Later this month, I’m going to be coming back to Boston, my hometown, and I’m going to take a seat at a local bar — J.J. Foley’s, or The Plough & Stars, or Shays — and I’m going to order a beer and talk to people for the first time in a year and a half.
Now, consider all the things that had to happen for me to do that. There’s the vaccine, of course. A miracle. And my own birth, which is obviously an important moment in my life. And there’s the founding of Boston and Cambridge, etc. But let’s go further back; let’s think about the origin of cities.
OK, so: For 95 percent of our time on earth, homo sapiens have been nomadic foragers, wanderers and wayfarers. Humans lived in small bands that moved according to the whims of water, food, weather, and neighbors. Then, some 12,000 years ago, we invented agriculture. No more wandering and wayfaring. Instead, we put down stakes and formed small, self-sustaining communities. And, as far as we know, things were pretty good. “We had everything we needed for a successful life of small-scale farming that would have allowed for population growth to cover the planet, one little village at a time,” writes Monica Smith, archeologist at the University of California, Los Angeles.
And yet, it didn’t play out that way, as evidenced by my ability to get a beer at Foley’s. Within a few thousand years, cities began to rise, and humans began to crowd into them. This was a new thing. To our closest genetic cousin, the chimp, such a situation would have been an instant bloodbath. And for our ancestors, it would have been . . . stressful. For the bulk of human history, strangers were the exception, encountered usually in small numbers and at odd intervals. We devised a lot of ways to meet them and cooperate with them, for sure. But we were careful.
So then why did we take to cities so quickly and wholeheartedly? Because our ancestors wanted more, Smith contends in her 2019 book, Cities: The First 6,000 Years. They “wanted plenty of intangible things that they couldn’t get out there in the countryside: the thrill of a crowd, the excitement of new inventions and novel foods, and the tantalizing allure of meeting a romantic partner from beyond the confines of the village.” In other words, cities were where the action was and we wanted in. We still do.
During the COVID-19 crisis, I thought about cities a lot because I saw my current home — New York City — being ravaged by a virus, and pulling together in a way that still brings tears to my eyes. But I’d also spent the past few years working on a book about talking to strangers — why we don’t do it, when we will, and what happens when we do. I talked to a lot of social scientists, historians, and thinkers. But I also just started talking to a lot of strangers. And when I did, I found that it felt weirdly good.
This isn’t just me. A raft of new psychological research has found that talking to strangers can enhance feelings of happiness and belonging, increase trust and optimism, alleviate loneliness, and even reduce prejudice. Talking to strangers, it turns out, is very good for us.
And you can do it anywhere. But you get a lot more chances to do it, with a broader spectrum of people, in cities — on the T, in the coffee line, at the corner store, wherever. And when we do it — loath as we can be to try — a sort of magic can happen. In all my conversations with strangers, especially if their experiences were different from my own, I came away feeling as though I had just explored another world, that I had grown in some small way. Expanded. The sociologist Richard Sennett captured this nicely: “Cities can be badly run, crime-infested, dirty, decaying,” he wrote. “Yet many people think it worth living in even the worst of them. Why? Because cities have the potential to make us more complex human beings.”
Now, as America reopens and cities come back to life, wounded but resolute, we have a choice to make. We can flee to the ‘burbs or the country, as many people have. We can shy away from human contact because we fear infection, which is still understandable, given the trauma we’ve suffered. And we can continue to dissolve into digital life, as we had been doing before COVID, and as many of us did completely for the better part of the past 18 months.
Or, we can realize the value of what was taken away from us in 2020. And we can recommit to the city, this invention, unprecedented in the natural world, that helps us become what we are, and what we can be, simply by surrounding ourselves with an endless multitude of strangers.
Joe Keohane’s new book, “The Power of Strangers: The Benefits of Connecting in a Suspicious World,” will be published July 13. He’ll read at The Plough & Stars in Cambridge on July 22 at 5:30 p.m. Send comments to magazine@globe.com.