationship I have to people who live in inside home. And a lot of this came sort of crashing down morally for me one day when a woman who lived in my neighborhood and whom I had seen for about. About two years, I would say regularly. She lived in this corner, a block away from my house, and I had a number of interactions with them. Sometimes I offered food, sometimes I offered money. She came to request water at my house a couple of times

Ellie: 47:26

Such a good liberal, David. No kidding.

David: 47:28

gosh. And I also had negative experiences with her. Yeah 'cause she struggled also with mental health issues. You know, she threatened me a few times. She spit in my direction multiple times. She threatened to come up and cut me in one time.

Ellie: 47:42

I remember talking to you after that, that was not a fun experience.

David: 47:46

And then one day she disappeared from the neighborhood and I never knew what happened to her. To this day I don't. And it drew me into a minor moral crisis.'cause I. I didn't know what I should do. Should I look for her? Should I have retroactively done other things? Which is probably true. In any case, But yeah. Who counts as a neighbor? I'm still in the position of that lawyer. In the Parable of the Good Samaritan. You know how far is a neighbor a neighbor. Quite literally, in terms of spatial distance.

Ellie: 48:19

And I think part of what is tricky when we're talking about unhoused neighbors is the question of the public and private distinction. And so, you know, there are some people who wanna say the public and private distinction itself is a creation of bourgeois capitalism that needs to be destroyed. But you know, we do live with a very real public and private distinction, and I think like strong social democracies that offer everybody, regardless of their status, a place to live are like, I think that's just like unequivocally good thing and we should be doing that even if we ask broader questions about like whether we wanna hold onto the public private distinction. Because I think part of what happens with unhoused neighbors is that there's a carving out of a private space in what is designed to be a public space, and that can cause a lot of friction. I mean, we saw this a lot. I used to live in Echo Park in LA and especially during COVID, there was a big proliferation of tents in Echo Park Lake, and that was challenging for a lot of neighbors because like one of the few public spaces that people could use as parks. People were saying, well now it's like somebody's living room or like somebody's bathroom or somebody's kitchen. And there, there was like a mutual aid kitchen that popped up and there were some really exciting things that happened, but there were also some very real tensions around what people perceived to be the co-opting of public space for private space.

David: 49:47

Especially in cities where public space is so rare, but it also is a question of priorities, riight? Is my access to public space going to trump somebody's basic need for a space for cooking food?

Ellie: 50:00

Especially like during a pandemic when so many people lost their income. And there was an eviction moratorium, but people were still losing housing

David: 50:07

Yeah. And so in these cases, I think those arguments seem intuitive that we want to protect public space 'cause it's a public good to be shared, but it also hinges on a false equivalence of sorts, Of which priorities matter, and to what degree they ought to trump or act as trump cards for others. Now, aside from this, I wanna add another possible dilemma in relation to our neighbors and our ethical relationships and duties toward them. And this is also rooted in an experience I had in San Francisco where I heard scary noises in my neighbor's house, and I didn't know. How serious they were. I didn't know what they meant. And so it brought up the question for me, how do I know when I intervene, if ever in the life of my neighbor in their privacy? Or you know, in relation to their private life by doing something like calling the police. And you know, how do I know when to enforce distance, when maybe they are entering into my private life a little bit more than I want to.

Ellie: 51:16

Yeah.

David: 51:16

And there is no clear answer to that.

Ellie: 51:19

Well, and that also speaks to this isn't rules and regulations like this is the police state. And so Yeah, and I think especially, I struggled with this in Atlanta too, with a different, it was the same, same apartment as the Kettle girls, but it was a couple who lived there before the Kettle girls. And I would hear them have like some pretty intense fights. And I did intervene once because I heard the woman. Like yell, stop or no, or something like that. And it was very clear that there actually like wasn't much that I could do. But then I remember asking a friend like, should I call the police? And then she was like, well, you have to look into the jurisdiction around domestic violence, like the arrest laws, right? Because as I think we've talked about maybe in our discretion episode or we read about the Barry book.

David: 52:04

Yeah, we about it. When do you arrest, when do you not in cases of domestic abuse?

Ellie: 52:09

Yeah. And you know, many states have laws that force you to arrest at least one of the people who's involved in a domestic spat that a neighbor has called the cops to respond to. And so I think that also like raises really challenging questions too.

David: 52:24

The intervention in some ways. You, it's easier to know because you can justify it based on the danger. The enforcing a distance seems morally and socially more problematic because it almost seems like a violation of the spirit of neighborliness. It's like, oh, somebody is making an effort to get to know you and you are putting a stop to that.

Ellie: 52:46

Yeah. Yeah.

David: 52:47

And you know, another very quick anecdote about this that also connects to the lack of clarity we have around who is a neighbor? Another situation that happened outside of my apartment in San Francisco is when I heard sex workers sort of in a, in a fight. And

Ellie: 53:04

And

David: 53:05

there it was, both of those questions at once. Yeah. It was, yeah. Are they neighbors? Are they not? They work here regularly and I kind of know them. And on the other hand, do I intervene knowing how fraught the relationship is between sex workers and the police force,

Ellie: 53:21

How did you respond to those questions?

David: 53:23

In this case? I didn't call the police. And it's funny because I've realized over the years, I don't know where this comes from. I suspect maybe it has something to do with being a person of color. It has never been my intuition to call the police. I have never, once, even when I've been in scary situations, I've never thought the police will make this better. Yeah. Even when retroactively, it becomes clear that maybe it would've, yeah. And even when people that I am with, who in many cases have been white people, have had the thought, oh, let's call the police, and I just realized how strange sounding that thought is, once I hear it verbalized.

Ellie: 54:01

In our alternative models of justice, like restorative justice require a lot of interaction with people and like a strong sense of ties. Those ties don't have to be that you share, you know, the same like class ethnic, racial background, but they do have to, there, there have to be some strong ties there, which I think is challenging in the kinds of urban environments that we live in. Okay. This is gonna sound like a really weird pivot, but you know, I really wanted to talk about Rear Window and so I just, we, we, we had to close the episode soon and I wanted to mention, 'cause this is like classic neighbor movie and it is about when you intervene and so.

David: 54:39

Okay, so I've seen the movie, but can you very briefly give me a synopsis?

Ellie: 54:44

So this is this classic Hitchcock film. There's a photojournalist named Jeff who has recently been injured and is recovering. So he is basically like confined to his apartment. He's hanging out in his wheelchair and he's watching his neighbors through his rear window. You know, he couldn't scroll or like watch Netflix at this time. And so his entertainment is his neighbors. He's got like this dancer, neighbor, and he's got like a few other neighbors that I'm forgetting right now. But there's this one neighbor, the salesman named Thorwald or Torvald, depending on how I'm forgetting how they pronounce it in the movie. I was like looking back at the synopsis, but he sees Thorwald making suspicious trips with a suitcase after seeing Thorwald sick wife and hearing a scream in the apartment. Sorry, I kind of gave that backwards. So he hears a scream in the apartment. He knows  Thorwald lives with his sick wife. One night Jeff hears a scream. It seems like it's coming from Al's apartment, and then he sees Thorwald making suspicious trips with a suitcase then.

David: 55:51

Yeah, the temporal order does matter there.

Ellie: 55:53

Then this neighbor's dog is barking. Oh yeah. It was digging. Well, sorry. It wasn't, oh my God. Okay. I need to look back on my notes for this. I'm like tryin to just say this off the cuff. Okay, so he sees a neighbor's dog digging in Thor Wall's, flower bed. Then the neighbor's dog is killed. And so it turns out that Thorwald killed his wife and the dog.

David: 56:14

Surprise, surprise.

Ellie: 56:15

I know, but the neighbor, like, it's through Jeff's interventions that that comes out, but he struggles a lot with.

David: 56:22

with.

Ellie: 56:23

Am I seeing what I'm really seeing? Am I connecting the pieces correctly? I don't really know this guy. And so like how, what are my responsibilities, obligations, and like how and when should intervene. It ends with Jeff alerting the police, but Thorwald confronting Jeff and they fight before the police arrive. So the police like end up kind of saving the day here, I guess.

David: 56:51

Takeaway is call the cops, y'all.

Ellie: 56:54

If you're an old white man.

David: 56:56

So I remember the movie and I remember thinking about it primarily through the lens of voyeurism, because it's a movie about seeing all these neighbors having access into their private

Ellie: 57:06

Witnessing.

David: 57:07

Yeah, witnessing, which we talked about. I also remember that as the movie is progressing, it's actually really unclear whether there is really something sinister happening or whether it's all a projection from the fantasy of this voyeur. Right.

Ellie: 57:22

Exactly.

David: 57:22

yeah, so I think in this case, of course, later we know that it was, a well-grounded suspicion, but we need to retmember hat we are in the position of the voyeur before he knows for sure. Whether something bad happened or not. Yeah. And I don't wanna answer this story with a, an anecdote, but that acting on fragmentary knowledge happened to me in Paris when I had a neighbor who screamed very scary things to her children and her partner above me, to the point that my partner said, I think at some point we might need to call the police. She would threaten to throw the children out of the window. Really, truly scary things and. And then we learned after about five, six months that the woman struggles with mental health and lives alone.

Ellie: 58:14

Mm.

David: 58:15

And it really brings into focus this point that in relation to our neighbors, we always only have fragmentary knowledge. And that fragmentary knowledge opens the door to fantasies that we might project onto our neighbors that we experience as perceptions, we think we're seeing something. When we might be imagining. and I think remembering that is really important for thinking about, you know, real life decisions. Like, do I call the cops? Do I make a complaint?

Ellie: 58:48

Did you find out about this neighbor's condition through another neighbour?

David: 58:53

Through another neighbor.

Ellie: 58:54

See, that's an important piece of the puzzle, right? Even though boundaries between neighbors are important, I think that broader network is crucial as well. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please consider subscribing to Overthink on substack for extended episodes, community chats and other additional content, and thanks to those of you who already do.

David: 59:06

To connect with us, find episode transcripts and make one-time tax deductible donations. Please check out our website, overthink podcast.com. We also have a thriving YouTube channel as well as TikTok, Instagram and Twitter accounts at Overthink_Pod.

Ellie: 59:31

We'd like to thank our audio editor, Aaron Morgan, our production assistant Bayarmaa Bat-Erdene and Kristen Taylor, and Samuel PK Smith for the original music. And to our listeners, thanks so much for overthinking with us.