118. SHOWING OUR TRUE SELVES - What Does It Tell Us When We Tidy Our House?
Last weekend my sister seemed fairly embarrassed about the state of her flat when my wife and I turned up to help her build a cot for my niece. It was an odd reaction. The flat was only slightly messy, and the mess was caused by her having to clear out space in the nursery to make room for the very cot we were there to build. So it was mess that technically we had caused and it was certainly mess that we understood. What’s more, that day was the only day that week she or her partner hadn’t been working, so it was amazing the flat wasn’t in even more of a state when we arrived. Our own home, after all, usually looks like a bomb site at the end of any normally busy week, and we don’t even have a six month old to look after entering into the equation.
This morning, I was reading the news and saw a story about terminal cancer sufferer and podcast host, Deborah James, receiving a damehood from Prince William. When the “Bowelbabe”, as she is affectionately known, announced that the Prince “actually came to our family house today” on Instagram, she added “yes, you can imagine the cleaning antics and preparation went off the scale”. She used the word “surreal” to describe having a member of the royal family knocking on her door, but “surreal” is how I would describe a terminally ill person spending any of their precious last moments scrabbling around to make their house presentable for a prince. Before they got the call, I have no doubt that the James family were perfectly happy with the state of their home. After it, suddenly, there was a desire to make it look its absolute best.
When teaching Hindu puja I usually ask my students if any of them ever get their house ready to receive a visitor. Their responses, without exception, every year involve tales of parents frantically getting them to tidy their rooms before some family member or friend arrives and a general sense of panic around the house before the doorbell rings. Cushions plumped up that usually sit deflated on the sofa. Surfaces usually strewn with the day’s detritus wiped clean and made sparkling. Perhaps scattered with artistically displayed books or magazines that no-one in the house is actually reading. Parts of the house are wiped down that have never been wiped down before.
When we got married at my wife’s parent’s home in the country, my wife never forgets coming into the kitchen late the night before and seeing her mother cleaning the bin. The bin. A place literally designed to be filled with our trash. And now we could see our face in it.
Philosophers are always fascinated with the distinction between appearance and reality and when I hear all these stories of how we try to make our homes look their very best whenever visitors come by - when I find myself doing it too, cold sweat on my brow as the doorbell rings unexpectedly and I cross my fingers it is not someone I know looking to “pop in” and see the truth of how I live without the time for proper staging - there are several things that cross my mind:
1) If we all are running around like headless chickens to make things look nice whenever someone visits then that must mean that none of us actually live our lives in the way that we present to others that we do. We appear to all be living in squalor whenever no one else is looking.
2) But if none of us actually live our lives in the way that we present to others that we do, there seems no reason for us to continue presenting ourselves in that way. If fear of shame or exposure of the squalor in which we really live are the motivations for putting up the facade, then it is an unnecessary fear. In most cases my visitor will keep a home as poorly as I do and understand all the reasons I have for not being able to tidy as frequently or as thoroughly as I would like. Rather than exposure, there might instead be a sense of connection. Therefore fear of shame or exposure of the squalor in which we really live cannot be the main reason we tidy up for visitors, even if we think it is.
3) Perhaps, therefore, we do it merely as a sign of respect? We know how we are capable of living on our very best days, and the way our home does sometimes look when we really take the time to make things nice for ourselves. We therefore want to offer that “best case scenario” to our guest so they can see that we care enough about them and their experience to have gone to such effort for them too. It is the very fact that it is an effort to produce, and an anomaly from the norm, that makes it worth doing for them. We are not offering them our same old every day life, we are offering them something made special just for them.
4) If this was the only reason, however, we would not feel bad about our homes looking the way they usually look if someone we don’t particularly respect comes round. I have tidied in my time for a window salesperson giving me a quote, and felt mortified when a police officer needed to check our garden following a local robbery and had to walk through our house to get there. So part of it must be respect for ourselves. But it is strange that we don’t seem to give ourselves the respect we feel we deserve when it is just us around to enjoy it. It seems, instead, to be a self-respect seen through the eyes of others. Philosophy has much to say about the way the self or subject is dependent on another to be fully realised, as well as the way the subject can be objectified by the gaze and interpretation of others. Whether the German idealism of Kant or Hegel, the existentialism of Sartre, or the poststructuralism of Foucault there are many theories around the impact of what others think about us making it so.
5) But this doesn’t necessarily solve anything because point (1) remains: none of us actually live our lives in the way that we present to others that we do. So why does self-respect require me to make-believe a form of living that neither you nor I actually indulge in so that you can acknowledge and affirm the fantasy right back to me? If anything it props up a fantasy world. You now think that I live like this so then when I return the favour and come to visit you, you believe I expect your home to be a certain way too. Repeat ad infinitum…
I guess my conclusion from these messy thoughts might go something like this:
1) We actually do want to live better than we currently do but real life frequently gets in the way. Most of us are too busy to clean and tidy our homes as much as we would like.
2) Visitors give us permission to prioritise the desire to live better and acknowledge that such self-care is important. To tidy the house for ourselves would be indulgent. To do it for others, however, is an obligation. It is work we have to do.
3) Because we actually want to do it but seldom give ourselves permission to do so, we prop up the fantasy narrative that others expect it because if we acknowledged that others are just as likely to have a home as messy as we do then the motivational permission we seek is lost. The constructed idea of etiquette here is a necessary fantasy in a busy world to buy ourselves the time to indulge in self-respect.
4) Therefore by visiting each other and being frequently sociable we help each other out by contributing to the frequency with which our friends are able to justify focusing on their own wellbeing by pretending they are focusing on ours.
In other words, perhaps we have some sort of moral obligation to visit our friends as much as possible so that they can be released from the self-harm of the normal working week and indulge in the self-care and maintenance they need but are so often denied?
Or maybe I am just having some PTSD about how much we let the house go during each of the covid lockdowns once we knew it was legally mandated that there would be no visitors for a while and am clutching at straws to explain the neglect?
Author: DaN McKee
My book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE , from the publisher, and from all good booksellers. Read my Anarchist Studies journal paper on Anarchism and Character Education here. For everything else DaN McKee related: www.everythingdanmckee.com