I was wrong

I've long believed, and often said, that it is very rare for both parties to a failed relationship to be at fault. I now know that is wrong. I now think it's very rare to find a case where only one person is at fault.

Why was I fooled? Part of the reason was that I leaned heavily on the fact that certain facts about what someone has done are indisputable. We learn that, "X had an affair." Well, it's all her fault then!

My point here is not that people who have affairs do so because the relationship is going badly. That happens sometimes but other times people have affairs because their just selfish little shits. My point is that when the other person in a relationship unilaterally does things that are really crappy those facts can easily be manipulated into telling a very one-sided story. This story usually starts with an easy lie we tell ourselves (I did this once upon a time). It goes like this: "My biggest mistake was trusting you." That's what whiny little victims say.

To believe that you have to believe that there was some really big betrayal or a series of betrayals that came out of nowhere and caught you completely off guard. That seems possible or, rather, the first part and the last part seem possible. I can believe there was a huge betrayal or betrayals and I can believe these caught me completely off guard. What is a bit more of s stretch is the second part, that these "betrayals" came out of nowhere. To put it bluntly, "betrayal" is just "warning sign" writ very large.

Why did I not see this before?

•  For a long time I was a whiny little victim about bad treatment I'd received from women in my life, most notably from my mother.
• Every time I got into a relationship, or even just a good friendship, with a woman I told myself that I was incredibly fortunate. I spent too much time worrying that she might reject me and not nearly enough time asking if she was a safe bet.
• I knew that while everyone has faults, you can only control yourself, so I focused on working harder on myself when things got difficult. That sounds sane but is actually insane. I was a fixer. I had come to believe that a bad relationship can be fixed by one party unilaterally deciding to work harder at it. 
• I didn't ask the hard question. One reasonable safety check to apply to a relationship not only at the beginning but all along is to ask yourself whether the other person really wants you. That is a different question from do they really want to be in a relationship. Most people (desperately) want to be in a relationship. But do they want you just as you are?

The strange, empty feeling that comes with leaving a bad relationship behind

It's very hard to leave people behind. No matter how much neglect or even outright bad treatment was involved in what was supposed to be a close relationship, the decision to move on produces an odd feeling of emptiness.

You'd think that finally moving on from someone who held you back for years would produce  a feeling of joyous liberation. It doesn't. It leaves you empty and lonely.

The solution, of course, is to move on, to fill the vacuum. But even though you can see that ..,

PS: I was intentionally vague in this post so as to keep the relationship in question a secret. It occurs to me rereading it this morning that this discretion on my part might have the unintended effect of making it seem like I'm discussing my marriage. I'm not.

A question

One additional issue arising from yesterday's post: how much time and energy do we spend supporting bad relationships?

We all have connections, family connections, home-town connections, school connections, business connections that we maintain. But what should "maintain" mean here? I can think of quite a few in my life where all the maintenance has come from my side and nothing but impositions and exploitation has come from the other side. This is especially true in my case of family relationships.

When the only cure for narrative is more narrative

"I read Claire Dederer’s latest memoir, Love and Trouble"

The expression "latest memoir" ought to evoke the same feelings as "my most recent divorce" or "not last since my last criminal conviction".  These are movements from unfortunate to carelessness.

That said, such memoirs at least gave a reviewer an excuse to talk about herself.

To hedge the accolade slightly, I suspect some portion of the pleasure was narcissistic on my part: I kept recognizing myself in these pages, especially in their evocations of middle-aged befuddlements, and of the surprisingly long half-life of adolescent inchoateness.

Notice, first, the tactic: by announcing she is being narcissistic, Laura Kipnis plans on having her cake and eating it too. That's a clever trick and it's one we all fall victim to so let's not beat her up for what is a near-universal human trait. At the same time, let's take her at face value and ignore the half-meant self-deprecation. Read literally, Kipnis tells us that she's not handling middle age well and that something she here calls "adolescent inchoateness" contributing to this failure. What does that mean?

"Feel your feelings"

That's a bit of advice I keep seeing. It's pretty good advice, to a point. In order for this advice to be any good to you, however , you need to know how to feel them.

Your goal is to extract the greatest experience of flavor from the rum, so don't be in a rush to decide whether you "like" a particular rum or not. Suspend judgment for as long as you can. The minute you decide that you "like" the rum (or not) you stop noticing the rum and start paying attention to your judgment. Your evaluation gets in the way of your perception and tasting is a game of sharpening perception. (from A Short Course in Rum by Lynn Hoffman)

That advice can be applied to a far-wider range of experiences than just tasting rum.

One place that definitely can be applied is to feeling your feelings. Start off by noticing them. Just sit, or stand, there and feel what you are feeling. Suspend judgment as to what these feelings mean, whether they are good or bad and what you have to do about them.

Since reading his book two years ago, I've come to think that Mr. Hoffman is correct in that if you start paying attention to your judgment you lose touch with thing you should be experiencing. He's too polite to say so but the further problem is that your judgment tends to become a performance. You want people to know what you think and you want them to be impressed that you have the sort of fine, discerning tastes that they should respect.

Feelings are no different. When I decide I'm feeling sad, or happy, or vindicated I don't just get stuck on that judgment, I start to behave in accord with it. My "feeling" becomes a performance. It's a way, I suppose, of paying attention to my judgment and it rapidly becomes a way of getting others to pay attention as well. I don't think it's healthy.

Sometimes understanding the lesson is a simple matter of paying close attention to the language used. Compare these two expressions:

1. Feel your feelings
2. Express your feelings

Those are two very different expressions and yet the second is often offered as a replacement for the first. We're often told that we should learn to express our feelings. That is good advice if there is some positive benefit to letting others know how we're feeling. Oftentimes, however, people tell us that expressing our feelings is a way of "getting them out", as if expressing them was a way of letting off steam that might otherwise cause our internal boiler to explode. If little boys, for example, aren't taught to express their feelings they will learn the habit of bottling them up and, boom, male suicide rates will spike.

And male suicide rates have risen so it all seems vindicated.

Except for one tiny problem and that is that male suicide rates have risen. They used to be lower back when men were taught not to express their feelings. That doesn't prove that expressing their feelings has made men more likely to commit suicide. There may be other factors at play. There almost certainly are. It does, however, cast serious doubt on the claim that rising suicide rates are proof that men need to "express" their feelings.

The thing about expressing feelings is that, as Hoffman tells us,  it tends to validate our judgments about them and, therefore, to amplify to replace our actual feelings with a need to validate our judgments. You can prove this for yourself with a simple experiment. Next time you're all alone, think of some past betrayal. Say out loud what happened and then say how angry it made you. Just keep talking about it, expressing your anger. It's a virtual certainty that your voice will rise and your feelings will get stronger and stronger. If you really let it go, you'll work yourself up into an intense rage. If we're honest with ourselves, we will realize that this will work even if our judgment about this past betrayal is wrong, even if we were not actually betrayed.

If you tell yourself you're sad, or angry, or jealous, you will start to feel that way even though, and this is the really important thing, you might be wrong about how you're feeling.

Far better to feel your feelings. Just spend sometime noticing yourself and what you're reactions are instead.

Addition to emotional awards

Negative emotions—and righteous indignation is familiar one these days—have a purpose in human life. Anytime we find ourselves faced with pop psychology telling us that we need to rid ourselves of some emotion—be it righteous indignation, or resentment, or jealousy—we should stop and remind ourselves that these have all survived tens-of-thousands of years of evolution. If there wasn't something positive about these negative emotions they would have been weeded out of humanity long ago.

But the gist of the advice against righteous indignation is good. It can a dead end and there is something addictive about it. The same can be said of alcohol mind you. That said, training ourselves to have a drink every time we wanted a lift is suicidal. Similarly, it would make no sense to train ourselves to be good at reacting with righteous indignation. And yet, that is exactly what much of the modern culture does.

I see it everyday of Facebook. Someone I know will share a link with a heading that reads something like, "See how X responded to trolls who ...". Click on the link and you'll get some supposedly searing putdown of these evil people. And you'll get to share in the feeling of smug moral superiority that comes from seeing evil people crushed like bugs.

On the other hand, that was what the "trolls" who picked on these people were seeking in the first place.

But it gets worse the more you think about it. Some celebrity, and quite likely some celebrity you'd never heard of until two minutes ago, gets a riff off at the expense of people you didn't know existed and you get a vicarious thrill out of sharing in it.

And we do this with our entertainment too. Think of how many times the hero of a movie or TV show triumphs in a moral argument by becoming self righteous. Shows such as  M*A*S*H and West Wing traded on nothing but self-righteous indignation season after season. What does it do to our moral character to work ourselves up into this state about fictions?

Righteous versus self-righteous

When righteous seems unjustified to us, we call it "self-righteous". That gets a bit tricky if we dismiss any sense of moral realism as the modern world has largely done. If I can't point at actual moral facts, as opposed to my sense of what is right or wrong, in a moral argument there is no longer any distinction between righteous indignation and self-righteous indignation; anyone who wants to bring about something I don't want will seem a fit target for my anger.

"Feel your feelings"

There is some very good advice about dealing with out tendency to become self-righteously indignant at this site. The whole thing is worth reading but one item in particular struck me:

3.  Feel your feelings.  How do you feel when you are complaining about or reporting this behavior?  Superior?  Powerful?  Is that the true motivation for it, rather than righting a wrong?

There is an assumption of moral realism behind that. Kellen believes that you can tell the difference between when there is a real injustice and when we are just getting high on the reward our emotions give us (he calls them "feelings" rather than emotions).

If we go back to the first point I made about the usefulness of negative emotions, we can get a sense of this. What happens when we are subject to an attack? We either shrink or rise up. If powerful forces unite against us, we'll usually shrink because the alternative is being crushed. It's not a good idea starting fights you're guaranteed to lose. Okay, but what happens when the attack against us is unfair? That's when self-righteous indignation can give us an emotional payoff. I may not be able to do much about trolls but I can retreat to some safe place and vent about them to my friends and I get an emotional charge that makes me feel better. "Those trolls can't hurt me!"

So far, so good. But that emotional reward is a reward whether it's deserved or not. Like all emotional rewards, it can become addictive.

We tend to think we are very good at understanding our emotional states but we're usually only good at having them. We don't often stop and reflect on what is happening and why. That's why we need people like Kellen to help us sometimes.

Before leaving the subject, I should note that the opposite mistake is also possible. That is to say, I can train myself—or be trained by others—to discount my feelings. If you had a parent or parents who saw you as primarily a problem to be dealt with rather than someone to love, your greatest joys and greatest defeats will have seemed like intrusions on their lives rather than something to share. The parent who thinks this way, and there are a lot of them, will train you from an early age to react to strong feelings by distrusting them. If you're feeling hurt, you need to get over yourself. Feeling good about something you've done, you need to get over yourself. Internalize that and you'll think every case of righteous indignation is unjustified simply because it is a strong feeling.

I suspect that what happens here is simply an addiction to another kind of reward. Controlling your feelings is an important thing to do so our body fires up the endorphins when we realize we've managed it. Insert a parent into your life who sees all your feelings as inconvenient and you'll get really good at feeling that reward. Pretty soon you'll get good at suppressing even justified anger.

The (moral) truth is out there.

Self-knowledge?

Woody Allen has made some questionable decisions in his personal life, and his recent films have not been great. But I know of no modern filmmaker who would be so willing to indict himself as thoroughly as Allen does in Annie Hall.

I'll buy that. To a point.

Have you ever been around someone who lacerates themselves for their moral failings but smiles as they do it? I've seen it. I've done it myself.

The Last Psychiatrist talks about this somewhere. He talks about how easy it is to say, "I'm a narcissist." Unless you actually plan to do something about it, it's meaningless.

And, if you really mean to do something about it, why do you need to say it? Is declaring that you have a problem going to make you more accountable?

The answer to all those questions is easy: look how it worked out for Woody.

"Other girls will judge them."

It's important to pay attention to what actually happens and to pay attention to what actually gets said. The quote above comes from a CBC story about a girl who sent naked selfies to a boy who later shared them around with his friends. Let me repeat that, "a girl who sent naked selfies to a boy who later shared them around with his friends"; a boy shared pictures she sent to him with other boys and yet the damaging consequence was that "other girls" judged her.

Isn't moral psychology interesting?

Here's the way the CBC sets up the story:

When she sent selfies of her partially naked body, she thought only her boyfriend would see the images. 

The teenager never imagined one of the sexually explicit photos would end up being shared with five other boys in a Dropbox account.

"Partially naked body" means she sent him a picture of her breasts. The CBC is worried you'll enjoy it too much if they're upfront (if you'll pardon the expression) about this.

Here's how she explains how the boy convinced her to send photos:

"Basically [he] threatened to break up with me if I didn't send him pictures. I was young and naive and just sent them, and then that's what he did with it," she said. "I just think he's a pig."

There's a lot of equivocation in that quote. "Basically" here means that he did things that she now interprets as manipulative threats. Just how explicit these threats were is not clear. We also don't know how she interpreted them at the time.

 Here's the moral lesson she has drawn from her experience:

"Other girls will judge them, make them feel bad about themselves, make them feel like a slut for sending the picture, for trusting the person. It hurts self-esteem and it makes it hard for people to trust each other."

She wants it to be possible for people "to trust each other." That is to say, she wants to live in a  world where it's safe for girls to send nude selfies. (By the way, we should notice that while her identity is kept from us, as it should be, one of the consequences of this case being reported in the media is that every single kid at her high school knows who she is. I suspect almost everybody in Bridgewater, Nova Scotia knows who she is. She has two choices: leave town or be stuck with the identity this has given her for the rest of her life. As offensive as this thought will be to some, she'd be better of if the five boys had gotten away with it. That's why kids don't tell their parents about things like this.)

Many (but not all) teenage girls fantasize about someone seeing them naked and a surprising number will arrange to have it happen. They want to have it happen but they don't want it to be their responsibility. Boys, meanwhile, will try to trick or pressure girls into letting them see them naked. The two desires tend to play into one another. The fact that the boys are trying to manipulate the girls into doing this makes it easier for the girls to believe it's not really their responsibility when this happens. It also makes it easier for everyone involved to limit how far things go—most teenagers want to play with fire.

That neither surprises nor depresses me. I still have fond memories of Barb who, at age 17, walked into the room where her brother and I were talking and accidentally-on-purpose let her terrycloth robe fall open. She did this not because she was interested in me; she probably held me in contempt. It would have felt like riding a roller coaster to her—like something that was calculated-to-scare-her-but-was-actually-very-safe. And it was.

If you want to get depressed, stop and think a bit about how this instinct that so many teenage girls have would have worked out for most of human history.

So, what's the lesson here? That we should stop trusting others? To some extent, yes, that is the lesson. That said, living in a world where there is no trust would be horrible. The better lesson is that trust is only possible within strict limits. To use the current jargon, you have to set boundaries. What that current jargon leaves out is that you have to set boundaries on yourself as well as others. To use the old and better jargon, good fences make good neighbours. My fence keeps your livestock away from my garden but it also keeps my livestock out of yours.

(If the only reason you set boundaries is to protect yourself from others, you're a narcissist. And if you advise others to set boundaries only as a way of protecting themselves by controlling others, you're teaching them to be narcissists. The boundary game only works if both sides have an interest in it.)

Notice that the girl quoted by the CBC doesn't really blame the other girls who judged her. She blames the boy, as she should. She doesn't really blame the other girls who judged her because she sees that as a consequence of his betrayal more than something that is the judging-girls' fault.

She may be just a naive teenager but she has a deep understanding of the praxis of high school life. Mean girls slut-shame girls who are willing to go further sexually than they are. She's willing to live with that and most other girls will also go along with the mean girls. It's a way girls can vote girls who threaten them by going too far off the island. The same thing happens to the most prudish girls on the other end of the scale. Every high school girl recognizes that there have to be limits and every high school girl also recognizes that no one is going to be able to have any fun at all if adults get to set the limits. At the same time, it takes someone brave and strong to step up into the role of setting limits and most high school students aren't brave and strong. The only people willing to do that are bullies, enter the mean girls. Crazy as it may seem to us, most teenagers trust bullies to make important moral decisions for them. (Note to busybodies: this is why anti-bullying campaigns will always fail.)

But this girl also wants something else. She wants a secret space she can sneak away to and interact with boys. She wasn't really surprised to find out this boy was, in her words, "a pig". She was counting on that. What really surprised her was that the shame of being such a pig as to ask her for these photos wasn't enough to make him keep the secret to himself. She thought of it as a secret they shared—the basis of the trust she sought was that both of them would be equally afraid of "their" secret getting out.

The key point here is that when she says she wants "people to trust each other" (for that is the implicit message she is sending), what she really wants is to have enclaves where the ordinary rules don't apply and yet remain safe; places where people can sneak away and do things that they will be so ashamed of they will keep these things forever secret. At heart, she's a Victorian.

What's taken that Victorian world away from her is that everyone now has a camera in their pocket. Before that, there was plausible deniability. If I'd been a heel and gone back to school the next day and told everyone that Barb had flashed me, she could have denied it and just about everyone would have believed her.

Notice the subject header again. It's dangerous in teen eyes because the whole world might find out. At the same time, the risk is what makes it fun. Every kid who ever jumped off a roof into a swimming pool knew it was dangerous but none of of them ever thought they were going to end up in a wheelchair. Let's not kid ourselves, tens of thousands of girls and women will send erotic selfies today. Most will never suffer any consequences. Most of those women are also smart enough to realize that it's a virtual certainty that other men and women than the person they sent it to will get to see those pictures.  They can live with that because the risk of being publicly shamed, that "other girls will judge them", is very small.

What to do about it? There is nothing you could do.

When members of the same family do not talk with each other

This came up in my Facebook feed yesterday.

As of now, more than 400 people have typed "yes" or clicked on "like", thereby revealing more about themselves than they realize.

Before we get to that, notice two things about that message. It uses every trick in the passive-aggressive handbook. It starts with something that looks like sorrow but very quickly changes gear to shame its target with the suggestion that "the children" are suffering because of you. Then it brands the conflict as imaginary. That alone is sufficient grounds to dismiss it. Some conflicts are imaginary but most are not. Most conflicts are real.

Some people do, of course, take offence for trivial or imagined reasons. A lot of others, however, don't stop talking to family members because of a conflict. It may happen after a conflict but it is not that conflict alone that causes someone to stop talking to their siblings, parents or children.

I was curious about the page that would share such things. When I visited it the top posting was this:

There is a certain tension in finding both those memes on the same page.

By responding positively to the first post, more than 400 people have outed themselves. They've told us that they have a family member not speaking to them. This clearly bothers them. So they've decided to respond by using passive aggression, by calling attention to a post on Facebook where they hope the person who is not speaking with them will see it. How very nice vile of them!

When a family member stops speaking with you they are telling you that they no longer believe your behaviour is acceptable. They may be right or wrong in this judgment but it is very unlikely that they are being impulsive. They're doing this not on the basis of one thing but on the basis of long-established behavioural traits of yours. They are not nurturing resentment about the last conflict so much as they are adjusting their behaviour based on their 100 certainty that there will be more such conflicts in the future if they maintain contact with you. As I say, they may be wrong; if, however, you were inclined to type "yes" in response to the message at the top of this post, you can be pretty certain that you, and not they, are the problem.

It's Easter today—the ultimate feast of reconciliation. Reconciliation, however, is not simply a matter of getting together again. It requires making amends and attempting to sin no more. And sometimes, reconciliation is not possible in this life. Sometimes people feel they've been burned so often that they aren't willing to risk being burned again. If someone has decided to stop speaking with you there isn't much you can do about it.

Indifference is the greatest protector of our privacy

Yes, ’n’ how many times can a man turn his head
Pretending he just doesn’t see?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind
The answer is blowin’ in the wind

For my parents generation, Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind" was a great protest song. Anyone who takes the time to actually read the lyrics will see that it isn't. The point of the song is rather that the human condition never changes. Wealth is generated, diseases are cured, technology is developed but the we ourselves and the universe we live in remain mysteries.

Lately, that bitter impatience that led my parents' generation, also known as "the silent generation" to protest against the human condition has come back with a vengeance. One sign of this is the concern with privacy.

Here's the thing: you don't have any privacy. None. Research and writing has been a part of my job for forty some years now and if I took a whim to dig into you and your secrets, I could find out an immense amount about you. The only thing that saves most of us from having our most embarrassing secrets trotted out for our humiliation is that no one particularly cares. If you ever did something to motivate people against you—such as running for office or being charged with a crime—they'd find things that you think no one knows about and they'd use them to hurt you so fast it would stagger you.

And so could anyone else who really wanted to know your secrets.

The thing that saves you is that they don't care enough to bother.

You're just not that important. This has been said here before, but it's worth repeating, your purchasing habits, your web-surfacing history, your occasional porn-viewing habits are of no interest or value to corporations. Companies collecting data on online users don't care about you. There is no money in you. What's valuable to them is what large groups of people do. Knowing what value sets motivate women who care about fashion to self-select into identifiable taste groups is knowledge worth billions of dollars. Knowing that you have secrets is probably of no economic value to anyone.

There are nasty little people who would like to know your secrets, ranging from gossips to identity theft artists, but they aren't the ones people worry about. There is also very good reason not to want governments to collect a lot of information about their citizens but the people who pretend to worry about large corporations collecting data actually promote more and more government invasion of our privacy. (That's because "privacy" is just a smokescreen for their real interest which is more government control of the economy.)

There are also those people who shared your secrets and could, in theory, divulge them any time they took a dislike to you. Assuming they remember, which they probably don't as they neither love you nor hate you enough to remember these things for very long.

The bottom line, though, is that should anyone decide it was worth their while to ferret out your secrets they'd have a very good chance of succeeding. If powerful people in the press decided to do so, they'd have an even better chance. If your government ever turns on you, you're doomed.

Final thought: What about the secrets about yourself that you're keeping from yourself? There are some. And they're important secrets or else you wouldn't bother lying to yourself.

Disrupting the narrative

One of my better lents was two years ago. I had decided to construct a chronology of my life. That is to say, I had decided to go look for independently verifiable events from my life and set them down in chronological order. What I discovered, and what you'll discover too if you try it, is that some of the key events in my personal narrative happened a lot sooner than I thought they had, some had happened a lot later than I thought they had and some of them didn't happen at all.

Now just saying that raises a problem. For another way of saying things happened earlier or later or not at all "in my personal narrative" is to say that my personal narrative was just wrong, that it wasn't true. That, in case you're wondering, is what made it a lenten sacrifice. And I undertook the thing precisely because I knew that assembling such a chronology was going to blow up the narrative. I knew this because I knew that chronologies have a tendency to disrupt narratives. What I didn't know was exactly how it would do it.

I'm so addicted to narratives that I must have expected that I was going to jump from one narrative to another. Maybe from one narrative to its mirror image. I've been conditioned to think this way all my life (and so have you) by something called the hermeneutics of suspicion. That is a tendency to think that the narratives we tell ourselves hide dark secrets. That's a credible claim because sometimes they do. The problem with the hermeneutics of suspicion is that it operates on the assumption that there is always a dark and unflattering truth lingering behind the narrative.

When Joan Didion wrote, "We tell ourselves stories in order to live," she meant that we tell ourselves stories in order to conceal bleak, horrible facts from ourselves. When I set out to do my chronology, I expected to find bleak, horrible facts about myself. I expected to find proof that I'd been telling myself a story to hide from myself the ugly truth that my life had been made up of chaotic and disconnected moments driven by my selfish drive for power and sex.

Before moving on, pause and notice that that too is a kind of narrative. "People tell themselves stories to hide from themselves just how meaningless and unflattering their lives really are," is a kind of narrative. Not only that but it's a brutally simplistic narrative that cannot be true. It's the sort of thing a narcissist would cling to as a last point of refuge so they didn't have to give up their belief that they are very special. If I can't be a very good person, I can be a complete failure. (There's a a theory that some murderers kill as away to bestow a kind of meaning on their lives after a long series of personal failures.)

What I found when I did my chronology was not an alternative narrative. I did indeed find that a lot of things I do were done in pursuit of sex. That's what men do and it isn't evil. More importantly, I found was that there were a number of cases where I'd believed I'd behaved badly when I'd actually behaved pretty well. And I discovered that there were certain people in my life who'd consistently told me things about myself that weren't true. These were people very close to me who'd told me over and over again that I was a bad person whose judgment was no good. They hadn't told me I was evil. What they'd told me over and over again was that I needed to be brought down a peg or two for my own good. As a consequence, I'd grown up to be a man who doubted his own instincts believing that these always concealed baser motives that I was hiding from myself.

Okay, but how do I know I've finally gotten it right? Couldn't all this be just another illusion? It might be but "might be" doesn't mean "is". To believe, as Joan Didion appears to believe a lot of the time, that we just shift from one false narrative to another is to embrace a profound form of skepticism with all that comes with that. If someone says, "You just think you've found the truth but this is just your irrational desires masking the dark truths you know to be true," the obvious response is, "How do you know that doesn't apply to what you've just said? How do you know that your persistent skepticism isn't a way of masking the dark truth that you aren't the smartest person in the room, that you aren't the only one who can see the bleak truth that everyone else is trying to avoid?"

Punishment as kind of love

If we accept, as I argued yesterday, that it sometimes makes sense to treat failure as a sin, we should also accept that God will punish some our failures and that he will do so even when we don't reject him in failing. That he might punish us for failing when we are "doing our best".

Yesterday, I argued that the mother who punishes her child for failing does harm when she wrongly assesses the child's abilities and the challenges they are facing. You should be able to pass in Math and History but it is not reasonable to expect you to be the most popular kid in your class. That said, some kids could reasonably aspire to be the most popular in their class, in which case we would have to ask whether this is a good goal when it is achievable.

God, being God, would seem to be the one most qualified for punishing our failings for he could make these judgments correctly.

In the end, we have to trust that he loves us.

We have come to believe in God's love: in these words the Christian can express the fundamental decision of his life. Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction. (Benedict XVI)

Living morally, then, is a matter of establishing within ourselves the disposition that goes with that encounter.

Overly critical maternal superego

One of my favourite blogs is The Last Psychiatrist. He writes long posts and uses a style of analysis favoured by Wittgenstein that not everyone likes. What that means is that he tends to analyze by circling around and trying out different perspectives rather than dissecting the subject. I find he's worth reading and can almost always find a gem in his pieces.

Like this one:

... an "overly critical maternal superego" which is different than a paternal superego because it yells at you not when you sin but when you fail. This is the mom who doesn't want you to have premarital sex, of course, but a girl like you should be dating the captain of the football team.

We were discussing narcissistic parenting styles on Facebook the other day and I wish I had this quote at my fingertips at the time. I leave it to readers to decide if it sounds like anyone they know.

Here’s a puzzle: when is it reasonable to treat poor performance on a math exam as a moral failure Perhaps the relationship is not clear?

On one level, doing well at arithmetic is simply a matter of skills accumulated. You learn to do the mental math, which consists of memorizing addition from 1+1 to 9+9 and multiplication tables from 1x1 to 9x9. Then you learn a series of steps to follow when doing more complex operations in addition and multiplication. At the same time you learn how to do it backwards so you can do subtraction and division.

But it’s also a moral task because learning how to do these things is a matter of self discipline. Assuming you don’t have to deal with special mental challenges, it’s expected that you will “get” arithmetic. That’s a moral expectation and your mother and father will see it as a moral failure if you don’t.

This requires that they make accurate assessments of what it is reasonable to expect from you. At some point, after passing calculus and linear algebra in my case, you’re allowed to stop. No more is expected of you unless you really want to do it. If you decide you want to do more, then it is reasonable to expect that you do it well.

There is classic child-parent encounter on the front of “I can’t do any more”. It starts with a walk in the park perhaps and the three-year-old says, “I can’t go on” and the parent either picks them up and carries them or insist that they keep pushing. The parent has no strict calculus to make this determination. They simply judge the child based on their experience.

And the parent might well fail morally here. She might cruelly drive the child to the point of injury but that is extremely unlikely. The more common occurrence is she will think it easier to just give in and carry the child rather than help them develop self-discipline. And so children grow up to be weaklings.

And what of the failure of the mother in the example above? The problem is not that she criticizes her daughter for failure rather than sin for failure can be a sin. No, what she has done is to establish an unrealistic explanation. She has failed to assess the situation.

The captain of the senior football team gets sex from the girl he dates. Perhaps not at a strict Christian high school but any other high school he does and no sex means you aren’t his girlfriend. To expect a daughter to meet both conditions of no premarital sex and captain of the football team is impossible and the mother who pushes for such a thing is cruel and heartless.

You could put together a whole list of such statements:

“Just stand up to bully, he’ll back down.” 

“When I was your age I was slim without ever dieting or exercising.” 

“Your cousin Archibald plays the piano beautifully and he never took a lesson.”

A parent who’d say such things does incredible damage to her children.

When people close to you attack you

Here's how Thomas Friedman began his column a little more than a year ago:

I find this election bizarre for many reasons but none more than this: If I were given a blank sheet of paper and told to write down America’s three greatest sources of strength, they would be “a culture of entrepreneurship,” “an ethic of pluralism” and the “quality of our governing institutions.” And yet I look at the campaign so far and I hear leading candidates trashing all of them.  

Donald Trump is running against pluralism. Bernie Sanders shows zero interest in entrepreneurship and says the Wall Street banks that provide capital to risk-takers are involved in “fraud,” and Ted Cruz speaks of our government in the same way as the anti-tax zealot Grover Norquist, who says we should shrink government “to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” (Am I a bad person if I hope that when Norquist slips in that bathtub and has to call 911, no one answers?)

Now, there is a tremendous problem with sloppy logic here. Donald Trump is running against pluralism? Not exactly. We wouldn't say that someone who opposes a certain kind of exercise is opposed to physical fitness. But there is a deeper problem than that and it's in the last line. Grover Norquist wants government to have much less influence over our lives and he used a colourful metaphor to describe that. Friedman wants Norquist to suffer.

And note that wanting smaller government is taken as being identical to wanting to shut down emergency services. Is Friedman actually so stupid as to believe that? Think carefully about your answer because if he isn't stupid then he is dishonest and manipulative.

I suspect that a big part of what motivates Friedman is fear. He can't imagine life without big government and so he engages in vicious and unfair attacks on people who think otherwise. A consequence of this way of thinking and behaving, however, is to shrink our sense of community. In Friedman's world there are good people who believe in big government (and Friedman can't imagine quality government being anything other than big government) and there are people he wishes would suffer because they have the wrong beliefs. That doesn't leave a lot of common ground.

Social psychologists have long known that we present different faces to different people. We do this based on the level of commitment. Friedman may well wish Norquist, whom he doesn't know or care about, dead for simply having the wrong opinions but he is unlikely (I hope) to think the same thing if his wife or one of his children became a libertarian. He might wish that they didn't think this way and may even have heated arguments with them about it. But he'd still love them. If, on the other hand, he meets someone on the bus and they express such a view, he might decide to change seats. The degree of commitment to the person matters.

For that reason, we can usually be more open with the people closest to us. We can say what we really think and not worry that they are suddenly going to start yelling and screaming at us or that they will stop speaking with us. But what if they do just that?

Facebook is a particularly interesting test case for this. You present more or less the same face to everyone on Facebook. What does it mean if people who are supposed to be in your core group of close friends and family respond to your opinions with anger and threats to cut you off while others calmly accept your right to have these opinions? It means they aren't really your close friends or family anymore. They may even be your enemies now. It's nothing you did. They chose this. You don't have to do anything about that. I'd argue that you shouldn't do anything about it. I mean, you shouldn't retaliate or try to convince them to change their minds.

On loving your enemies

The Office of Readings for today has a great reading on loving your enemies by Saint Aelred, abbot. I've always had great difficulty with the notion of loving your enemy.

As I was reading it, it suddenly hit me that two people I have lately had trouble with are, in fact, enemies. They are not enemies by my choice but by their choice. They have attacked me for years now and, a few months after each attack, come back and re-established "friendship". And I, like Charlie Brown when Lucy offers t hold the football, have cheerfully readmitted them. That won't happen again.

I'll forgive them and do my best to forget this latest affront. But I'll have nothing more to do with them. They aren't friends because they don't act like friends even when they aren't being jerks.

Not surprisingly, Aelred gives Jesus as the exemplar of how to love your enemies. I won't pretend to even come close to him in terms of forgiveness but it struck me as I read the piece that Jesus never made the mistake of thinking his enemies to be friends. He asked that they be forgiven and even suggested that they only did what they did because of a misunderstanding but nowhere in the gospels does he pretend they are his friends.

"Be, not do"?

That comes from a popular devotional blog for women. A good friend of mine shared a post from it on Facebook yesterday. It caught my attention because I think it's trying to make a good moral point and missing the target by just a tiny bit.

Here is the meme from the top of the post:

I'm on record as a fan of Catholic Romanticism and that image is something very close to it that is sometimes called Romantic Catholicism (it makes a positive difference if our Catholicism defines our Romanticism as opposed to the other way around). And it's almost good solid virtue ethics—as opposed to the rule-driven ethics that has been the curse of Catholic morality, both liberal and traditional. There is a lot to like here. And there's even more to like in the body of the post.

It begins by accurately identifying a real and significant problem with our moral culture.

An incessant to-do list runs in the back of my mind, and I’m constantly finding myself flitting from one task to another. Even pausing to enjoy entertainment is a struggle against the pull to be useful, so typically you’ll find me folding laundry while watching TV or scrubbing dishes as I listen to a podcast. Kill two birds with one stone, right? 

Our culture’s blaring message of BE PRODUCTIVE and TAKE ACTION are constantly nagging me. In and of themselves, they aren’t bad, but when my accomplishments define my value and vocation, that’s when I know something is wrong.

"When my accomplishments define my value and vocation". That's a profound and radical critique of the morality of our age. And notice that it's not a critique of a narcissistic and empty consumer morality. This is a criticism of what morally serious people teach their children. The people who think that our accomplishments define our value and vocation think of themselves as good. That is rather Jesus-like in spirit.

The writer, her name is Sarah Ortiz and you can see her blog here, has bravely challenged some of our moral pieties. And I think she is right on target. The word "duty" appears nowhere in the article but the kind of morality she identifies is one that is built on duty. The tasks she is struggling to perform above—washing dishes and folding laundry—are her duties. But did you notice what is competing with them? The answer is watching TV and listening to podcasts.. Those are harmless enough activities but they are pretty empty. If you're alternating between duties you hate and mere distractions, you have a big problem at both ends of the scale.

The solution she proposes is that we be servants to one another. She does that on the basis of a pretty dodgy interpretation of today's Gospel reading, which you can find at the link.

Magical thinking versus theology

The thing that's missing here is a realization that is we are our actions. They are the only measure of who you are and what you are becoming. Yes, grace is giving you the ability to do but what you do is sine non qua: we are called to be doers of the word and not merely hearers.

I think this is hard because really embracing this requires us to care a whole lot about what we want to be and that can look like selfishness. Indeed, we are surrounded by people and institutions who work non stop to convince us that our most important moral task, growing in the likeness of God, is mere selfishness. To succeed, we have to set aside what our parents wanted us to be, what our bosses want us to be, what the beauty industry wants us to be and what the entertainment industry—including Catholic mommy blogs—wants us to be and think seriously about what we want us to be. Jesus taught us to be servants to be sure but he taught us that was the way to be first, that was the way to be a leader.

The measure that we are on the right track is happiness in the sense of flourishing. We are to aspire to happiness and that begins now. There are limitations to what we can achieve in this life but there is much we can do within those limitations. We are not taught to wait and suffer patiently until that great day when we are magically made whole. If the plot line of salvation you're working on in any way resembles the one where the heroine debases herself in front of others so that one day her fairy godmother will make it possible to go to the ball where a beautiful Prince will fall in love with her then you believe in a silly superstition and not Catholic Christianity.

Our faith is not magic but hard and real and sensible. Here is the meme from above with two slight, but crucial corrections:

Our value is in who we are created to become, not in what our sense of duty tells us we should do.

The most subversive moment in teen literature

I suspect I'm repeating myself but I love this:

A red-billed cap pulled at a jaunty angle over her blonde curls. Penny made a striking figure in a well tailored suit of dark wool. Her eyes sparkled with the joy of youth and it was easy for her to smile. She was an only child, the daughter of Anthony Parker, editor and publisher of the Riverview Star, and her mother had died when she was very young. (Behind the Green Door, 1940)

The red-billed cap makes it seem particularly appropriate right now.

That's called esoteric writing. There is lots of plausible deniability. There is a period and lots of parenthetical statements between "it was easy for her to smile" and "her mother had died".  There is even a plausible counter reading that she was very young when her mother had died and therefore being without a mother is not a barrier to Penny's finding it easy to smile. And that was probably enough to fool the mothers of readers of the Penny Parker books. They might have been briefly troubled by that paragraph had they read it but would have reassured themselves that it was just an accident of an accidental juxtaposition of ideas and that it didn't mean what it appeared to mean.  That won't hold if you think about it though: the text implies that it was easy for her to smile because her mother was dead and not despite her being so.

I suspect that very few of the girls who read the Penny Parker books missed the point. They eagerly grasped the chance to imagine what it would be like not to have a mother and they did so because it's liberating to think that*. And healthy. Blowing up your relationship with your mother is an essential part of growing up for both girls and boys. If you didn't do it as a teenager, do it now. (And also with any other members of your family determined to carry on in your mother's spirit.)

The Penny Parker books were the work of Mildred Wirt Benson, more famously known as the creator of the Nancy Drew series. She wrote the first four books of that series and quit when the women controlling the syndicate decided they wanted to make Nancy Drew more lady-like and obedient. You'll notice that Nancy's mother was also deceased. Wirt Benson created four heroines whose mothers were dead. That's a bit too many to be a coincidence.


* I should add that only a girl whose mother was still alive would think that. This is fantasy—actually having your mother die when you are young is nothing fun. But the fantasy is very appealing and the proof of this can be found in any one of hundreds of teen adventure stories where the hero is an orphan.

On not taking people you care about seriously

I think one of the keys to happiness is learning how to stop taking seriously people who don't deserve to be taken seriously. Some of these people will be very near to you.

The problem is that everyone pushes values at you all the time. That's inevitable and fair. You, after all, are pushing values at them all the time. You don't have to set out to preach at them. The mere fact that you live out your core values will cause you to project them. There have been times when I knew people objected to my beliefs and so I kept them to myself so as to not place stress on our relationship. It didn't work; the consistency of my habits and my daily choices gave away my beliefs.

I also quickly learned that there was a double standard. They felt free to pronounce on their values and got offended when I expressed mine. On the other hand, they chose to get offended at my quietly living mine. Any conservative with liberal family and friends will know what I'm talking about.

I realized that the only choice was to stop taking them seriously. To continue to treat their opinions as worthy of respect was only going to cause unhappiness for me and them. But I immediately ran into a trap for acting in a way that showed I didn't take them seriously was a) going to offend them and b) was contradictory for my wanting them to know that I didn't take them seriously was proof that I did want to take them seriously.

In the end, I've found myself behaving a little like the character of Thomas More in Bolt's play A Man for All Seasons.  I go to great lengths to shield my real values from these people. It works ... to a point. It works enough, however, to make for much more happiness in my life.

The people involved sense that I don't share their values and they could probably figure out that I don't take them seriously—that I don't even bother to try and figure out what they believe or why anymore—if they thought about it. For the most part, though, they don't take that second step. I am aware that should they ever, as More's persecutors did, force the issue, that would be the end of any relationship between us. I am particularly aware of this threat since the last election for, while I do not admire Trump, I can't take seriously the notion that he is a dangerous threat who must be stopped. I have simply been avoiding family members and friends who do think he represents some sort of existential threat (to the limited extent that they can be credited with actually "thinking" about these issues). And I am perfectly willing to keep avoiding them for as long as it takes; if that turns out to be for the rest of my or their lives, I'm willing to do that.

Learning from Jane Austen

There’s a lot of tribalism and romanticism in the water these days. By tribalism I mean the idea that loyalty to one’s side comes first and arguments come later, and when they do, they must be bent to fit the needs of one’s side. By romanticism, I mean the primacy of feelings over facts.

I understand the point Goldberg wants to make here. He’s wrong though. Wrong about a technical point that only geeks would care about. So let’s go with that.

The primacy of feelings over facts was a feature of some aspects of Romanticism but it was more a feature of something that immediately preceded Romanticism. Sentimentalism, sometimes called “sensibility”, regarded feeling as special way to view the world, an alternative to rationalism, that would give a better understanding of reality. It’s been back in vogue a bit lately in academic circles. Romanticism, whatever that means (and it has many meanings), came as a response to sentimentalism.

Whatever the history and correct use of labels, sentimentalism has returned in a big way to popular culture and that is what Goldberg is right about. We want, as he ably discusses, our feelings validated. We want to be told that the prism we see the world through is a morally superior way to see things.

One way we might respond is to look at the different responses that the first round of sentimentalism engendered to see if we can learn something. Outside of the various kinds of Romanticism, the most famous response was Jane Austen’s. Her first published novel, Sense and Sensibility, dealt with the issue directly but all her novels feature at least one character who causes trouble for herself and others because she takes her feelings as authoritative.

The most important thing is to work on ourselves so that we don’t become that person. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say, so we become less like that person than we currently are.

There are, I think, two key lessons from Austen that we would all do well to begin applying to our lives. The first of these comes from William Deresiewicz:

Being a good person is more important than being a fun person*.

Probably the best novel to see this is Mansfield Park where it comes out strongly in the contrast between Mary Crawford and Fanny Price.

The second lesson is my own:

Learning is more important than being vindicated.

The best novel to see this is Austen’s most famous, Pride and Prejudice. The pride in that novel is primarily Mr. Darcy’s and that has been much discussed here and elsewhere. But what is Elizabeth Bennet’s failing. Well, prejudice obviously but not in our sense of the word wherein prejudice has come to mean something like racism. It originally meant simply to pre-judge something. And why would we do that? Well, there are a number of reasons but one way to make certain you are prejudiced is to seek vindication over learning. Both Darcy and Elizabeth suffer from pride and prejudice but Darcy is better at overcoming his need to feel vindicated than Elizabeth.

If we're going to restart this blog, let's make a point of emphasizing being a good person and learning. (To return to Goldberg's point, the search for vindication often leads to tribalism and our attenpts at being a fun person tend to lead to sentimentalism.)

* I'm quoting from a podcast interview he did at the Art of Manliness.