Episode 49 - Gossip

Transcript

David: 0:06

Hi, I'm David Pena Guzman,

Ellie: 0:08

And I'm Ellie Anderson. Welcome to Overthink,

David: 0:11

the podcast where two friends,

Ellie: 0:13

who are also professors

David: 0:15

put philosophy in dialogue with the everyday.

Ellie: 0:18

Because big ideas are within everyone's reach.

David: 0:30

Ellie, there is this story going around online about Socrates. Supposedly, he had a triple filter test for gossip. A citizen would come up to him and tell him something. And then Socrates had three questions that he would ask before he decided if he wanted to hear the gossip. And the three questions are, is it true? Is it positive? And is it useful? And upon meeting none of those conditions, the underlying assumption there being that gossip is idle bullshit slander, he would disregard the value of the gossip and the ethics of having brought that to his attention.

Ellie: 1:13

Oh, my God. I- it's like, um, it's like a water filter. This filters out these three different levels of toxins. So this is almost certainly not true. Socrates would not have had a triple filter test. First off, the dude claimed to know nothing anyway. And so the idea that he would have some like schematized test is totally ridiculous. And in looking at the references to this online, right, a Medium pop psychology article and just like all this random stuff. So I feel pretty confident in saying that this is gossip about Socrates. The triple filter test that Socrates had for gossip is nothing but gossip.

David: 1:50

So meta, but I don't know, even if it is not true that he ever presented this test, I can kind of see it fitting into the rationalism of his way of thinking, because he does want people to speak to him only in very direct, clear definitions that hold together, according to the principles of logic. So I could imagine Socrates being like, if it's not a clear answer to my questions, it's gossip and therefore unethical.

Ellie: 2:20

Yeah. I mean, I guess the extent that a lot of gossip trades on hearsay, not all of it, right? Sometimes we gossip about people that others have told us directly, but then we're presenting it to another, which is indirect, of course. But a lot of gossip too is like, oh my God, I heard from so-and-so that this other person slept with so and so, and blah, blah, blah. Right. That doesn't seem particularly likely to hold up to Socrates' method of questioning people and trying to get to the bottom of things, uh, based on reason.

David: 2:54

Yes. The rumor mill apparently is not part of the Socratic dialectic.

Ellie: 3:01

I don't know though. I mean, I think it's funny when people are trying to go back and say like, oh, there's a story about this ancient Greek philosopher and give credence to some listical version of their moral argument, right, which is that gossip is bad.

David: 3:21

Yeah. As if Socrates is just a self-help expert for the 21st century trapped in the body of a fourth century BCE Greek man.

Ellie: 3:32

But I think definitely it trades on our kind of cultural imaginary around gossip, which is that gossip is a bad thing.

David: 3:41

Confusion of gossip with rumors, with lying, and the sense that those who engage in gossip probably have questionable characters. I do think that's part of our cultural imaginary.

Ellie: 3:54

Yeah, no. This idea of, is it true, is it positive, and is it useful as being the three characteristics of Socrates triple filter test. It actually has some weird similarities to Aristotle's theory of friendship, which distinguishes between complete or true friendship, pleasant friendship, and useful friendships. So maybe somebody just read Aristotle in a class, misattributed to Socrates, and then decided to make a triple filter test on their listicle on Medium.

David: 4:23

Well, I think we need to create a new triple filter test for

gossip and mine is: 4:26

is it juicy? Is it juicy? Is it juicy? And if the answer is no, I don't want to hear it. Just inverting the Greeks on their head.

Ellie: 4:42

Today, we're talking about gossip.

David: 4:45

Gossip is often considered a vice that we should avoid.

Ellie: 4:49

Feminists and evolutionary biologists suggest that it is a fundamental mode of social interaction.

David: 4:55

How do we know when gossip is a vice or a virtue?

Ellie: 5:07

In his lectures on anthropology, Immanuel Kant warns of the dangers of gossiping at dinner parties, which I just love. The author of The Critique of Pure Reason, telling his students be careful around gossiping at dinner parties.

David: 5:24

Uh, yeah. It's neither pure nor rational, obviously.

Ellie: 5:29

Well, here's what he says. Quote, it goes without saying that in all dinner parties, even one at an inn, whatever is said publicly by an indiscreet table companion to the detriment of someone absent may not be used outside this party and may not be gossiped about.

David: 5:48

Ooh. So if Kant is sitting at a dinner party at an inn, of course, 18th century German inn, and suddenly a table companion starts talking shit about somebody else, Kant will just turn up his nose and pretend like he didn't hear it, like this is not the kind of conversation that we have at my table gentle man or woman.

Ellie: 6:10

Well, okay. Yes and no. His reasoning here is more about privacy and trust. So he says that dinner parties have a duty of secrecy about them with respect to what might later cause inconvenience after the dinner party, to the people who were there. So it sounds to me like he's not against talking about people at the dinner party, but he is against spreading what was told at the dinner party around afterward. So this is like a, what gets said at a dinner party stays at a dinner party situation. And his biographer says that he gossiped a lot at the dinner parties that he hosted.

David: 6:45

Well, yes, I know that he loved really fancy parties and apparently had a really expensive taste in wine and a pretty fashionable slash impressive wine collection. So I just think of Kant as like the most unimpressive, probably the least fun philosopher. And yet here he is having all these Kiki's way, way before Kiki-ing was a thing.

Ellie: 7:09

No one spills tea like Kant at an inn.

David: 7:12

That's what happens in Konigsberg stays in Konigsberg. Uh, I think it makes sense that he would take issue with spreading gossip because doing so would obviously erode trust and lead to the collapse of truth-telling as an institution. And it would be a violation of the foundation of his moral theory, which is the categorical imperative. Because when you gossip about somebody who is not there, right, this is his concern, talking about somebody who is absent, you're using them as a means to an end, rather than as an end in themselves. So you are spreading their secrets merely for the sake of entertaining the people at the dinner table. And that does seem like a kind of immoral act.

Ellie: 8:01

Yeah. Or like after the dinner party saying, I was at this dinner party and this is what somebody told me in private, but I want to think a little bit about the relation of gossip to secrecy. So I'm wondering if gossip needs to involve spreading secrets, because I tend to think about it often as just talking about other people behind their backs and Thomas Aquinas, interestingly, distinguishes between tale bearers, so people who tell tales, and backbiters and-

David: 8:31

Which one are you Ellie? Tale teller or a back biter?

Ellie: 8:35

I'm a backbiter. I'm kidding. Um, I'm telling a tale bearer, I think. Um, but he thinks that, you know, tell bearers and backbiters are people who talk smack about others, but only backbiters do it with ill intent. So, I mean, I guess this is a little bit different because he does think that both tale bearers and backbiters are speaking evil of their neighbors. Whereas I think a lot of gossip is actually totally benign if not even positive. And I don't think it needs to involve telling somebody's secrets. So like hyping somebody up behind their back is a form of gossip. And I think that a lot of gossip is mostly about gaining a sense of other people's status and their trustworthiness or character.

David: 9:14

So, yes and no for me, because I think when it comes to gossiping, there is an implication that to gossip about somebody means to talk about something or to share something that they might not want spread, which is why we referred to it as speaking behind their back or talking behind their back rather than to their faces. So there is an element of concealment at work or evasion. So even if it's not necessarily telling a secret in the technical sentence, there is something that they do not want to be part of the public sphere and that you are putting in the public sphere.

Ellie: 9:53

Okay. So it wouldn't necessarily be telling a secret, but at least telling something that they might not want publicly acknowledged.

David: 10:00

Yeah. Or telling something secretly, if that makes sense. So it's, it's the act itself that has a secret of quality rather than the content of the speech act.

Ellie: 10:09

Yeah. And I think that's really interesting and thinking about secrecy and publicity and privacy here, because this is actually why Kierkegaard thought that there was a problem with gossip. Kierkegaard thinks that gossip and chatter obliterate distinction between the public and private spheres. And this is a problem for him because you're here thinks that there is a lot of our human lives that is essentially inward and that cannot be communicated or articulated to others. And so what happens with gossip is by externalizing the private contents of another psychic life, we are sort of trivializing or ruining it. And so I don't know I agree with Kierkegaard that gossip obliterates the distinction between public and private, but I do certainly think it has a strange relationship to it. By gossiping, one is making something that is private public, but it's sort of following what you said, David, one is usually doing so in a somewhat private space oneself. So when I think about the spaces when I gossip, it's usually in a one-on-one conversation or maybe in a small gathering, such as a dinner party, although I don't dinner party at inns very often.

David: 11:22

Yeah. So, I mean, we might say a private space or maybe an in the context of an intimate relationship, because you're right that we tend to gossip with friends, with family members. I wouldn't gossip to a stranger because there is no commonality. We don't have the third party as shared point of contact. So it just wouldn't even make sense at that point. It doesn't perform the function that it's supposed to perform, but I do agree that it blurs that distinction by definition, because something about somebody in our life then is possessed by somebody that, that didn't receive it from that person.

Ellie: 11:59

I also think that gossip can help bring another person into your private sphere more by bonding you. So, for instance, I'm thinking about the fact that in making new friends, there tends to be a sort of threshold where suddenly we can start gossiping about mutual friends, right? It's like if you get introduced to person A by person B, when you get to know person A, you might reach a point at which you gossip about person B, and that indicates that you're close to them now.

David: 12:27

Yeah. So then the boundary between acquaintance and friendship is gossiping. And in my case, then the difference between friendship and very close friendship is what Aquinas would call backbiting. Like if you're a backbiter we're going to be besties, because I want all the juicy gossip in my personal life.

Ellie: 12:46

Okay. Do you remember when we were in grad school and the two TAs of the ethics classes were cheating on their partners with each other? That was like the juiciest grad school gossip.

David: 12:56

Wait. I don't know. I think I was left out of that.

Ellie: 12:58

No, you- David, come on. Remember.

David: 13:02

I also have a very bad memory.

Ellie: 13:05

Okay. After the recording, I'm going to name drop to you. What- we're going to gossip. We're going to have a kiki after this.

David: 13:10

Ellie. The whole point is to put it out in the public sphere. You need to say the names, where they live, who their current partners are and what their email. address.

Ellie: 13:19

Tenure track jobs.

David: 13:20

We have to dox them, in fact.

Ellie: 13:24

Um, okay. Moving on. But I wonder whether what we're talking about then is like a kind of quasi public quasi private space of gossip, right? It's not quite private because it's actually violating privacy, but it's also not quite public because it's being shared among say friends or neighbors.

David: 13:41

And when thinking about this semi private, semi public space, we have

to ask the question: 13:45

who historically occupies this space, this space that is forbidden from public, but that also needs to communicate socially. And I think that's historically oppressed people, including women, for example.

Ellie: 14:01

Yeah, totally. A lot of the indictments of gossip are very gendered. And one of the places, one of the many places that one finds this is in the Bible where in First Timothy, the apostle Paul condemns women, widows specifically, way to kick a woman while she's down, who are idle, right, with their time and spend it gossiping. So he presents gossip as a product of idleness and boredom. It's like, oh, you don't have anything better to do because you don't have a man in your life and you don't have a job.

David: 14:33

Well, the term gossip itself was originally used in early modern England for women friends, for like a friend who is a woman. And so you would talk about like, yeah, like she's a gossip or my gossip. And that term was then made into a synonym for idle talk, uh, that potentially disrupted this social order, shattering positive connotations, really, in female sociality and friendships. So the notion is that a gossip, like a woman, engages in gossip that disrupts social order. And so any kind of friendship among women then has this awful connotation.

Ellie: 15:12

Yeah, totally. So gossip didn't originally have a negative connotation and fascinatingly. So it actually derives from the old English terms, God and sib, sib meaning a kin, like this is my godsib. And so it originally meant godparents. In time, it came to be used to companions in childbirth, what we would call a doula nowadays, and then became a term for women friends, and it didn't have a negative connotation. And so I think what you're pointing to David is that the way that then it comes to have this negative connotation because it's associated with women's idle talk.

David: 15:49

And I wonder whether that original meaning of godsib, which is where our term in English sibling comes from, which a reference to kinship or kin is because the doula is somebody who would get a sneak peek into the most private aspect of a family's life and then in theory could share that information with others, depending on whether they're a reliable or unreliable doula.

Ellie: 16:15

Oh, I don't know about that. Or like the doula would have a special access. Oh, I'm godsib of the baby. And I can tell you, its head came out first.

David: 16:25

Yeah. Meanwhile, the mother is like, I'm pretty sure I am aware of that.

Ellie: 16:30

Right. Well, and there was also this thing called the scold's bridal back in the day.

David: 16:36

Wait a what? Repeat that.

Ellie: 16:37

Okay, it's called the scolds bridal. And it was something that in Britain, in the 16th and 17th century, gossips or scolds would have to wear. It was an iron cage that supposedly had iron spikes that went into the mouth and stopped this speaker from speaking anymore.

David: 16:57

Oh my gosh.

Ellie: 16:58

I know.

David: 17:00

That sounds incredibly torturous.

Ellie: 17:04

Yeah. So we go from a godsib to a scolds bridle. Oh my God.

David: 17:11

Do you know if that was used actually on people or like-

Ellie: 17:15

Yeah.

David: 17:16

Probably.

Ellie: 17:17

Yeah. And, and I think interestingly, there was a study that came out last year from some social psychologists called "Who Gossips and How in Everyday Life?" and the authors distinguished between neutral and evaluative gossip. So a lot of times when we think of gossip, we're actually thinking of what they call specifically evaluative gossip, which has gossip that has a negative or a positive connotation. And I think most think about gossip is having a negative connotation, right? Like, oh my God, the two ethics TAs were cheating on their partners with each other, right. And then there might be less frequently a positive form of gossip. Like every time you're not around me, David, you just hyped me up and you're like, Ellie's the most brilliant person I've ever met. Um, I do, I do it to you too.

David: 18:00

Oh. I'm a backbiter but then I take it all back. I'm obsessed with that reference, I guess.

Ellie: 18:07

Yeah. You're just like fully now on board with Aquinas's philosophy.

David: 18:12

It's such a better image than like a backstabber because it's somebody taking their teeth to the back of somebody else and feasting on their flesh.

Ellie: 18:23

Okay. So yes, that is evaluative gossip, but then there's this whole other kind of gossip called neutral gossip and neutral gossip is just like talking about people. Like my mom does this all the time. I know so many details about her friends surgeries and their kids and their lives, and it doesn't have a negative or positive connotation. And so what the authors found is that it is true that women gossip more than men generally. But that only applies to neutral gossip. And this is just because women tend to talk more about social topics anyway. When you think about evaluative gossip, there's not a significant gender difference.

David: 18:58

Well, honestly, men, when it comes to evaluative gossip, I feel like men in moments of male bonding are really intense gossips. Like we need that torture device for men because they're the ones that really spread really dangerous secrets. Um, just that they are very good at hiding it too. So they control the appearances a lot more and they don't have to put up with this social stereotype that they are gossips.

Ellie: 19:26

We're bringing back the scolds bridal for the toxic bros.

David: 19:52

In his book, Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language, which came out in 1998, anthropologist Robin Dunbar observes that gossip appears to be a constant across all human cultures, which suggests that it might be a product of human evolution. Now, according to him, all primates form and maintain social bonds through grooming. So you scratch my back, I'll scratch your back. And then we form a kind of reciprocity that sets an expectation for future behavior. But at some point in history, our ancestors faced a very unique challenge. They started forming societies that were a little bit too large for individuals to manually groom each other. And so they started developing a form of what Dunbar calls vocal grooming, where they would make noises like shrieks and primal grunts of sorts that replaced the old style of manual grooming, but still perform the same social functions. So we went from like picking each other's bugs and eating them to making sounds as a way of staying in contact with one another.

Ellie: 21:08

So there's a trajectory between picking bugs out of your hair, grunting at you, and saying, can you believe so-and-so slept with so-and-so?

David: 21:16

Yes. Yes. Can you believe those two TAs slept with so-and-so is you picking my bugs and expecting me to pick your bugs.

Ellie: 21:25

Okay, well, so, so how is it that grunts replace manual grooming exactly. Tell me a little bit more about this trajectory, cause I can understand the value of literal grooming as someone who really enjoys popping my partner's pimples. But with vocal grooming, you don't get the same benefit.

David: 21:45

Well, that's definitely true that, you know, vocal grooming is not gonna pop his zits in the same way that manual grooming will or get rid of his lice or something like that, you know, not that your partner has lice, probably, um.

Ellie: 21:59

It is gorgeous, gorgeous head of hair.

David: 22:02

So here, I think we have to emphasize the social function of grooming rather than the immediate objective of an act of grooming. So when you groom somebody, what you're telling them is, Hey, I'm here for you. We got each other, and I expect you to be there for me in the near future. And the picking of the bugs is just one way in which we convey that message, right, through maintaining physical touch and helping one another. And according to Dunbar, vocal grooming performs the same social functions even if it doesn't bring about the same physical benefit. So when you grunt in the presence of another person who is at a distance from you, you're essentially telling them the same thing. Hey, I'm still here and you got my attention in case you need me. So it's about that social function of cohesion and serving as the glue for the social unit.

Ellie: 22:59

This raises a question for me, which is: which comes first language or gossip, right? Do we have language because we gossip or do we gossip because we have language. Cause I, I wonder if there might not be a chicken and egg dilemma.

David: 23:15

I see.

Ellie: 23:16

Seems like you would need language in order to gossip, right, there, there's a move from the grunts to, so-and-so slept with so-and-so, but then if you already have language, then chances are that when you gossip, you'll be gossiping full sentences, rather than weird primal grunts and so, uh, would, would there not be, you know, some, some other form of language that would have first had to come on the scene?

David: 23:37

So the way Dunbar would probably respond to that question is that it's not that gossip led to language or language led to gossip. So it's not a causal relationship or one enters a scene before the other. It's rather that language first appears as gossip. It is the form that it takes when it, when it appears in human evolution. So our ancestors started to feel alienated from one another because they had these larger societies probably because of the rise of agriculture. And they just couldn't devote all their energy to physical grooming. There are too many people, the society is too large and especially because now their hands are occupied with other things like cooking, using tools, you can't be like, you know, preparing lunch and also popping the zits of your partner, like you only have two hands. So they start switching from an emphasis on the hands or the limbs to an emphasis on the throat. And that shift in emphasis for Dunbar is the beginning of language. So it, it really means that language has a social origin.

Ellie: 24:44

And you can see that type of view defended by a number of philosophers as well, this idea that language has a social origin. Marx and Engels that, for instance. They think it about both consciousness and language, but then we might contrast that type of view with other theories of the origin of language, such as the one defended by the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico. Good ole Vico.

David: 25:06

That's such a great name, but you cannot say that and not say it in an Italian accent.

Ellie: 25:10

I started saying an American accent and then I went full Italian. Yeah. So dear Vico defended an influential theory of the origin of human language that traces it, not to social dynamics of trust, but rather to our experience of fear. So, so Vico thinks that our ancestors would make shrieks, often onomatopoeic ones, to scary events as a way of externalizing their feelings. So a thunderstorm happens and they freak out and they make a sound like "puh" that kind of sounded like a thunderstorm or like the experience of falling is like, ahhh. But here the focus is on negative feelings, like shock, pain, and fear of death, rather than necessarily communicating something to somebody else. And this is different from Dunbar's theory where the focus is more on social connection and relationships of reciprocity.

David: 26:01

Yeah, no, there, there definitely is a contrast here. And I was doing research about language not too long ago. And I found out that the official name for a Vico's theory of language and other theories that similarly focused on the expression of primal emotions is the poo poo theory of language. Basically the original language was all about just indexing affective states in the moment, like, wow, bad. Yay. Good.

Ellie: 26:31

Poop?

David: 26:32

Yeah. The poopoo theory of language, because they're just like-

Ellie: 26:34

Like P O O or P O O H?

David: 26:37

P O O H like-

Ellie: 26:39

Oh, it's like pooh pooh, not like poopoo.

David: 26:43

yeah. So it does have an H, the point being that it's an expression of a very basic dislike of something.

Ellie: 26:49

Okay. Okay.

David: 26:51

And so it's just like, mwah, no, boo. Maybe I like boo theory of language would be equally descriptive, but I just love that term, that pooh pooh theory of language.

Ellie: 27:02

Oh, I mean, yeah, I'm, I'm obsessed. Pooh theory of language. It's just so good.

David: 27:07

Yeah, but going back to Dunbar's theory, uh, we should specify that there, the focus is not really on these moments of shock that elicit a fearful shriek from pre-modern ancestor, but rather on a desire for social collaboration and even recognition. And this social dimension is something that many other theorists of gossip also recognize. For instance, a 2004 paper defines gossip as a kind of observation learning about culture. So basically we hear information that is conveyed about others, and we internalize cultural norms about proper behavior and expectations through the hearing of that information. So here gossip appears primarily as a vehicle of socialization that acclimates and teaches the individual the worldview of their culture.

Ellie: 28:03

That makes so much sense. What happened to me when I got my current job is I started during the pandemic. And because of that, all of the faculty meetings were happening on Zoom. And I found myself in these meetings, I have no idea where anybody stands. I'm hearing people talk in these meetings and I can judge what they're saying based on my perceived sense of their merit. But I have no idea what the history of these people is at the institution, who might be trustworthy or not. And so I remember really wishing that I had somebody to gossip with, like a senior faculty member who would be able to tell me here's so, and so they're amazing. Here's so, and so they're not, right. Because it was really hard to make sense of my social, my new social surroundings absence of that.

David: 28:53

Yeah. And I mean, it seems like you approach academia much like that show that I've been watching recently Survivor, which is now on like its 38th season or something like that. It's absurd. So one of the really fascinating things about Survivor is how much of people's social standing in their relative tribes hinges on whether or not other people come to them with gossip. So the players that sort of like sit back in their hammock and like the Godfather just like receive everybody else's gossip are seen as the most dangerous because they're the ones that control the information. So it seems like you were on the margins of your academic tribe, Ellie. Nobody wanted you in their clique.

Ellie: 29:34

Well, no, but they do want me in there clique, we were all on Zoom. We couldn't have a clique because it's not like a colleague was going to- colleague I barely knew was going to call me up and be like, here's what you should know about everybody. Like I was on the margins because I was new, right.

David: 29:49

That what they told you?

Ellie: 29:51

Now I get the gossip. Are you kidding me?

David: 29:54

You know, that joke that in every, uh, friend circle, there is always a boring one. And then if you say in my friend circle, there isn't a boring one, it's because you're the one.

Ellie: 30:07

It's like how they say, if there's no naked neighbor, you are the naked neighbor.

David: 30:13

That does not seem analogous in any way.

Ellie: 30:16

I think that means you're the naked neighbor. This is my justified true belief. No leaps in logic there.

David: 30:21

Is that an idiom, a naked neighbor, or literally a neighbor who is naked?

Ellie: 30:25

It's literally a neighbor who is naked. I'm sorry. I'm taking us up on a random tangent, the boring ones. That's a more, that's a more relevant example here. Um.

David: 30:33

Still in the spirit of making public that which maybe should remain private. Yeah.

Ellie: 30:48

Enjoying this episode? Please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can also connect with us and other listeners on Facebook and instant. Instagram. The idea that gossip was our first language and that gossip can teach us how to be members of a normative community showcases that gossip is not just a vice, even though we're accustomed to thinking about it that way. We honestly can't live without gossip. And so we might want to reconsider the value of gossip for humans.

David: 31:34

Definitely. And I think one value that gossip can definitely provide is that it can be a powerful tool of resistance against certain forms of oppression. And here I want to lean on the post-colonial theorist Ranajit Guha, who wrote a book in the 1980s, entitled Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, where he notes that throughout the 19th century, rural peasants in India engaged in a very complex campaign of active resistance against the British colonizers. But of course, because they were outnumbered, they had to develop clever strategies of resistance that were hard to combat and hard to detect. And one of the strategies that they developed was to share information with other and communities as a way of organizing revolts and, uh, uprisings and things like that in the form of gossip. Now, I went back to this book, which I read several years ago, and the term that Guha actually uses is rumour, so not gossip, but the difference between these two is blurred a little bit too, because rumor is simply a kind of anonymized gossip. So when you think about gossip, you often present yourself as a source of information. Like, Ooh, I'm going to tell you something about such and such. Whereas in the case of spreading rumors, you simply displace responsibility for the information onto an anonymized source. Like they say that blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So we can definitely think about this gossip slash rumor phenomenon as a kind of communication tactic that in the 19th century helped all these peasant communities avoid detection and censure by the colonizers.

Ellie: 33:30

That's so interesting. Cause I think gossip and rumors certainly overlap sometimes, but not always, right. And I think gossip does tend to have a clearer connection to the truth, that it tends to be more traceable than a rumor. But I also think that there could be some utility to less traceable gossip aka rumors in these kinds of colonial contexts, because if the rumor is not traceable back to a particular person, then it's less likely that if it gets to the oppressors, they will find somebody to punish, right. There's a lot of kind of indirect discourse that happens in colonial contexts.

David: 34:07

Yeah. And a lot of that means that those who are caught by agents of colonialism, they can deny knowledge of the information and even dismiss it as just gossip. Oh no. Like, I don't think there's really going to be an uprising in a week. I think that's just gossip people talk.

Ellie: 34:26

Hmm. Yeah, no, that makes sense. And certainly this idea that when you can't use public channels of communication, because you don't have access to them and or because they are themselves untrustworthy, people tend to rely on informal networks of connection. The philosopher Sissela Bok defines gossip as being an informal mode of communication about someone absent. So that also might be a difference, is that I tend to think that gossip, following Bok, is specifically about people. Whereas rumors might be about events, including the one that you just mentioned, David, but certainly it's this kind of informal network of knowledge that can fly under the radar among subjugated peoples.

David: 35:10

Yeah. And I think one way to work through this idea of maybe decentralized network of communication is us an example of the fluidity of language, right. And why even under the most controlled conditions, there is always an exchange of information between the inside and the outside and even among the margins, because that's what gossip and rumor facilitates, it's communication, peripheral communication, communication at the periphery, that doesn't get filtered through the center and might even be illegible to those in a central position. So I here think about, for instance, something like a prison. We know that prisoners develop all sorts of codes for communicating with one another in the presence of guards, but without arousing their suspicion, and they become experts at code switching, they become experts in what we could call counter discourse, much like the Indian insurgents that Guha talks about.

Ellie: 36:12

Yeah. And I think we can also reflect here a little bit on the places where gossip tends to happen. So for Kant its happening at inns but for a lot of people, especially women of color, for instance, it's happening in interstitial moments, in the moments of passing by each other at the market or in the moments of stopping by someone's house and having a cup of tea, right, before the husband comes home.

David: 36:39

Powdering their nose at the restroom, you know?

Ellie: 36:42

Yeah. And I think that these kinds of gendered modes too, where people are emerging for a moment out of the private sphere of the home and being with others, but then also not really in a public space either, right, in the bathroom, in the market, even in the living room of the home, right, that is a private space, but somebody has entered into it, who doesn't live there, right? These moments of gossiping as transitional moments are also ones that are helping it to fly under the radar. It's not happening in the courtroom or maybe in the public square, but probably less likely, right. If it's happening in public squares, happening amid hushed voices.

David: 37:23

So maybe the difference here is between spaces that are actively surveyed and spaces that are not surveyed. So, you know, the dinner table, when the whole family's there is probably not going to be gossip about the family, but for instance, I come from a Mexican family. We love picnics. It's just a thing. And I know that picnics are a place for family members to engage in gossip about other families and learn about the broader social network to which we belong. And all of this happens at the park. So it's a public space, but it's not a surveyed space.

Ellie: 37:58

I'm thinking about how I went for the first time, in a long time, because of COVID to a philosophy conference last week, and about those sort of gossip that happened there. And speaking to what we're talking about, the moment at which I divulged gossip to somebody I hadn't seen in a few years was right next to the elevators. We were walking out of the reception together. So we waited until after the big reception in the reception hall, but then we're not quite close enough to go to one another's rooms and talk. And so it was just like in this interstitial moment of the elevator, right, like right in front of the elevator in kind of a random corner.

David: 38:32

Well, I wonder whether are in this case, it actually speaks to your psychologies where you're like, we want an element of danger. We're not going to go into a really private space. We want to do it by the elevator, where there is a risk that the person that we're talking about is going to be suddenly behind our backs.

Ellie: 38:46

No, no, no. The person was not there. And I actually think that this particular case of gossip illustrates some of the stuff that we've been talking about, because I wanted to share this juicy piece of gossip with this person, because it's about a mutual friend whom I have reason now to distrust. And so I was sharing why I now have reason to distrust that person and, you know, so much gossip really going back to what we were talking about earlier, I think has to do with social status and character. So you can gossip about things, and this is maybe one of the more nefarious forms of gossip, that a show that a person has less social value, or even maybe higher social than you thought, right. It helps you kind of think about a pecking order, but it also can help give you a sense of whether or not you should trust somebody, right.

David: 39:37

And you know, you mentioned character and it's interesting that you use that term because one of the places where Kant brings up the question of gossip is in his writings on character. And one of his concerns is that people who engage in the kind of gossip that he doesn't like, you know, they go and talk about what happened at the dinner party, to those who weren't there, they show that they have immoral or problematic character, maybe because they've cultivated certain dispositions that are not really in line with the social demand to cultivate trust. So for him, it's partly a question of showing your character, revealing your true cards.

Ellie: 40:19

But he's seeing that in the act of gossiping, right. Which is a little bit different from using gossip as a means to assess somebody else's character. But, but I think you're right that, you know, if I'm hanging out with somebody, getting to know them, and then they start to really talk shit about people, that's probably going to be an indication that maybe I don't want to be friends with them. At the same time, if they're on the opposite end of the spectrum. And I say something about a mutual friend and they're like, oh, I really don't want to gossip then that just bugs me too, because I think it's, it's so self-righteous, and I, and I think as we've talked about gossip is inevitable, right? So I think these kind of blanket condemnations of gossip are really problematic. There are better and worse ways to talk about other people. And I think it's totally valid to say that you think there are unethical ways of gossiping, but I think you can't just condemn gossip outright.

David: 41:09

Well, and I wonder whether we could even go even further in the other direction and consider the possibility of an unethical case in which somebody refuses to gossip, right? Like the case that you just talked about, where you are pouring your heart out to a friend, you are sticking your neck out, and then they're just like, I don't do that. And so that reveals that maybe you gave them more access to your life than they're willing to give you back. And so there does seem to be an asymmetry in the kind of vulnerability that they're willing to assume while also at the same time kind of posturing in a moral way. But I, I wonder whether that rises to the level of something unethical. I'm not sure I would call it that, but it kind of gets close.

Ellie: 41:55

I think it would be unethical if they have information about someone you're talking about, that would be helpful for you to know, right? Like, oh, I'm going to lend money to this person. And then the person that you're telling that to actually knows that this other person has a reputation for not paying money back, right. And they're like, oh, well I don't want to talk shit. I don't want to gossip. I think it would be important for you to divulge that you know, that this person has a reputation for not paying back. Really?

David: 42:24

You're like people need to talk. People need to reveal other people's secrets to me. Um, no, what, what I'm more interested in is the case in which you're talking just like neutral gossip, like just sharing information about other people and somebody refuses to take up that. I have to say that I do tend to think of a lot of evaluative gossip as a little bit problematic, even though it does perform this social function of adding cohesion to a, to a social group. So it might be that it is inevitable and it is part of our evolution, but it's also kind of shitty in particular cases.

Ellie: 43:02

So maybe I'm a little more pro evaluative gossip than you are David, but I think one thing that I really value about gossip is also its potential for telling us what other people think is within bounds and out of bounds. So if somebody is telling me, oh my God, can you believe that this person did this thing? That indicates to me that they think doing that thing is wrong. And so it gives me a sense of the norms that we're working with and what might be expected behavior. And I think that's a fundamental function that gossip has played throughout human history.

David: 43:34

Yeah. The fact that it makes us godsiblings, that makes us, it makes us each other's doulas. We give birth to each other's trust babies. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Ellie: 44:00

You can find us overthinkpodcast.com, where you can email us with questions, feedback, or even request for life advice.

David: 44:07

You can also find us on Instagram and Twitter overthink_pod. We want to thank our audio editor, Aaron Morgan, as well as our production Sam Hernandez.

Ellie: 44:17

Samuel PK Smith for the original music and Trevor Ames for our logo. And to our listeners, thanks so much for overthinking with us.