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From the barber’s chair: what makes a whole community

Cutting hair during COVID taught Californian barber Adrian and long-time client Neal some lessons about relationships. A new column.
A barber stands between two clients, a father and son, a neon sign shines behind.
Adrian and the Presas.

This monthly column features reflections from two Americans: Adrian Urquidez, owner/barber of Cutman & Co, a Barbershop in Solana Beach, California, and Neal Presa, a longtime client who is a Presbyterian minister. Both Adrian and Neal have been friends for almost a decade.  

Adrian

From being behind the barber's chair for 15 years now, I've learned so much about myself and others. From their life experiences as well as my own, when you put the two together, you have so much input to bring to the table.  

At the start of 2020 I just resurfaced back into my workspace after taking a leave of absence. I was struggling with some alcohol issues, and I needed to step away from the chair to figure myself out and get the clarity I need to move on with my life. At the start of COVID, three months sober at the time the world shut down, I could no longer go to Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meetings, I had to shelter-in-place and figure out how I was going to take care of my family. I applied to numerous jobs and had no luck. Finally, long time clients of mine began to text me saying “they need cuts”. That’s when the house calls began! Work began to flow in and before you know it word started to spread.  

Going to people’s houses, cutting hair outside, masked up, I began to realize that no matter what the circumstance, people want to feel good, they want to look good and that's where I came in the picture. Outside of my everyday work I started going to school for alcohol and drug counseling. I enjoyed every second of it; it kept me in the world of recovery. So, with school and Zoom meetings I was able to stay strong and continue to be sober. I learned so much in those two years as my clients, who became my friends, helped keep me afloat financially and ZOOM helped me attend those AA meetings.  

Looking back now, I see how important it was for me to go through COVID. I spent more time than ever with my family, understanding what I valued most and learned how important community is. I realized that the people I saw monthly were more than just clients; they were pretty much family. They cared about me, my family and my well-being, which helped me strive to be the best version of myself.  

Almost four years sober, I opened my first barbershop, grew my family by one and now get to do what I love every day in a shop of my own. I get to talk to people each of those days and listen to their life adventures. Barbering has evolved so much, when you step in, the vibes are welcoming. At the shop it is more than just “getting a haircut.” You get a beverage of your choice and sit back and relax and enjoy your experience. For 45 minutes or so my ears are theirs and whatever the case may be, my clients/friends get to share about whatever is going on: personal lives, sports talk and just everyday issues we all struggle with. I love what I do, as it opened so many doors and gave me the opportunity to meet so many people - corporate CEOs, professional athletes, doctors, military personnel, fathers, mothers and kids..  

At the end of the day, barbering has changed my life, and I can honestly say that I helped change the lives of others and myself by being vulnerable, personable and just really being present in my everyday life. 

Neal

The old saying “misery loves company” is true in so many ways. On the difficult journey of life, trying to figure out the twists and turns of what makes it both beautiful and gratifying – and the same time a source of frustration, anguish, and all the mixed emotions of what it means to be human, we need companions along the way. We are human and we can’t do life alone. It’s miserable to do so, and we need neighbors and strangers alike to share in our joys, to comfort and commiserate with when the going gets rough, and to learn from one another.  

As with any company we keep - whether it be family, friendships, your neighborhood, or even the traffic on Highway 5, there’s bound to be some sort of conflict. Hopefully, the risk of being in relationship with others doesn’t discourage you and me from being a part of community, of joining new ones, and learning about other people. 

COVID-19 was one of the biggest disruptors of such community. Remember the social isolation, the shelter-in-place directives? Recall everyone around us masking up, only seeing each other’s eyeballs, walking on sidewalks socially distanced from each other? Or trying to live and work with endless online meetings and only seeing a few inches of the other person’s existence? 

And, in the midst of all of this upheaval, there was a wide swath of community here in the United States and around the world, who amplified their voices on the streets and social media refusing to get vaccinated or to listen to medical professionals. The herd mentality that overtook logic and healthy action to benefit everyone else was a community-response in itself, granted not a healthy and not a helpful one. 

It’s good that this inaugural column of “From the Barber’s Chair” is starting on the subject of community. Adrian’s not just my barber, but a friend of mine and of our family. Adrian and I have come to know, respect, and love one another as I have sat in his chair for countless haircuts and conversations about all sorts of topics. He, like a pastor and a bartender, has heard it all. He, like so many artisans in his craft, has the comforting demeanor and listening posture that encourages you to share about your life, be vulnerable about your fears and celebrate your child’s achievements. You also find the joy of a reciprocal relationship in receiving his life’s story as he lives it out between each monthly appointment. Ours is not so much a vendor-client relationship - though of course there is still a fee and gratuity to pay and a service to be rendered - as it is about two erstwhile strangers who are friends, who are figuring out this thing called life. We  have this give-and-take; a give-and-take not so much about goods and services, instead it’s about a mutuality of reflecting upon the craziness and wonders of being husbands, fathers, professionals, citizens of the world, trying to be good human beings to neighbor and stranger alike, and make what positive impact we can on the world in our slice of God’s creation. 

So, when COVID-19 arrived, like a monster truck barrelling down a storefront, disorienting life as we all knew it, it was such a gift and a blessing for Adrian to have continued his business by making house calls. There we were, in the backyard of our home, every month, my two sons and I would meet Adrian as we all donned our masks. It was two years of those house calls that that helped bring our family and Adrian through COVID.  

Adrian was part of another barber shop at the time and that shop was going through a management transition. I knew from years back that Adrian had dreamt of having his own barber shop one day. He had disappeared from the scene for a year. It was on one of these COVID-period house calls that Adrian shared of his ongoing journey towards sobriety. He shared of the strain that alcoholism took on him, his health, his marriage, and family, and how his slow walk to recovery was unfolding and that was life-giving for him and all those with whom he loved and who loved him.  

The road to recovery came at a right time when the onset of COVID drove many people into addictions and depression because of social isolation. To receive Adrian’s story and to be invited into the sacred space of his life was a precious gift. 

Adrian and our time with him were a source of community, a source of life. 

During this period, I was working with church colleagues remotely as we tried to creatively figure out how to serve a large congregation when the name of the game ought to be face-to-face community. This was not to happen, and not anytime soon. Also, our sons who were, at the time, both in high school, grew weary physically and mentally having to take their classes via Google video. I could see their energy level waning and melting. My wife and I grew concerned about them and about their classmates. This was not a healthy situation at all, but this is the best we all could do at the time, to just manage the frustrations, the anxieties, and the stresses of it all. 

Our haircut appointments with Adrian were monthly punctuations for human contact outside of our family unit, outside the Zoom contacts with church colleagues, outside the video classrooms. It was like those proverbial apocalyptic movies of emerging from the underground bunker to see who was alive, or like the mythical Noah’s flood surviving on the ark and sending off the dove to see if the bird would bring back evidence of land. Adrian and our times with him were a source of community, a source of life. Such was a powerful lesson in what community is and what community is about: it’s being there for each other, to express and evidence life, it’s helping others keep living and to keep going.  

 After each haircut, as I reflected upon our time with Adrian, and even now, two years after the fact, my family and I experienced the presence of Christ in our backyard, every month.  

When Jesus, and the community with whom he interacted and which were inspired by his life and mission, said/wrote: “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” Jesus embodies it. Standing for the way to true life. Showing the way to live life and the way to truth. In whatever combination we understand and receive what he claims about himself, Jesus is very much interested in and in the business of engaging with us human beings truthfully and truly. It’s because he cares deeply that we live life truly in the presence of God and with one another.  Jesus desires that to happen in community, where his spirit is moving in and through conversations, story-telling, prayer, laughter, tears, and all the things that make human relationships interesting and meaningful.   

For our family and for Adrian – from the barber’s chair in a theologian’s backyard – as we all struggled with life and faith, we also discovered a bit more about being a holy community; not because there was a posted time announcing that there was a worship service or Bible study, not because there was a stained glass or a cross present. None of the familiar symbols and signs were present that indicated “church” was happening or “theology” was being articulated.  All it was were the simple ingredients of honest conversations anchored in love for one another, for faith, for life itself and the bit that God had given us, not knowing whether we would live to see tomorrow but being grateful to God that we had that moment together.

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Is empathy really a weapon?

Musk and Fonda disagree on whether empathy is a bug or a feature.
A montage shows Elon Musk wielding a chain saw, Jane Fonda flexing her muscles and Hannah Arendt smoking.
Wordd Wrestling Empathy.

You may have heard that you can kill a person with kindness, but in recent weeks have you also heard that you can bring about your own death through empathy? In an interview recorded with podcaster Joe Rogan in February, Elon Musk added his voice to a cohort of American neo-capitalists when he claimed, “We've got civilizational suicidal empathy going on” and went on to describe empathy as having been “weaponized” by activist groups.  

“The fundamental weakness of western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit… they’re exploiting a bug in western civilization, which is the empathy response.”  

In recent weeks empathy has become one of the hot topics of American politics, but this is not the first time that Musk has shared his thoughts about empathy, and it should be noted that on the whole he is not really against it. Musk identifies, rightly, that empathy is a fundamental component of what it means to be human, and in previous interviews has often spoken often about his vision to preserve “the light of human consciousness” – hence his ambition to set up a self-sustaining colony of humans on Mars.  

But he also believes that empathy is (to continue in Musk’s computer programming terminology) a vulnerability in the human code: a point of entry for viruses which have the capacity to manipulate human consciousness and take control of human behaviours. Empathy, Musk has begun to argue, makes us vulnerable to being infected:  

"The woke mind virus is fundamentally anti-science, anti-merit, and anti-human in general. Empathy is a good thing, but when it is weaponized to push irrational or extreme agendas, it can become a dangerous tool." 

Strangely, on certain fundamentals, I find it easy to agree with Musk and his contemporaries about empathy. For example, I agree that empathy is essential to being human. Although, far from empathy leading us to “civilisational suicide”, I would say it is empathy that saves humanity from this fate. If consciousness is (as Musk would define it) the brain’s capacity to process complex information and make a rational and informed choices, then empathy, understood as the ability to anticipate the experiences, feelings, and even reactions of others, is a crucial source of that information. Without empathy, we cannot make good decisions that benefit wider society and not just ourselves. Without it, humanity becomes a collection of mere sociopaths. 

Another point on which Musk and I agree is that empathy is a human weak point, one that can be easily exploited. Ever since the term “empathy” was coined in the early twentieth century, philosophers and psychologists have shown a sustained fascination with the way that empathy causes us to have concern for the experiences of others (affective empathy), to think about the needs of others (cognitive empathy), and even to feel the feelings of others (emotional contagion). Any or all of these responses can be used for good or for ill – so yes, I agree with Musk that empathy has the potential to be exploited.  

But it is on this very question of who is exploiting empathy and why, that I find myself much more ready to disagree with Musk. Whilst he argues that “the woke mind virus” is using empathy to push “irrational and extreme agendas”, his solution is to propose that empathy must be combined with “knowledge”. On the basis of knowledge, he believes, sober judgement can be used to resist the impulse of empathy and rationally govern our conscious decision making. Musk states: 

“Empathy is important. It’s important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree—make sure you understand the fundamental principles, the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to." 

What I notice in this system is that Musk places knowledge before empathy, as if existing bits of information, “fundamental principles”, are the lenses through which one can interpret the experiences of another and then go on to make a conscious and rational judgement about what we perceive.  

There is a certain realism to this view, one that has not been ignored by philosophers. The phenomenologists of the early twentieth century, Husserl, Heidegger, Stein – those who first popularised the very idea of empathy – each described in their own way how all of us experience the world from the unique positionality of our own perspective. Our foreknowledge is very much like a set of lenses that strongly governs what we perceive and dictates what we can see about the world around us. The problem is: that feeling of foreknowledge can easily be manipulated. To put it another way – we ourselves don’t entirely decide what our own lenses are.  

To graft this on to Musk’s preferred semantic tree: empathy is a means by which the human brain can write brand new code. 

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, another great twentieth century thinker, Hannah Arendt, explored how totalitarian regimes seek to control not just the public lives but also the thought lives of individuals, flooding them with ideologies that manipulate precisely this: they tell people what to see. Ideologies are, in a sense, lenses – ones that make people blind to the unjust and violent actions of a regime:  

"The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists." 

A big part of the manipulation of people’s sense of foreknowledge is the provision of simplistic explanations for complex issues. For example, providing a clearly identifiable scapegoat, a common enemy, as a receptacle of blame for complex social and economic problems. As we know all too painfully, in early twentieth century Europe, this scapegoat became the Jewish people. Arendt describes how, whilst latent antisemitism had long been a feature of European public life, the Nazi party harnessed this this low-level antipathy and weaponised it easily. People’s sense of foreknowledge about the “differentness” of this group of “outsiders” was all too manipulable, and it was further cultivated by the Nazis’ use of “disease”, “contagion” and “virus” metaphors when speaking about the Jews. This gave rise a belief that it was rational and sensible to keep one’s distance and have no form of dialogue with this ostracised group.  

But with such distance, how would a well-meaning German citizen ever identify that their sense of foreknowledge about what it meant to be Jewish had been manipulated? Arendt identified rightly that totalitarian systems seek to eliminate dialogue, because dialogue creates the possibility of empathy, the possibility of an exchange of perspectives that might lead to knowledge – or at least a more nuanced understanding of what is true about complex situations. 

When I look at Musk’s comments, I wonder if what I can see is a similar instinct for scapegoating, and for preventing dialogue with those who might provide the knowledge that comes from another person’s perspective. In his rhetoric, the “woke mind” has been declared a common enemy, a “dangerous virus” that can deceive us into becoming “anti-merit” and “anti-human.” In dialogue, those who claim to be suffering or speaking about the suffering of others might be enabled to deploy their weaponized empathy, trying to make us care about other, to the potential detriment of ourselves and even wider humanity’s best interests. Therefore, it is made to seem better to isolate oneself and make rational judgements on behalf of those in need, firmly based on one’s existing foreknowledge, rather than engage in dialogue that might expose us to the contagion of wokeness.  

Whilst this isolationist approach appears to wisely prioritise knowledge over empathy, it misses the crucial detail that empathy itself is a form of knowledge. The experience of empathising through paying attention to and dialoguing with the “other” is what expands our human consciousness and complexifies our human decision making by giving us access to new information. To graft this on to Musk’s preferred semantic tree: empathy is a means by which the human brain can write brand new code.  

In these divisive and divided times, there are, fortunately, those who are still bold enough to make the rallying cry back to empathy. At her recent acceptance speech for a Lifetime Achievement Award, actor and committed Christian Jane Fonda spoke warmly and compellingly in favour of empathy:  

“A whole lot of people are going to be really hurt by what is happening, what is coming our way. And even if they are of a different political persuasion, we need to call upon our empathy, and not judge, but listen from our hearts, and welcome them into our tent, because we are going to need a big tent to resist successfully what's coming at us.”  

Fonda’s use of the tent metaphor, I’m sure, was quite deliberate. One of the most famous bible passages about the birth of Jesus describes how he “became flesh and dwelt among us.” The word “dwelt” can also be translated “tabernacled” or, even more literally, “occupied a tent” among us. The idea is that God did not sit back, judging from afar, despite having all the knowledge in the world at his disposal. Instead, God came to humanity through the birth of Jesus, and dwelt alongside us, in all our messy human complexity.  

Did Jesus then kill us with his kindness? No. But you might very well argue that his empathy led to his death. Perhaps this was Musk’s “suicidal empathy.” But in that case Musk and I have found another point about empathy on which we can agree – one that is summed up in the words of Jesus himself: “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”   

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