“Collegiality may grease the wheels of society, but when does it become dysfunctional or oppressive? Or, to raise another question, what are the advantages of rudeness?”
Erich Prince’s November, 2024 essay, “These People All Know Each Other,” which was just featured in the annual list of Merion West’s best articles of the past year, makes a compelling and provocative case regarding some of the pitfalls of “collegiality” and the advantages of retaining a degree of personal autonomy. Certainly, society itself would not be possible without a degree of companionship and a shared understanding of reality. Collegiality may grease the wheels of society, but when does it become dysfunctional or oppressive? Or, to raise another question, what are the advantages of rudeness?
I have a good friend with whom I have engaged in many fruitful philosophical discussions over the years. These discussions have almost always taken place over a campfire during one of our many caving and river expeditions, mostly in Central and South America. Often our guides and cooks would join in: True philosophers, those who actually wonder at the spectacle of reality, are as likely to be found in the jungles of Guyana as in an Ivy League faculty lounge.
Many of these campfire discussions with my colleagues could involve deep philosophical issues—the existence of God, the nature of evolution, etc.— but, unlike in a faculty lounge, they were usually devoid of the kind of politeness associated with collegiality. In fact, no good discussion (often fueled by rum) would proceed without the kind of crude personal attacks commonly found among workers on a construction site. No one tiptoed around fragile egos.
I think the reason for this was because our collegiality was not dependent upon a common set of ideas but, rather, on common experience. Mutual respect was earned and reinforced in shared activity. Spending all day engaged in strenuous physical activity dedicated to a common goal served as a grounding for any ideas later expressed around the campfire. Common experience is the source of common sense. After spending all day hauling a boat up treacherous rapids, try asserting that everyone is entitled to their own truth.
All human ideas arise out of a sense of experience. When we understand this, we understand their limited and poetic nature. “All philosophical terms are metaphors” writes Hannah Arendt in her 1978 book The Life of the Mind. Human ideas originate as analogs of human experience. There is no life of the mind without the life of the body. Successful ideas, however, tend to take on a life of their own and lose their sensual grounding. We, human beings, are often bound by a set of ideas, and implicitly respecting this constitutes collegiality. But individuals or groups of individuals who over identify with ideas tend to lose their connectedness to any common experiential reality. This can lead to both arrogance and fragility. Here, collegiality can feel oppressive and stifling for anyone not fully on board with the same ideas.
Cultivating and maintaining individual autonomy, as Prince suggests, is a way to minimize the oppressive nature of collegiality. However, the great advantage of individual autonomy is not merely the opportunity to cultivate one’s own new ideas. Rather, autonomy provides the opportunity to reground ideas in experience. All of this is to say that personal autonomy provides an opportunity to submit oneself to the rudeness of reality.
Chris Augusta is an artist living in Maine.
