Hell Yeah I Have Schadenfreude, and I'm Not Afraid to Use It!

As I'm sure everyone knows by now, Donald and Melania Trump have both tested positive for COVID-19, along with Trump's assistant Hope Hicks, Notre Dame University president (and Trump booster) John I. Jenkins, Utah Senator Mike Lee, and probably others.  Initially it was claimed that the Trumps are asymptomatic, but there have been reports that Trump had been tired-looking and unsteady a few days ago, and now that they're both at least mildly symptomatic.  We'll see; it's too early to say much for certain, but it looks like last week's meet-and-greet announcing Trump's nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court may have been the spreader.  None of these people wore masks at the event.  Nor, it appears, did the Trump family at this week's debate.

I was a bit hesitant to check social media this morning after I heard the news, anticipating a flood of sanctimonious drivel from Democratic liberals and centrists.  I needn't have worried.  Most of the people I follow are hard-hearted leftists and satirists; Trump and his toadies got no sympathy from us.  The only outpourings of hopes and prayer I saw were quotations from the predictable suspects: right-wing Trump supporters demanding that "the radical left" (liberals and centrists) behave better than the Right, and liberals either virtue-signalling or motivated by childish, superstitious fear that they'll be punished for having hated Trump so vehemently.  They compared him to Hitler, now they wish Hitler a speedy recovery.

It's mildly surprising: I'm a guilt junkie since childhood, probably thanks to my Catholic mother, but I feel no qualms about saying that I don't care what happens to the Trumps or his followers, especially the highly-educated elites.  I still feel guilty for many things I've done in my life, but withholding good wishes from Trump isn't going to hurt him or anyone else.  He'll have the best treatment available if he gets sick, as will his wife and Jenkins and the rest.  If he dies, so have 200,000 other Americans (along with even more people around the world), and so have adults, children and babies in his concentration camps who didn't get any medical treatment at all.  As various people have said, if you want to pray, pray for the White House and Capitol staff, or for people in prison or concentration camps or cramped workplaces who can't keep a safe difference from each other.  After eight years each of Dubya and Obama followed by four years of Trump, I don't have any guilt left where the troubles of the mighty are concerned.

One presumable Christian quoted Galatians 6:7, “Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, this he will also reap.”  This is false, of course, like all invocations of judgment and karma, and a Christian of all people should be wary about wishing judgment on others.  On the other hand, I've read the gospels, and I know how callous and delighted Jesus was about the suffering of the damned.  I'm not a Christian and I don't believe in Hell.  If Trump dies, he dies; but so do we all eventually.  I wouldn't have wished for Trump to catch the virus, but I won't pretend to care that he has.  If I myself catch the virus, get sick, even die, it won't be because I didn't pray for Trump.

This clip from exactly four years ago is entertaining: Trump mocking Hillary Clinton for her bout of pneumonia.  Pneumonia isn't COVID-19, but it does kill old people (and Clinton, like Trump, is an old person; on the other hand, it must be balanced against Clinton's obscene gloating over the lynching of Muammar Qadafy: "We came, we saw, he died!" If it will make liberals feel any better, I'd have the same reaction if Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama or Joe Biden caught COVID.  Or Jeff Bezos for that matter.  They are all murderous elites who, as Susan of Texas always says, kill us for money, and the virus is no respecter of persons.  Meanwhile, it's fun to think of the Trumps quarantined together (though the White House is big enough to give them plenty of space), with Melania blaming Donald for giving her the virus.  And you know he'll be trying to find a way to sneak out of Walter Reed and play golf.

But, as some are already protesting, isn't that just sinking to their level?  I don't really think so, but I can't say I care.  But if we're going to worry about such things, let's talk about double standards.  It's fascinating how selective liberals and centrists are in these matters.  Someone pointed out: "Bernie Sanders had a heart attack and Dems were questioning his fitness to serve. Trump gets coronavirus and Dems pray for a speedy recovery."  When the left historian Howard Zinn died, National Public Radio ran a scurrilous obituary that quoted the odious right-winger David Horowitz attacking Zinn with his usual disregard for facts. It's hard to imagine them, or any other respectable media outlet, doing the same for the most depraved right-wingers.  Remember the outpouring of dishonest eulogies for John McCain? Or Richard Nixon, or Ronald Reagan?   By contrast there wasn't much empathy on display for Hugo Chavez, the legally-elected president of Venezuela, when he died of cancer at a relatively young age.  I'm all for critical evaluations of the prominent dead, but they should be honest, and that seldom happens regardless of the politics of the deceased.

So far I've seen one remarkably good report from corporate media on the Trumps' status, this factual and unsensational NBC story. NPR, which I woke to this morning, didn't do nearly as well: they did their typical personality-driven, faux-predictive coverage, including a bizarre segment on what "Trump's Coronavirus Means for National Security."  "The president, of course, is the commander in chief of our nation's armed forces. So what could this development mean for the military?" anchor David Greene asked. Correspondent Tom Bowman reassured him:

Well, we've heard nothing from the Pentagon at this point or the White House about the continuation of, you know, the military. Defense Secretary Mark Esper is traveling overseas. I reached out to his spokesman; no word from him yet. But it's important to note, David, that the president is still carrying out his duties as commander in chief.

And more of the same, for anyone who might fear that Communist Venezuela or China might be poised to take advantage of our Commander-in-Chief's potential incapacity and pour across our undefended borders.  This is, among other things, the result of seeing politics as the domain of One Man, the Head of the Nation, instead of a vast hydra-headed network of experienced people both civilian and military, who can carry on even if the Head is struck off.  I was only twelve when John Kennedy was assassinated, but I remember the same kind of inane fuss at the time and thinking that it was ridiculous, as it is now: the country isn't going to fall if the President gets sick or dies - something which has happened numerous times in our history and, for better or worse, here we still be.  The mainstream media love to stroke this kind of genteel panic.  The New Yorker, for another example, is hoping for chaos.  And the liberal rehabilitation of Donald Trump, which leftists have been warning about, has already begun.

The liberal muckymuck Jeff Greenfield, Fox News and seemingly some commentators on CNN have called for Joe Biden to suspend his campaign while Our President fights for his life.  Ah, what would we do without Rachel Maddow?  I expect nothing from far right-wing media, of course, but it's going to be an education to see our responsible mainstream media showing their mettle (or rather, their asses) as this story plays out.  Meanwhile, I'm grateful to the commentators of Left Twitter for their savage and on-target mockery of Trump and his liberal apologists.  You can have my Schadenfreude when you pry it out of my cold, dead hands.

I'll Be Your Mirror

I just finished reading an interesting little book by the essayist Kristin Dombek, The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016).  Dombek explores the current fascination with narcissism, which we're told is spreading through American society and thence to the world like a radioactive virus.  (And of course, it's going to take over the White House in less than a week: "narcissist" is a Homeric epithet for Donald Trump in the alarmist discourse about him.  Which doesn't mean he's not an awful person, only that narcissism is the least of the things wrong with him, especially since narcissism is virtually a prerequisite for seeking the presidency.)

There's a lot of quotable and useful information in The Selfishness of Others.  Probably the overarching theme is awareness that what people evidently fear and denounce is other people's narcissism, not one's own.  Dombek begins by discussing The Bad Boyfriend/Girlfriend, the Demon Lover who takes our devotion and then tosses it aside, who is analyzed, identified, and excoriated in innumerable books, TV, and websites.  I wondered as I read if Dombek would draw the conclusion that I thought begged to be drawn from the phenomenon, and to my relief and satisfaction, she did:

Maybe we do so [i.e., "exaggerate the ease with which we can get accurate, non-pseudo, empathy in ordinary cases"] especially when we believe (because all our conventional narratives of romance and friendship and mental health and intimacy tell us so) that someone should be for us the most familiar person in the world.  The irony is that the kind of empathy that many women who believe themselves to be hooked up with narcissists describe themselves as having (calling themselves in contrast to their narcissist an "empath," a "clairvoyant," a highly sensitive person) then gets in the way of their understanding the narc at all [106-7].

This is good, but I don't think Dombek goes quite far enough.  If someone is really an "empath" or "clairvoyant" [!], then why doesn't she recognize that a prospective lover is a narcissist before getting involved with him?  (This is one of those times when a genuine gender-neutral third-person pronoun would be handy; it is certainly not only heterosexual women who encounter Demon Lovers.)  Why doesn't her clairvoyance reveal that the prospective soulmate in fact has no soul, but is an empty shell pretending to be a person?  As Dombek indicates in her tongue-in-cheek proposed "entry for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" at the very end of the book, such people are themselves suspect of believing "that he or she is 'special' and uniquely unselfish and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other people with low-selfishness scores" (137).  It seems to me that such people are at least as likely as their "narcissists" to have a personhood deficit, which they think an ideal lover (or mother-substitute?) will make good.

I'm not casting the first stone here; I recognized myself, especially my younger self, in Dombek's discussion.  I was also reminded of the way that many people, including many gay men, demand that other people recognize their inner beauty but feel entitled to lovers with a surfeit of outer beauty.  I have some minor disagreements with Dombek, such as her embrace of the unproven and dubious claims for "mirror neurons," but on the whole The Selfishness of Others is an exemplary critique of a current pop-psychological fad, and fun to read besides.

The Lady Who Cried "Superpredators!"

This morning I happened to hear a clip of Hillary Clinton's now-notorious 1996 description of "superpredators":

We need to take these people on. They are often connected to big drug cartels, they are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids that are called superpredators — no conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first, we have to bring them to heel.

This inspired a lot of liberal hand-wringing when it resurfaced earlier this year, sometimes in places that surely wouldn't publish such complaints about Clinton now.  (DailyKos just sent me an e-mail bragging that they will have a Clinton surrogate live-blogging for them.  Which I guess is only fair; MSNBC has Rachel Maddow, and CNN has their Trump surrogate.)

I'm skeptical about such categories in any case.  I know very well that there are criminals who are remorseless, genuine sociopaths.  But "superpredators" sounds like one of those terms that an academic might come up with, which is then run with by politicians and media; it's catchy, it's a soundbyte, you don't have to think about it, whether you're "liberal" or "conservative."  When I encounter such terms I'm always skeptical, as I am when I hear about the latest drug menace that is so powerful you'll become addicted just by being in the same room with it.  It always turns out that addiction is something that must be worked at, like running for political office or writing news commentary.

What I realized this morning, though, was that Clinton could just as easily have been talking about high-level political elites like herself.  "We came, we saw, he died."  Or Barack Obama:  "Two words: predator drones.  You'll never see it coming."  Or Madeline Albright: "What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about if we can't use it?"  (I could add numerous Republicans to the list, but it's the Democrats who want us to believe that they're different.)  As Martin Luther King Jr. pointed out decades ago, the scale of violence committed by governments is vastly greater than that committed by gangs or rioters.  Empathy?  Conscience?  You check those into a blind trust when you become a head of state, or a member of his or her administration.  Those gang members are just prepping for their future careers.

Empathy and Irony; or, The Tyranny of the Minority

An assistant manager at work proudly drew my attention to the sign she'd just made for the salad bar, which she said was "politically correct."  That seemed a very odd quality for an informational sign in a university dining room, so I read it.  I couldn't see anything "politically correct" about it in any sense of the term that I'm familiar with, so I asked her what she meant.  She said that it was "polite."  I was probably a bit more peevish than I meant to be -- it's the beginning of the semester, things have been hectic, and the heat has been getting to me -- but I managed to figure out that she was using "polite" and "politically correct" as equivalent because, as she pointed out, that's how a lot of people use the term, so it's what it has come to mean.

I'm still a little baffled by her rationale, though it makes a kind of sense -- in the same way that many people believe that the US Supreme Court banned all prayer from public schools: not just officially mandated prayer but individual private voluntary prayer by the students.  That ruling did nothing of the kind, but decades of theocratic propaganda, and the evident difficulty most people seem to have grasping the issue involved, have won out over the facts.  In the US we should and do have the right to make our own religious choices; the government does not.

I don't object to politeness, kindness, and consideration for others.  They're good attitudes and practices, and not as universal as they ought to be.  Over the last few years I've seen a number of people claim that "political correctness" is really just politeness, and I have probably made that claim myself, but while it makes a good point, it's not true.

It's difficult, of course, to say just what "political correctness" is.  In practice the term is used to dismiss and derogate opinions that one happens to disapprove, often on the excuse that they are well-intentioned but Go Too Far.  In that sense the term originated on the left, to refer to ideological conformity, but quickly became doublespeak, as snark for those who are too conformist, and judge themselves and everyone else by sectarian Party criteria.  Such people do exist, and they should be opposed and criticized, but a buzzword like "PC" is isn't really a critique: it's a way of attacking someone else's position without actually showing what's wrong with it.  And those on the left who use the term seem to forget that by most Americans' standards, they are Politically Correct extremists too.

Which is why it struck me so funny when a friend claimed that she used "'PC' in the broader sense of offending mainstream sensibilities."  As it's generally used (including by her) "political correctness" is invoked in defense of "mainstream sensibilities," the background-radiation hum of racism, sexism, and general bigotry that only some liberal do-gooder or "Social Justice Warrior" would object to: C'mon, lighten up, it's just a joke, don't be so humorless, what's your problem, smile!  When "mainstream sensibilities" are offended -- when a professional football player refuses to stand for the National Anthem, say -- it's the offender, not the mainstream, who will be accused of political correctness, and no one tells the mainstream to lighten up.

I thought I'd read somewhere that Alexis de Toqueville used the actual term "political correctness" (in French, naturally) in one of his writings on America, but I haven't been able to track down a reference.  While looking I noticed that right-wing writers discussing the subject invoked the "tyranny of the majority," which they equated with Political Correctness As We Know It Today.  But again, as it's actually used and especially by the Right, Political Correctness has nothing to do with the tyranny of the majority: it means whiny minorities picking on sensible, well-meaning, inoffensive majorities.  Similarly, this blogger wrote:

What Political Correctness really means - wherever & in whatever form it appears - is this: that The State or similar authority (the Church, society, any dominant ideology, it doesn't matter which) has decided what you can or cannot think or say. It has decided this for you. Its definition is the one you must accept. Your opinion is wrong. Your opinion should not be heard. Your opinion is Incorrect.

Well, that's kind of true, but again, more in reverse.  First, the movements the writer is denouncing were not "dominant ideologies."  Feminism, Black Nationalism, and the like were insurgent movements resisting the "dominant ideologies" of the United States.  Within those movements there was a struggle to decide who'd get to decide the new "correctness," but I don't see that any of the competing definitions ever finally won out, and they are still being contested to this day.  The blogger draws on an essay on the history of the concept of PC by Ruth Perry, which spells that out explicitly, citing a poem Audre Lorde wrote against Toni Cade Bambara's declaration that she would raise her daughter to be "a correct little sister."  I must conclude that the blogger strategically misunderstood what Perry was writing about in the service of his own ideology, which he clearly would like to be dominant, and is indignant that feminists persist in being truly incorrect.

For my discussion today, though, I'm going to stick with a version of what might be called the mainstream understanding of Political Correctness, though I don't mean that in a good way.  When most people refer to PC, they seem to be thinking of, first, a strong concern with terminology -- a belief that using the "right" label is crucial to good politics, and using the "wrong" label a sign of bad politics.  (This is largely a straw man, of course, and bear in mind that those who deride "PC" speech are extremely doctrinaire about their own preferred labels.)  Second, they mean a strong intolerance of those with the "wrong" politics (though again, they overlook their own political intolerance).

So, then: is "Political Correctness" really just another word for politeness?  From either end, no.  Politeness doesn't equal Political Correctness: politeness is perfectly compatible with political oppression.  Members of dominant castes are taught (not always successfully, of course) to be polite and kind to their inferiors.  A genteel white supremacist would never think of using the N-word to a black person; a gentleman treats a lady with respect; a king doesn't rub his subjects' noses in their lower status -- though if those inferiors fail to observe their place, the velvet gloves come off.

Nor is Political Correctness about "feelings," though feelings are often invoked.  Debates over proper terminology were about trying to find language that would describe conditions better than the preferred propaganda terms that were in general use.  The feminist consciousness-raising groups of the Sixties, for example, used participants' feelings about being housewives as a starting point.  Their feelings were a symptom of what was wrong in their lives and in society, but the aim was to go from  there to a better intellectual understanding of women's situation and what might be done to change it.  Sometimes that aim was derailed as analysis of feelings and a sophistical focus on labels became ends in themselves, which was hardly surprising when feelings, as opposed to reason, were women's assigned sphere, but one of the goals of feminism was for women to break with the stereotypical expectations that had been assigned to them.  Not to put too much emphasis on this, but if feelings had been the core concern, the goal would have been Emotional rather than Political Correctness.

I recall fondly a conversation from the Seventies between an English literature professor of my parents' generation, who took for granted a New-Critical approach to his field, and a lesbian feminist of my generation.  The professor objected to literature which examined people's lives, he thought it didactic and boring.  That's as much an emotional reaction as a principled one, though he could adduce his New-Critical presuppositions to support his emotional reaction.  My lesbian friend replied that she found it really exciting when literature explored people's lives in an inventive, politically-informed way.  Which doesn't mean that fiction should be didactic, or that all such politically-informed fiction is equally good, but that such exploration is a valid artistic project.  And it should be remembered that, as Kate Millett showed in Sexual Politics, canonical art had its own politics, usually male-supremacist and often overtly misogynist, and critics not only didn't see those tendencies as blots on the work but endorsed them -- at least until feminist critics pointed them out, and they became something of an embarrassment to be disavowed.

As Joanna Russ wrote of "political criticism" at around the same time:

... in fact, it seems absolutely impossible to write anything without immediately making all sorts of assumptions about what human nature is, what good and bad behavior consists of, what men ought to be, what women ought to be, which states of mind and character are valuable, which are the opposite, and so on. Once fiction gets beyond the level of minimal technical competence, a reviewer must address these judgments of value. Generally readers don't notice the presence of familiar value judgments in stories, but do notice (and object to) unfamiliar ones as "Political" ... To apply rigid, stupid, narrow, political standards to fiction is bad because the standards are rigid, stupid, and narrow, not because they are political [originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, November 1979, 103; reprinted in The Country You Have Never Seen: Essays and Reviews (Liverpool University Press, 2007), 165].

It also should be remembered that analysis and understanding do not necessarily make you feel better.  (See, for example, Joanna Russ's essay on man-hating, quoted in this post.) Oppressed groups were supposed to accept their place, and if they sometimes felt discontented, they were supposed to remind themselves that we all (even the rich and powerful) feel discontented sometimes, but that their lot was decreed by Nature, and Nothing Can Be Done About It.  When you realize that it is not Nature but human will and decisions that define your place, you may get angry, and there was a lot of anger in the social movements of the Sixties.  This, of course, was presented as a discredit to them: why couldn't they be calm and reasonable, like their rulers?  If they didn't simmer down, it might become necessary to sic the dogs on them, which would make the rulers feel really bad, but you gotta do what you gotta do.

There's a flip side to politeness' compatibility with oppression, however: those people who are most vocal in demanding politeness toward the oppressed are apt to become extremely impolite in dealing with those they disagree with.  Perhaps the tantrums directed at someone like Donald Trump are understandable, though not excusable if you want to see yourself as more rational than the Rethuglitards (and such terminology would, I'd have thought, be unacceptable to the very people who use it), but the same kind of vitriol and ragegasms are turned on different factions on the same side.  Anyone old enough to remember the Lesbian / feminist Sex Wars of the early 1980s, as I am, knows how vicious the feelings-oriented Therapy wing of feminism could be when dealing with feminists it placed beyond the pale.  This tendency turned up in the Sixties too, when lesbians were purged from second-wave feminist organizations and Betty Friedan claimed that lesbians were CIA agents trying to undermine the movement.  More recently, I've been struck by the hatred directed by some prominent trans activists at RuPaul for referring to himself as a "tranny."  Also by the fury directed by other GLBT people at the lesbian writer E. J. Graff for suggesting that "choosing" to be gay would not be a bad thing.  And also by trans people and their allies who throw tantrums over the use over the word "transgendered," even though it has been in common use by transgender writers, among others, without any pejorative intention or effect.  I've argued before that advocates of totalistic safe space have always been highly selective about whose feelings they respect and defer to.  The license to rage appears to be an expression of what F. G. Bailey calls "the moral mind" -- emotional displays (that is, tantrums) to show how deeply one feels about an issue and to establish which side one is on.  And what that means is that the tactics of the Right are considered appropriate by many on the Left, though both factions would deny their similarities.  Am I saying, then, that it's okay to trample on other people's feelings at whim?  I'm not, though remember, those who'd make that accusation are perfectly willing, even happy, to trample on the feelings of those who they don't believe merit consideration.  The trouble isn't "political correctness," but a disinclination to act according to one's own declared principles -- in this case, of respecting other people's feelings.

Consider the recent controversy known in some circles as the Bathroom Wars, over which public restrooms should be used by transgender people.  Laws have been passed in numerous places to require trans people to use the facilities appropriate to the sex they were assigned at birth, and support for such laws often took the form of ragegasms and threats to attack any trans person the frother 'caught' entering the 'wrong' bathroom.  Their pretended motive was to protect their wives and daughters from fantasized predation by men dressed as women, though I think the intensity of their rage combined with their total ignorance about transgender people was a clear sign that something else was going on, though I don't know exactly what.  I remember similar fury about the provision of "gender-neutral" restrooms, which seemed to be associated with the fantasy that any normal person who used the facility would be magically transformed into a Transgender.  I had some fun taunting some of my right-wing transphobe acquaintances by asking them why they didn't have separate sex-segregated bathrooms at home.  It's like the opponents of same-sex marriage who believe that when gay marriage is legal, everybody will have to be gay-married.

My point here is not to resolve these questions, but to point out that opposition to the Bathroom Laws generally took for granted that the feelings of trans people must be respected, even when they were just as batty as the anti-trans frothers.  I saw a couple of articles about trans people who claimed that, from an early age, they just knew that they were in the Wrong Bathroom.  Since sex-segregated bathrooms are a cultural convention, there can't really be any such thing.  In the US we're taught to respect this convention from an early age, but we also grow up in homes where everybody uses the same bathroom.  There are very good prudential reasons why trans people would want to use the public restroom assigned to the sex with which they identify, for their own safety, but claiming that bathrooms have a sex/gender buys into the assumptions of the bigots.

What intrigued me, as it has with issues like same-sex marriage, is that the feelings of the transphobes, which clearly ran very deep and strong, were not seen as worthy of respect; only the feelings of transpeople.  The feelings of a little girl who resists wearing a dress, or a little boy who wants to wear a dress, must be respected and indulged -- but not the feelings of a little girl who wants to be an anorectic Disney Princess, or a little boy who's All Boy and refuses to make his bed or help wash the dishes.  This is why the appeal to feelings is so misconceived, apart from its selectivity: What do you do when feelings clash?  When you adopt a position based on people's feelings, you can't just dismiss the feelings of other people who reject that position. You have to evaluate the problem by looking at evidence and reason, which of course no one wants to do.  I don't respect bigots' feelings, but then I oppose the whole apparatus of safe spaces and bogus respect mandated by the Culture of Therapy -- I don't respect the feelings of my fellow gay people either, and that includes my own.

I don't respect bigots' feelings, but I do sympathize with them.  I understand why many people find it upsetting to see two men holding hands, or two women getting married, just as I understand why a gay man raised in a homophobic society is repulsed by effeminate gay men, or by the thought (let alone the reality) of kissing another man.  (And yet -- I grew up in the same society, in an even more homophobic time: why don't I have those feelings?  You can't use Society as an Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card for bigotry.)  But such feelings must not be given authority to decide policy and law.

Am I "politically correct" myself?  I hope so, if we're using the term in its earlier, non-snark sense: I think that it's a good thing to examine one's life according to one's principles, and to try to live by them.  But because I also believe in the value of critical thinking, I know that correctness is hard to determine and rarely if ever finally known.  I might conclude after thinking hard that my principles are flawed and must be changed.  Therefore it's important not to be dogmatic, to be open to debate, and to try to debate responsibly.  Feelings are relevant, but they don't have the final word.  And if we want to criticize the knee-jerk emotional reactions of the Right, we must be just as critical of the knee-jerk emotional reactions of liberals and the Left.

Some Adults Are More Adult than Others

I got bogged down in a post I was trying to write about the current fuss over Political Correctness, especially the Political Correctness of young African-Americans which supposedly threatens to bring down the Republic by attacking Freedom of Speech.  Then someone linked to an article that suggested another approach to me.  Rather than add it to what I'd already written -- the subject could and should be a book, rather than an article -- I decided to explore it separately.

First the writer, one Ryan Holiday, invokes and quotes Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451; it's a stupid book, and I've discussed it before, so I won't cover it here.

Then Holiday quotes a saying of the Stoic philosopher Epictetus (ca. 55-135 CE): “If someone succeeds in provoking you, realize that your mind is complicit in the provocation.”  He concludes,

Control and discipline of one’s own reactions make for a successful person and a functioning society. I don’t think you want to live in a world where that isn’t the expectation of each of us. I don’t think you want to see the things that will need to happen when the burden of making sure everyone is happy and not offended is put on the government—or worse, a corrupt and bitter blogosphere.

But that seems to be the road we’re going down. Even though we’ve been warned. 

I was about to say that this is incredibly dishonest, but unfortunately it's all too credible.  Anyway, I decided to track the saying down, because it sounded like the sort of thing that is made up and attributed to some famous thinker; I'd already seen it by itself in a meme that was going around Facebook.  It turned out be genuine, it's Saying 20 from the Enchiridion or Handbook.  Then I noticed that Holiday had taken it out of context.  Here's the whole passage, in another translation.

Remember, that not he who gives ill language or a blow insults, but the principle which represents these things as insulting. When, therefore, anyone provokes you, be assured that it is your own opinion which provokes you. Try, therefore, in the first place, not to be hurried away with the appearance. For if you once gain time and respite, you will more easily command yourself.

I'm not entirely unsympathetic to this, but as I noticed even before I tracked it down, in use it tends to exculpate and erase the person who gives "ill language or a blow" -- he or she is also complicit in the provocation, no less than the victim.  That generally is forgotten when someone is telling someone else that the insult is all in his or her head.  As Epictetus says, it's "the principle which represents these things as insulting."  He who gives ill language or a blow is also trapped by "the appearance."  Epictetus was born a slave, and before he became a freedman was owned by a secretary of the Emperor Nero, so he had plenty of occasion to experience insults and abuse, and to learn to master himself for merely prudential reasons.

Leaving out the reference to being struck also makes things too easy for Holiday and others who cite this version of the saying.  Very often it is the better part of valor for anyone who's hit by someone who has power over them to control their emotions.  The assailant in such cases is probably using the blows to assert his or her status and remind the slave who's boss.  That doesn't mean that the slave is mistaken about the message being sent, even if he or she decides not to collude with it; nor does it mean that anyone who objects to being struck has no valid complaint and just needs to man up.  There's also a world of difference between my telling myself to practice control when someone insults me, and the person who insulted me telling me that self-control is good for my soul.  When today's straight white males are whining about the misandry of feminists who joke about subsisting on male tears, shouldn't they also take Epictetus' wisdom to heart?

That being said, let's stick to speech.  If someone calls me "faggot," I don't react by bursting into tears or clubbing him down.  I'm not even insulted, since I am indeed a faggot.  But I also recognize what the epithet means.  That is also part of what Epictetus meant, I think: the "principle which represents these things as insulting" is the system of male supremacy, in which men have power over women and not-men.  The same principle is involved in a man randomly calling a woman a "slut," or a white person calling an adult black male "boy."  The word is used performatively, to assert and assign status.  I don't take the insult personally, but I do want to challenge the "principle."  To do that, I must think about how best to do it, which will probably include joining with other fags and sluts and boys to change our society.  Meanwhile, I may respond by calling the person who called me "faggot" a bigot; he or she should, of course, take the same advice he or she would give to me, by refusing to be complicit in the provocation.  But generally they don't: their feelings are delicate and must not be bruised; I must master myself, but they need not.  I consider this a test of their sincerity.

Many of the insults that people like Ryan Holiday want to minimize and protect aren't delivered face-to-face, one-on-one.  Athletic teams with names or mascots invoking American Indians are an example of this.  I can't help wondering how American white males would react if an historically black university were to name its team the Greyboys or Rednecks or Honkies; I don't think it would go over well, especially if the mascot wore a culturally-insensitive costume. (It's entertaining to imagine what one: a backwoodsman in whiteface and bib overalls?)  At any rate, that an individual isn't being targeted specifically doesn't mean that no insult or derogation is intended.  As Joseph Heller's Yossarian says in Catch-22, just because anti-aircraft fire was trying to kill all the Allied bomber crews didn't mean they weren't trying to kill him too.

Noam Chomsky's metaphor of stepping on ants is relevant here.  He says that Americans (that's just an example, since it applies to all imperial or ruling groups) don't necessarily harbor murderous hostility to the people our police and military kill or torture, we just don't think of them as having feelings we need to respect.  (Unlike our own -- nobody's more obsessed with cultural sensitivity than an American Christian throwing a tantrum because some Muslims on the other side of the world burned a US flag or called his country "Satan.")  Analogously, Chomsky doesn't worry about stepping on ants when he walks down the street.  So the little kids whom a friend once observed Trick-or-Treating, one of whom was dressed in KKK robes, and led the other, in blackface, with a rope around his neck didn't necessarily hate African-Americans; nor did their parents, who surely approved and probably helped make the outfits.  I'm being way too generous here, because southern Indiana is Klan country.  A better way to put it is that it doesn't matter what they felt, or thought they were doing; they were embodying the principle of white supremacy enforced by racist violence.  That this implementation didn't involve overt violence doesn't change the "principle" that gave it meaning.  The ants I step on thoughtlessly are no less dead because I didn't mean to harm them, and the dusky people killed by American bombs around the world are no less dead because it never occurred to most Americans that they were people.  (No one else is allowed to kill those dusky people -- they belong to us.)

There is an issue that needs to be explored here, which is the principle of non-retaliation.  That a person who feels himself insulted by words is justified in striking back is a widespread, longstanding principle of human social life, known as "honor."  (Women are not supposed to protect their honor with violence -- the men who own them are supposed to do it for them, because a slight to one's woman's honor is a slight to one's own honor.)  It's so widespread that it might well be part of "human nature." Yet the contrary -- that one should not retaliate -- is also ancient and found all over the world: not only Jesus but Plato's Socrates and the Buddha, among others, declared it.  Yet, though it has an equal claim to being natural, it's one of those principles that is generally honored only in the breach.  In practice, only the poor and relatively powerless are seriously exhorted to live by it.  When someone is excused from that duty, it's because someone more powerful is willing to grant them something like full human status.  An example would be the sympathy expressed by many about the Charlie Hebdo massacre.  I overheard a gay Christian male I know saying in connection with that attack that while he didn't condone violence, you'd better not insult his mother and expect him not to do anything about it!  I wouldn't blame him for being angry if someone insulted his mother, but I would blame him if he hauled out an automatic weapon and shredded the offender.

Holiday wrote:

Real empowerment and respect is to see our fellow citizens—victims and privileged, religious and agnostic, conservative and liberal—as adults. Human beings are not automatons—ruled by drives and triggers they cannot control. On the contrary, we have the ability to decide not to be offended. We have the ability to discern intent. We have the ability to separate someone else’s actions or provocation or ignorance from our own. This is the great evolution of consciousness—it’s what separates us from the animals.

Here's a perfect example of the patronizing attitude I'm talking about.  By telling black students at Yale not to make a fuss over racially insensitive Halloween costumes and the whole structure of white privilege and supremacy they invoke and support, Holiday tells them they're acting like children, even like animals.  The protesters did not claim that they were "ruled by drives and triggers they cannot control"; on the contrary, by organizing a protest they showed that they were in control of their reactions.

What also separates us is our capacity for empathy. But how empathetic the speech we decide to use is choice for each one of us to make. Some of us are crass, some of us are considerate. Some of us find humor in everything, some of us do not. It’s important too—but those of us that believe it and live our lives by a certain sensitivity cannot bully other people into doing so too. That sort of defeats the purpose.

Revealingly, he doesn't really believe that the black students' protest was a choice for them to make.  They should respect the right of white students to be "crass," but they have no correponding right to be crass themselves.  Even speaking out is "bullying."  It's a fascinating repudiation of freedom of speech by Holiday. White men, unlike minorities, are entitled to panic when their conduct comes under criticism.  Seeing them as adults who can be reasoned with is bullying and shows lack of empathy.  Notice his complacent certainty that he's one of those who "live our lives by a certain sensitivity."  Notice also that he speaks of the crass and the considerate as though these were acts of God -- the crassness that falleth like rain from the heavens -- instead of choices that people make, at least when they're white males.

Notice too that Holiday, like others of his viewpoint, equivocates -- or in plainer language, plays fast and loose with -- just what is happening in this controversy.  Are the insults real, or do they exist solely in the imagination of childlike minorities who lack empathy?  If they are real, are they unintended, or is that just a defensive excuse made by people who live their lives by a certain sensitivity when they're caught exploiting their status?  Now you see the insult, now you don't.  How I'll react to various expressions of antigay bigotry depends on my assessment of these and other factors. But I'm reminded of Dorothy Dinnerstein's remark in The Mermaid and the Minotaur (Harper, 1976) that for women to be

ready to collaborate with men ... is to have been given to understand, much more often than not, either [a] that they had no idea what you were talking about, but in any case it seemed irrelevant, or [b] that they could do the important part of it without you, but loved to have you around helping, minding the kids, cleaning up the shit, and looking pleasant.

This response in new left men was part, I think, of the ordinary human moral laziness that made them falter in the face of other challenges too.  But to face the narrow unintelligence of such a response, its complacent ungenerosity, is to give way to ordinary human rage, murderous rage, which one tries to handle, if one is not a murderer, by withdrawing from those who evoke it.

This doesn't solve the problem of offense and people's reaction to it; that is for the other post I'm still bogged down in.  Nor does it mean that every action by minorities is wise.  As I've said before, while overdogs are not entitled to lecture underdogs on what should offend them, those of us who are underdogs in some aspects of our lives can't take for granted that simply being underdogs gives us wisdom and discernment -- if only because we disagree with each other about which battles to take on. At some point we all need to address each other as adults.  But that's not made easier by people like Ryan Holiday.  The last thing he wants is for straight white males to be addressed as adults, because that would imply that the childlike minorities are not children but his equals -- not animals but human beings, with whom he can be expected to empathize.

No matter how empathetic and adult one succeeds in being, those who are used to privilege do not give it up easily, and will happily counsel their status-inferiors to be adult, empathetic, and above all, patient.  To take Epictetus' counsel is not to forget that abuses are happening, but it may give the abused breathing space to think how best to counter the abuses.  No effective action to do something about abuses will be acceptable to the abusers and their apologists.  But that shouldn't intimidate those who seek change.  If anything, it's one sign that the struggle is having an effect.  As the sociologist Philip Slater wrote, all real change produces a backlash; if it doesn't, it isn't real change.

Sermon Style

Things have been hectic lately, and they don't promise to be any less so.  I hope to have some more time to write this week while I'm traveling.

Right now I'm rereading May Sarton's Encore: A Journal of the Eightieth Year (Norton, 1993).  Sarton's later journals have a certain amount of intrinsic interest insofar as they describe her struggle with bad health and her reflections on aging.  She had a relatively easy time of it nevertheless, with a large and faithful support network, who enabled her to live at home and by herself (more or less, if you overlook the many people passing through with food and entertainment, assisting with cleaning and gardening and transcribing the journals (after her stroke she began dictating them): most never-married old people don't have that.  And even so, the later journals often read like thank-you notes to her friends and helpers and caretakers and other people she interacted with, as if she unconsciously feared that failing to name every benefactor and helper would result in a loss of their support.  But maybe I'm just imagining that.

She also discusses art, politics, and culture, and as often as not I disagree with her.  One of her correspondents

had the kindness to copy out, from a book by Piero Ferrucci called Inevitable Grace, something which goes right to the state of myself, my health and my life, in a marvelous way.  The beginning of the quotation from Ferrucci is "Empathy, however, is no solitary event.  On the contrary, it is that which permits artists to feel and express the most concealed needs, pains and dreams  of a whole society.  The aim of the poet, says Pablo Neruda, is to embody hope for the people, to be one leaf in the great tree of humanity."  Then Ferrucci quotes from Neruda: "'My reward is the momentous occasion when, from the depths of a coal mine, a man came up out of the tunnel into the full sunlight and the fiery nitrate field as if rising out of hell, his face disfigured by his work, his eyes inflamed by the dust and, stretching his rough hands out to me, a hand whose callouses and lines traced the map of the pampas.  He said to me, his eyes shining, "I have known you for a long time, my brother!" That is the laurel crown of my poetry, that opening in the bleak pampas from which a worker emerges, who has been told often by the wind in the night and the stars of Chile: you are not alone, there is a poet whose thoughts are with you in your suffering.'"  And back to Ferrucci: "Empathy then is an expansion of consciousness.  Through the faculty we are able to become one with trees and ants and elephants, birds, rivers and seas, children and old people, men and women, suffering and joyful people, rainbows and galaxies.  Thus we become able to breathe and live in other things or to find them within ourselves, as in a living microcosm in the most unlikely face, in the strangest of situations, in the remotest places, we discover ourselves and once we reach this point there need never again be the feeling that we are strangers in a strange land."  It is a good Sunday sermon, isn't it?  [24-25]

It's a sermon, all right, but I don't think it's a good one.  I suspect the trouble may lie partly in the translation, as I presume Ferrucci writes in Italian.  (He's a philosopher and psychotherapist who's evidently lived all his life in Italy.)  So it might be that "Empathy, however, is no solitary event" should be something like "no isolated event", in the sense of being a process rather than a one-time event.  Whatever.  Of course empathy is a relation between two or more people, so it could hardly be solitary.

I don't believe that writers are necessarily particularly empathetic as writers -- many of us are ferociously egoistic, which is necessary to find the time to be solitary and construct our faery castles of words.  (Sarton herself doesn't seem very empathetic.)  Nor do I believe that the response of their readers has much to do with empathy, from either end.  When a reader feels directly addressed by a work, is that because the author empathized with him or her?  Or did the writer dig into him or herself, and find feelings and traits that he or she turns out to have in common with others?  I vote for the latter.  I'm no Neruda, but my experience is that when I've written most personally and idiosyncratically, that's when other people tell me they felt addressed by my work.  For that reason I don't suppose that when I feel that something could have been written about me, the author must have been thinking about me.  That experience has improved my own capacity for empathy, I think, when it took the next step and realized that feelings that I thought were unique to me, that isolated me, were really feelings I share with much or most of humanity.

Did that miner really know Neruda?  I doubt it.  Is that conviction that a stranger (maybe a long-dead stranger, or one in another country writing in another language) knows you, really about empathy?  Sarton and other writers have had reason to complain about readers who showed up at their doorstep without advance notice, demanding personal attention and mothering, because they felt that the work was about and for them, commanding them to make an appearance.  (A recurring theme in Sarton's journals is her guilt at not being able to answer all the letters she receives from fans.)  Sometimes these fans were indignant when the writer had a schedule of his or her own, needs of his or her own, and couldn't give them what they thought they were entitled to.  Is that knowing?  Is it empathy?  I don't believe so.  It looks like self-absorption to me, and like a child's insistence that his mother give him all her attention.  That's understandable in children, not in adults.  Sarton also complained that many of her readers misunderstand her journals as celebrations of her own strength, self-sufficiency, and tranquility, even though she worked hard to describe her anger, depression, loneliness, and anguish when the Muse failed her.

Can I, as a writer or as a reader, really empathize with rainbows and galaxies?  Not, it seems to me, without doing violence to the word empathy.  A rainbow can't empathize with us; it has no mind.  We have enough to be getting on with just empathizing with other human beings.

Sarton said in her journals and in her interviews that she thought her work had value because it had affected the lives of her readers, and I'll go along with that.  I read her myself, after all, for insights into aging, the single life, and other topics that matter to me personally; not for her prose style or her formal brilliance.  That's true for other writers I'm fond of too.  But I look for other things in art as well.  One of Marge Piercy's characters says in Woman on the Edge of Time that no single work can tell all truth -- that's for the whole culture to try to do.  Some writers I read for the beauty of their sentences, for example, though I'm also glad when those beautiful sentences move me and seem to speak about my life.  As a writer I hope to convey something to my readers, but I don't know what it will be; sometimes they find something in what I've written that I didn't intend, or didn't know I was putting into it.