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But microgossip—the myriad back-nipping, back-fence, kitchen-table, men's-room exchanges all over the world, the low animated buzz of dirt-dishing that emanates from the globe—is the kind of gossip that may perform a kind of social mission. Microgossip keeps tumbling in like the surf, a Pepysian lounge act:
routines about Sylvia, about to be fired, and Karl, who can't get a divorce, and Dorothy's Valium.
Perhaps most of the world's gossip—both macro and micro—is done for the interest and entertainment of it. At certain dinner parties in Georgetown and Beverly Hills and East Hampton (cannibals' picnics, nights of the long knives), the gossip is a combination of dispassionate vivisection and blood sport: reputations are expertly filleted and the small brown pits of egos are spit out decorously into spoons and laid at the edge of the plate.
Gossip goes in for the negative, not the positive. It is no doubt meanspirited. "If gossip favors, even enjoys, dirt (the failings of character)," wrote the critic John Leonard, "it is because we suspect ourselves, and the suspicion is a shrewd one." Yet, oddly, people do not seem to object to being gossiped about as much as they once did. After all, as macrogossip has instructed, any gossip is a form of attention, a sort of evanescent celebrity. Even gossip works to keep away what Saul Bellow called "the wolf of insignificance." Privacy is not the highest priority; on the contrary, a certain emotional exhibitionism has been gaining ground. Of course, it can get out of hand: a man happy enough to be gossiped about as the office philanderer might grow queasy at learning that gossip is calling him a sadomasochist.
If much gossip is retailed merely for the enjoyment of the exchange, the simple human interest in the passing pageant of follies, it also has subtler purposes. Gossip—which concerns people, while rumor concerns events—is usually an instrument with which people unconsciously evaluate moral contexts.
"Did you see that Glen and Carolyn got out of the same cab at work this morning? And Carolyn was wearing the same dress she had on yesterday?" In gossiping about, say, an office adultery, gossipers will weigh and sift and test the morals involved. Gossip is intimate news (perhaps even false news), but it is also a procession of ethical problems. In gossiping, people try to discover their own attitudes toward such behavior—and the reactions of others. It is also a medium of self-disclosure, a way of dramatizing one's own feelings about someone else's behavior, a way of asserting what we think acceptable or unacceptable. In a book called The Moralities of Everyday Life, to be published early next year, Psychologists John Sabini and Maury Silver write that "gossip brings ethics home by introducing abstract morality to the mundane.
Moral norms are abstract. To decide whether some particular, concrete unanalyzed action is forbidden, tolerated, encouraged, or required, principles must be applied to the case."