Today's Facepalm

So all these Democratic anti-Trump memes that have been flooding my newsfeed, which are designed to promulgate fear, anger, and hatred of Trump and his fans, will turn those who view them into social conservatives?  That would seem to follow.  But I doubt it's what the meme-maker meant.  Our fear, righteous anger, and Two Minutes' Hate are different, because we're the good guys, intellectually and morally superior to the Rethuglitards.

I understand the desire to vent -- I do it often.  I don't object to venting in itself.  I object because, having vented, Democratic loyalists don't balance their rage with informed discussion of the political scene or anything else.  So I also see stuff like this link to TV pundit Ted Koppel saying that Donald Trump is "the Recruiter-in-Chief for ISIS."

That's really not fair to George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and other people already in (and out of) power who don't just advocate violence but actually practice it, killing and maiming and displacing innocent people and thereby causing the blowback we've been seeing for a few decades now. Trump is scum, and no doubt he's helping to recruit for Islamist organizations in his own small way, but he hasn't actually killed anybody or invaded and destabilized a country ... yet. All the others have.  Party loyalists can't admit, even to themselves, that in this respect Trump and the other Republican hawks are just continuing and extending normal bipartisan US foreign policy in the Middle East.

The author of the article on Koppel concludes, "Critical thinking and nuanced reasoning don’t go over too well in Trump Land."  That's true enough, but they're no more popular in Democrat Land, or whatever you want to call it.  I've often pointed out the confusion exhibited by educated people as to what critical thinking is, but here are a couple of positive models.  Deborah Meier, in The Power of Their Ideas (Beacon Press, 2002), sketched the Habits of Mind fostered in the alternative high school she helped found:

They are: the question of evidence, or "How do we know what we know?"; the question of viewpoint, in all its multiplicity, or "Who's speaking?"; the search for connections and patterns, or "What causes what?"; supposition, or "How might things have been different?"; and finally, why any of it matters, or "Who cares?" [50]

In Without Guilt and Justice (Wyden, 1973) the philosopher Walter Kaufmann proposed a canon, "the heart of rationality, the essence of scientific method, and the meaning of intellectual integrity."

Confronted with a proposition, view, belief, hypothesis, conviction -- one's own or another person's -- those with high standards of honesty apply the canon, which commands us to ask seven questions: (1) What does this mean? (2) What speaks for it and (3) against it?  (4) What alternatives are available?  (5) What speaks for and (6) against each?  And (7) what alternatives are most plausible in the light of these considerations?

Now it may be objected that doing all this is rather difficult.  But has it ever been a condition of virtue that it required no great exertion?  On the contrary... [178]

Kaufmann also liked to quote Nietzsche's quip "A very popular error: having the courage of one's convictions; rather it is a matter of having the courage for an attack on one's convictions!!!"

Both Meier and Kaufmann acknowledge that objections may be raised to their canons; that possibility is included in their list of questions, and Kaufmann considered them at some length.  Meier says that the Habits of Thought have never been formulated finally, and have changed somewhat over time.  That's to be expected.  She also says:

There are plenty of liberal-minded citizens who are uncomfortable with Central Park East's stress on open intellectual inquiry and would have us leave young minds free of uncertainties and openness until "later on" when they are "more prepared to face complexity."  First, some argue, "fill the vessel" with neutral information and easily remembered and uplifting stories.  But such compromises will neither satisfy the Right nor prepare our children's minds for "later" [81].

What a coincidence (or maybe not)!  What "some [liberal-minded citizens] argue" is the position of the Right as well.  Critical thinking tomorrow, indoctrination today.  But tomorrow never comes.

It's the spirit of critical openness these writers exhibit that is missing from the liberal and left partisans I'm discussing today, and have discussed before.

Radical!

Lately I've been seeing a lot of ranting online by liberals that we must oppose Donald Trump's "extremism" and "radicalism," and it annoys the hell out of me.  Trump is neither radical nor particularly extreme.  He's a familiar American type: a hustler, a racist, a bigot, a liar.  American politicians have always sought to appease and pander to Trump's constituency when running for office, by using dog-whistle tropes to signal that they despise the poor, the brown, the disadvantaged and disenfranchised.  Bill Clinton inadvertently gave the tactic its name: the Sister Souljah moment.  One of Barack Obama's was when he told a presumably black audience in Selma, Alabama, that "if cousin Pookie would vote, get off the couch and register some folks and go to the polls, we might have a different kind of politics."  (Ta-Nehisi Coates countered, "But Cousin Pookie did vote -- at historic levels, no less. And Cousin Pookie's preferred candidate has taken that vote and continued about the business of busting all the other Pookies out there for things the candidate did in his youth.") Another was when he said, after paying lip service to Gandhi and Martin Luther King in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, "But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people."  Nonviolence may not always be the proper approach to conflict, but it should be clear by now that the state violence Obama defended there with Bushite rhetoric does not defend nor protect the nation.  State violence, which routinely kills many more people than the retail violence of "terrorism," is almost always the work of moderates, not extremists.

I approved of a meme I saw that consisted of the mug shot of the Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood killer and the words "Where was he radicalized?"  It referred, of course, to the question that has been asked of the San Bernardino terrorists.  It's important and useful to remember that terrorism in the US has much more often been the work of white native-born Christians than of brown Muslim immigrants.  The answer in Robert Dear's case would presumably be that he was radicalized in evangelical Protestant or Roman Catholic churches, which are hotbeds of anti-abortion propaganda and activism.

But the meme in its social and political context seemed to be more an attempt to deflect accusations of extremism and radicalization, which I think is confirmed by all the denunciations I've been seeing of right-wing extremism and radicalism.  These miss the point.  Racism and religious bigotry in various degrees of intensity are mainstream American values.  That doesn't mean they're good -- it means that "mainstream" doesn't equal "good."  Since the mainstream routinely tries to marginalize its critics as extremists and radicals, I think it's important to stress that change has often been the work of extremists and radicals.  (I should also say something about the use of the word "criminal" in this discourse, but I'll try to do that in another post.)

So, the meme I made and posted today.  (I hope it will be the first of a series.)  The question isn't rhetorical, of course.  Rosa Parks was radicalized first of all by being a black woman in white-supremacist America.  She joined the NAACP, and though that organization has often been derided as too tame, too safe, not "radical" enough, it wasn't and isn't seen that way by American racists.  She became an officer of her local chapter and underwent training at the Highlander Folk School, a Christian Socialist establishment.  Remember that for many years the Communist Party of the USA was the only white organization which not only supported equality for African-Americans but put its white members on the line, establishing themselves as targets for violence by white racists.  Finally, as is well known, Parks set off the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott by refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white man when ordered to do by the driver.  That meant going to jail, which was an extreme choice for a middle-class woman of any color in the United States during the 1950s.  Civil disobedience was still a marginal tactic, and for a woman of color it meant extra risk of police violence while in their custody.  The bus boycott, though it's now hallowed by history, was an extremist if not a radical project; "more conservative black leaders" were at least uneasy about endorsing it, and it was denounced by white racists.

In the early weeks of the boycott, then-Mayor W.A. Gayle declared: ”We are going to hold our stand. We are not going to be a part of any program that will get Negroes to ride the buses again at the price of the destruction of our heritage and way of life.”

The echo of defenses of displaying the Confederate battle flag in that last clause is not coincidental.  It shows that the boycott and the aim of desegrating the buses was not only extreme, it was radical.  Having a few seats reserved for blacks, perhaps loosening the requirements that they surrender their seats to whites -- these are reformist solutions.  Rejecting racial discrimination altogether is radical in the context of the time and place (and meanings are always determined by context).  Think also of Gandhi and the movement for Indian independence, another extremist project -- as was the American Revolution: instead of accepting representation in Parliament and other reforms that they could probably have gained, the colonists chose the radical move of independence.  Direct action, like the bus boycott and later nonviolent resistance, is extreme.  It almost has to be if it's going to achieve its aims.

Which brings me to another point.  It should be obvious but apparently it's not.  "Extreme" and "radical" do not equal "violent," though that confusion is endemic not only to those who reject change but to some who want to bring it about.   As Noam Chomsky argued decades ago:*

In fact, it is senseless to speak -- as many now do -- of tactics and actions as being "radical," "liberal," "conservative," or "reactionary."  In itself, an action cannot be placed on a political dimension at all.  It may be successful or unsuccessful in achieving an end that can be described in political terms.  But it is useful to remember that the same tactics that one man may propose with high conscience and deep commitment to radical social change may also be pressed by a well-placed police spy, bent on destroying such a movement and increasing popular support for the forces of repression.

Martin Luther King Jr., who'll be the subject of another of my memes, explained this distinction to white "moderate" ministers in his letter from the Birmingham jail, some years after Montgomery:

You spoke of our activity in Birmingham as extreme. At first I was rather disappointed that fellow clergymen would see my nonviolent efforts as those of the extremist.

Instead of using the standard liberal response (Oh How Can You Say Such an Awful Thing!), however, King counterattacked.

But as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a bit of satisfaction from being considered an extremist. Was not Jesus an extremist in love -- "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, pray for them that despitefully use you." Was not Amos an extremist for justice ... Was not Paul an extremist for the gospel of Jesus Christ ... So the question is not whether we will be extremists but what kind of extremist will we be. Will we be extremists for hate or will be extremists for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice --or will we be extremists for the cause of justice? ...

I'm not a fan of Jesus, Paul, or Amos, but King chose the right response here, especially considering those he was addressing.  I had an entertaining exchange on Facebook this morning when I quoted King's letter to some liberals, a few of whom reacted with fury, accusing me of confusing extremism and violence (no, they were; I was explicitly doing the opposite).  (It reminded me of the time I advocated direct action in comments at another blog, and a nice but historically-illiterate liberal accused me of being "a believer in the idea of destroying everything so a perfect Utopia can arise from the ashes."  Well, maybe she wasn't so nice, but what matters is that she had no idea what "direct action" meant.)  Long-dead "extremists" tend to be recast as moderates once their movements have joined or become the establishment.  This is also true of King, whom both liberals and conservatives would like to claim for their factions.

I'm not saying that the extreme or radical position is always automatically the right one.  For one thing, it's not always clear what is radical or extreme in a given context, and there are usually multiple options that might qualify in each case.  Maybe this is the place to quote Barry Goldwater's quip, "I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!"  I agree, but Goldwater said it to divert scrutiny from the validity of his policies.  Each proposal must be evaluated on its merits, and whether it's extreme or radical or moderate or reformist is a distraction from more important questions.  There is no simple principle for deciding these things.  They have to be approached with evidence, knowledge, and critical reason -- which are no vices either, however unpopular they are.

* In American Power and the New Mandarins, Random House, 1969, pp. 398-99.

Orbis Non Sufficit

I'm working my way slowly through Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy by Susan Neiman (Princeton, 2002).  It's interesting, and it covers matters I don't know enough about.  It makes me want to read more Leibniz, Kant, Rousseau, and Hegel, the surface of whose work I've barely scratched.  I doubt I'll get very far with that wish, but it does map out some of what I need to know.

Neiman sees the Problem of Evil as the core of philosophy, and perhaps of theology as well.  (I nearly wrote "religion" instead of "theology."  I think religion is prior, logically and historically, to theology.)  She writes that for Hegel the Problem of Evil is central, and he thought he'd basically solved it.  "Philosophy," she quotes him, "should help us to understand that the actual world is as it ought to be" (100).

Unsurprisingly, many people object to such a program.  Neiman argues that Hegel was no sunny optimist, he didn't ignore the many terrors the world contains; he simply argued that it was impossible for things to be otherwise than they are.  Following her explication, I think I can agree with Hegel, provided we understand how his approach can be misunderstood and misused.

First, what is "the world"?  I suppose I should have studied German, because it would help to know if Welt feels the same in German as World does in English.  If it's meant to extend to the entire universe, then Hegel might well be right.  Certainly there is no reason to believe that the universe is structured to protect us or give us meaning; the universe has no feelings, and William Blake's claim that a bird in a cage "puts all Heaven in a Rage" is absurd.  We all die, most of us get sick, and this has nothing to do with human failings, as some attempts to solve the Problem of Evil argue. Ironically, it seems to me, it's as egoistic to believe that human beings could have designed a better universe than God did as it is to think that human actions can cause 'natural' disasters like earthquakes or volcanic eruptions.  But it's a common religious belief that our misbehavior gives God sick headaches, and that he watches every one of us closely to add our sins to our entry in his cosmic ledger.

Second, the misuse I mentioned is not just fatalism, but the selective complacency about the appropriateness of the World As It Is which is popular among rulers and their toadies.  It isn't specific to religion, as the persistence of Social Darwinism and scientific racism should remind us.  The Divine Right of Kings easily becomes the Evolutionary Right of Elites with barely a twinge of dissonance.  Human beings can't put All Heaven in a Rage, we can't delay the exhaustion of the sun or the heat death of the universe, but we can (for example) put kings' and queens' necks on the chopping block, and we can jail bankers whose recklessness derails the economy.  We can change our laws to make society better.  Not necessarily good -- Social Security, for example, didn't eliminate death, it didn't even eliminate poverty among the old entirely, but it lessened it.  Evolution doesn't determine political systems or social arrangements.  Kings and dictators are part of the World As It Is, but so is the resistance that blocks, frustrates, and overthrows them.  It won't matter to the universe, but it matters to us, and we can have an effect on the human scale.

Is this really not obvious?  Not, evidently, to those who try to justify evil on the human scale by calling it natural.  But that's too easy.  More pervasively in our time, it's not obvious to those who try to justify the status of the rulers by defining them as meritocratic "elites" who just naturally should be in charge.  Which, come to think of it, is why Mary Midgley's appeals to human nature rub me the wrong way.  She doesn't support oppressive arrangements, of course, she's a nice, humane, liberal lady.  But her conception of human nature is equivocal at best, vacuous at worst.  Maybe I'll have to try reading some Hegel, to try to find out if he recognized this.

Don't Count Your Libres Before They're Hatched

Venezuela had elections yesterday, and the right-wing Democratic Unity Roundtable won 99 out of 167 seats in the National Assembly according to Democracy Now.  The ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela won only 46 seats.  I'm not going to have much to say about this until some informed commentators whose opinions I trust weigh in.  As I've said before, it's very difficult to sort out truth from lies in US media where Venezuela is concerned.  (Not only Venezuela, of course.)  I will probably wait until the dust settles and we see how the new coalition conducts itself, because people are too damned eager to jump to conclusions about elections and their consequences.  (P.S. December 8: Greg Grandin's piece at the Nation is very helpful.)

I've seen a lot of raving where I have looked online.  One commenter on a Mother Jones pre-election post claimed that President Nicolás Maduro would refuse to accept the results of the election, stage a coup, and declare himself president-for-life or something.  (P.P.S. According to Grandin, DUC had been pushing this line throughout the campaign, so if it lost it could cry foul.)  Again, according to Democracy Now's brief post, Maduro has accepted the results.  Something could change there, but clearly a lot of people want Maduro to overturn the election so they can preen themselves on being right about him.  Not because they care about the welfare of most Venezuelans; they don't.  Accusations fly about Maduro's alleged corruption, his disregard for democracy, his attempts to suppress the opposition.  But again, I see no reason to suppose that the accusers really care.  One commenter pointed out, with devastating acuity, that Maduro was formerly a bus driver, and declared that he should have remained one.  Why?  It couldn't be because he really believes the wealthy are naturally immune to the temptations of corruption and abuse of power; it's presumably because he believes that proles should remain proles and let the Real People run society.  Just because.  Despite this commenter's protestation that he's not a right-winger -- he admits and condemns the many atrocities the US has supported and carried out in Latin America -- he shows no sign of being a believer in democracy or political equality.

A Venezuelan (but resident here in my city in Indiana) friend is spamming his Facebook feed with memes celebrating the change.  He seems to think that this vote turned current president Nicolás Maduro out of office, which of course isn't true. Another theme is that Venezuela is now "free"; again, he's jumping the gun, but also I think revealing his political assumptions and views.  I admit I don't know him that well, so it's entirely possible that he'd like a return to the US-backed dictatorships that ruled Venezuela for most of the twentieth century.  But more likely he's just not thinking, much like the people who celebrated the election of Barack Obama, or that of Justin Trudeau.  I've been criticizing his posts, so it's entirely possible we won't still be friends by next week or so; but it's too early to tell.

Here's what I think I can say.  First, in principle I think it's a good thing that the USPV lost an election.  One-party rule isn't good for democracy.  In the real world, though, it's obvious to me that the DUC (MUD is the Spanish acronym) won because of worsening conditions in Venezuela and Maduro's inability to improve them.  Venezuelan voters may or may not have had any illusions about the character of the opposition leaders; most likely they thought they were simply Voting the Rascals Out, as we do in the USA, and we know how well that works.  I doubt the DUC will be able to do anything about unemployment, inflation, food supplies, or other problems that affect most Venezuelans.  I also doubt they care.  They've been on the US payroll for years, getting millions from the Obama administration.  Imagine the frenzy that would ensue if it were revealed that Maduro had been funneling millions of dollars into either US political party's coffers, to "protect democratic space and seek to serve the interests and needs of the [American] people."  And the US, not excluding the Obama administration, has no interest in democracy or the welfare of most Venezuelans, or of most citizens of any country in the world including this one.  Obama, like his predecessors, has reliably sided with dictators and wealthy elites, and against democratic reforms and the majority of human beings.  I see no reason to suppose that he has suddenly gotten religion with respect to Venezuela, uniquely in the world.

Suppose that all the accusations against Maduro are true.  It would't follow that the DUC is going to be good, or even any better at all -- or that they intend to.  From the reports I've seen over the years, it's a coalition made up of a range of groups to compensate for the fact that no one opposition group had much popular appeal, but many of them are straight-out fascists.  Because it's a coalition, though, I'm not going to be too pessimistic yet.  If the DUC wants to keep its majority in the Assembly, it will have to make good on its rather extravagant promises to improve the lot of the poor majority at the same time it collaborates with US corporate elites and their servants.  If (or should I say "when"?) it fails to do so, it can expect to be voted out in its turn -- if it doesn't install a new dictator first.  Given its role in the 2002 coup -- supported by the US if not instigated by us -- against Chavez, and in political violence since then, that possibility can't be lightly dismissed.  I'm not Venezuelan, so I can really only be a spectator, wait to see how things will play out.  I think that speculation from here is a First World Luxury.  Venezuelans will have to decide what they'll do, and I mean all Venezuelans.

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.

Even Noam Nods

As I began writing this post it occurred to me to see if there were any amusing cartoons about Noam Chomsky on the Internet.  I didn't find any; the one above was symptomatic.  I think it's a safe bet that the cartoonist has never seen Chomsky speak; if he had, he'd know that Chomsky encourages his audiences and readers to check the references in his writings.  That's his answer when he is asked the question in the cartoon, which has been known to happen.  Most don't, of course, but that says more about ordinary human inertia than it does about Chomsky. (There's also a recurring complaint from his mainstream critics that Chomsky's books contain all those endnotes, full of references to obscure Marxist publications that nobody's heard of, like The New York Times.) There is a cult of personality around him, which he dislikes and has tried to discourage -- he's proud of his uncharismatic speaking style -- but that too says more about the way most people's minds work than about Chomsky.  So it's also a safe bet that the cartoonist has never read any of Chomsky's work either.

Some of Chomsky's critics like to fantasize that they're taking a big risk by challenging him.  He treats his critics with "contempt," it's said, which I guess is much worse than being blinded or concussed by a tear gas canister, let alone shredded by a Hellfire missile.  But it's possible to disagree with Chomsky intelligently.  The Lebanese writer Gilbert Achcar did it in his dialogue with Chomsky, as did the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe in a joint project, and both emerged unscathed.  If you come at him (or anyone, really) with prepackaged US or Israeli propaganda that has been refuted many times before, should you really expect to be taken seriously?

Where I fit into this picture isn't for me to say.  But I was poking through the table of contents of Understanding Power, the 2002 compilation of transcripts of Chomsky's interactions with audiences, and noticed a section on conspiracy theories.  Chomsky has often been accused of being a conspiracy theorist, so I decided to look at his discussion.  Though it was published after the September 11 terrorist attacks, the material in Understanding Power dates from years earlier, so I knew Chomsky wouldn't be addressing the numerous 9/11 conspiracy theories here.

I soon found myself quibbling.  It looked to me like Chomsky tried to solve the problem by definition, and I disagreed with his definition.

So the real question is, are there groupings well outside the structures of the major institutions of the society which go around them, hijack them, undermine them, pursue other courses without an institutional base, and so on and so forth?  And that's a question of fact: do significant things happen because groups or subgroups are acting in secret outside the main structures of institutional power?  [348]

The important words here are "acting in secret outside the main structures of institutional power."  Chomsky concedes the case of "the Reaganites, with their off-the-shelf subversive and terrorist activities" but claims that "that was sort of a fringe operation -- and in fact, part of the reason why a lot of it got exposed so quickly is because the institutions are simply too powerful to tolerate very much of that stuff."

The 9/11 Truthers don't claim that the attacks were false-flag operations by "subgroups ... outside the main structures of institutional power"; they claim that that they were the work of the Bush-Cheney administration, who were inside the main structures of institutional power.  One reason I don't take this claim seriously is Bush's reaction on the day of attacks: he went into hiding.  If the attacks had been the work of his administration, I'd expect him to have given a vindictive press conference immediately to show his lack of fear and quick response to terrorism.  When I've mentioned this to Truthers, they usually say that maybe Bush wasn't in the loop, but Cheney was.  That should make no difference: if Bush was Cheney's pawn, as many people including liberals affect to believe, Bush would have played out his role.  If I recall correctly, Laura Bush was in Washington DC that day and no one seemed to be worrying about her safety.  But that's just proof that she was in on the plot, right?  Has anyone considered the powerful possibility that she was the mastermind?

Maybe the problem word is "secret."  Chomsky and other critics of US foreign policy have pointed out that our government's supposedly secret actions, such as the "secret" bombing of Cambodia by Nixon in 1969-70, were secret only to most Americans, not to their victims or the rest of the world.  I don't disagree with that, but it doesn't change the fact that the US government and media conspired (in any reasonable sense of the word) to hide their discreditable and often illegal activities from the US public. Chomsky has also said, as I recall, that when Reagan's announcement of a US-backed terror campaign in Latin America met public criticism and resistance, the campaign simply went covert. The Johnson administration lied about the Tonkin Gulf in order to justify its escalation of the US invasion of Vietnam; that means that people inside "the main structures of power" conspired to mislead the public and the world.  Many criminal actions by the US government were secret until they were uncovered by the Church congressional committee investigations or journalists acquiring restricted documents through the Freedom of Information of Act.

I don't mean to make too much of this; I don't mean to imply that Chomsky is now irrelevant, or a paid agent of the CIA.  I think his working definition of "conspiracy" is too narrow, and doesn't reflect the way the people he's criticizing actually use the word.  They're talking about people in the main structures of power, not outside it.  Whether they're wrong is another matter.  I don't take the 9/11 Truthers seriously, because of their assumption that anyone who rejects their account must therefore support US foreign policy generally and the War on Terror in particular.  It takes some serious, willed tunnel vision and an Orwellian control of memory to say that of Chomsky.  But at the same time, I always get suspicious when anyone, including Chomsky, dismisses a claim as a "conspiracy theory."  Conspiracies do happen.  Because they are secret, it's hard to learn the truth about them.  It's as much a mistake to dismiss any talk of conspiracy as it is to jump to manufacture fantasies of conspiracy about an event.  This is one of those areas where the truth isn't Out There but somewhere in between.

That Is What Fiction Means

I just read a new young-adult gay novel, which I'm not going to name because I don't particularly want to single it out.  It was well-written, and I liked it on the whole, though I admit I'm getting a bit weary of what seem to be not merely conventions but cliches in this genre.  But I guess it's not all that surprising that a 64-year-old might not find coming-of-age stories very relevant to him.

I don't want to deny the enormous value of having lots of affirmative fiction available to kids, gay and straight alike.  But consider the story of the novel I just read: two teenage boys in a suburban school connect online over a Tumblr posting by one of them.  They're both closeted, of course, so they want to meet face to face but are afraid to meet face to face.  In the end, to cut to the chase, they do, and of course they're both totally cute and they fall in love and despite some incidents of antigay bigotry by a few fellow students they come out and everything ends happily.

What bugged me was that they are, of course, both totally cute.  So are all if not most of their friendship circle. It's not fair to expect a story like this to be realistic, but almost anyone who's met other people for romantic or grittier purposes online knows that disappointment is a frequent part of the process.  (Especially when the people don't exchange photographs before meeting, though this can still result in disappointment.)  So, I thought, what would have happened if the narrator had met his correspondent and found him to be not a totes adorable jock but someone pudgy, acned -- or even just not his type?  As often as not the person you meet isn't repulsive, he (or she) just isn't someone you're attracted to, often because you've been constructing a fantasy figure in your mind that no one could live up to.

An old friend of mine, when we were both speaking on a GLB panel to a college psychology class, told of growing up gay in rural southern Indiana.  He's about fifteen years younger than I am, so he grew up in a different queer Weltanschauung than I did.  He met another gay kid his own age while they were both still in high school, and they became friends.  He told the class how they'd also discussed the prospect of becoming boyfriends, but they weren't attracted to each other so they gave up the idea.  This bothered the professor, a middle-aged straight woman; she assured the class that all gay people don't think about sex all the time and that two gay kids who found each other in high school wouldn't usually consider each other as sexual partners.  I can't remember now how we responded to this; I think we just let it go.

In retrospect I'm not sure we should have done that.  There was nothing sinister about these boys considering a sexual relationship.  Neither of them had any prior sexual experience, and most adolescents of any sexual orientation are interested in acquiring some.  Unlike their straight peers, they were in a sort of desert-island situation, without other dating prospects or other erotic options besides the institutions of promiscuity, with all their dangers.  If a heterosexual man and woman were cast away on a desert island, they'd probably have to decide whether to have sex with each other -- there's a long genre of jokes, cartoons, and the like about such a situation.  So why shouldn't two isolated gay boys do the same?

The protagonists of this new novel don't have many other options, even thirty years after my friend's high school days.  So, I couldn't help wondering what would have happened if their great opportunity hadn't panned out?  What if they'd had to cope with rejection from each other when fantasy ran afoul of reality?  Has anyone written a YA novel about finding out that your dream guy, your fantasy prince, turns out to be a frog?

There's drama there.  I wish I could write fiction, because that would be a story I'd like to write.