That is what I was doing today. It's something I have been meaning to do for a while now; one of those things on the bucket list. It's also one of those things that tests your confidence. That's why no posts today (aside from this one). Too much nervousness.
Thursday, January 10, 2013
Wednesday, January 9, 2013
Elizabeth Wurtzel's latest piece about herself is actually shockingly well written
I know, I know. I understand the anger. Go ahead and call New York magazine and tell them you have written five thousand words about yourself and see if they publish it. Wurtzel not only got published, they spent big money to have a photographer take a picture that uses all the resources available to the art to make Wurtzel look more like she used to than she does now.
The key point in the article is when she suddenly starts talking about how her parents weren't rich. That's the thing about Wurtzel; she is part of an elite but she doesn't like to think of herself as part of an elite. She likes to think she earned her place in life.
Then she goes on to talk about how that elite life is about to disappear and how it's a sad thing that the rest of the world isn't subsidizing it anymore. That's important because New York magazine did publish her article and they did so for a reason.
But let's go at this from another angle because you know Elizabeth Wurtzel. I am going to be crude here. She had, and you can still see traces of it in her latest photo, what my friend Alison once called "a blowjob face". She once said of an ex-girlfriend of mine, "Guys will put up with endless bullshit from her because you love to picture that face looking up at you when she's giving you a blowjob."
As I say, you know her. You've met the woman who cruises through life getting jobs and good marks easily because she has sexual power. She isn't hot enough to be a model or a actress but, unlike them, she is right there in the room with you. And that matters to everyone, even other women. No matter what she does, the men and women around her continue to have hope in her. We want her to succeed.
As a consequence, women like Wurtzel are always forgiven for what they do and never have to forgive anyone else. Notice the contrast between the self-righteousness in these lines,
And yet, life has a disturbing tendency to play out like an Austen novel.
Wurtzel wrote this piece because of her desperate need for attention as opposed to any desperate need for money; which is to say that neither Crawford's life nor Wurtzel's is likely to be tragic. Their lives just won't be as good as they once seemed. All that rich promise their lives seemed to have, for others as well as themselves, when they were young and still had sexual power is now gone and it all gets kind of sad from here on in.
One temptation is to read the practical issues as moral ones. One reason to hate Wurtzel is because you believe she is finally getting the comeuppance that she has long deserved. (Or, for feminists, because the defiant role model they once loved is now an embarrassment.) This is misguided because life works out the way it does and morality will not ensure practical success. The thing about both Elizabeth Wurtzel and Mary Crawford is that they are both aware of and savvy about the practical consequences of their actions in a way that Lydia Bennet or Sid Vicious, for example, are not.
Wurtzel and Crawford defy convention not because they hate it but because they see themselves as above it. It's not so much that they don't see that the practical consequences of life will apply to them but that they feel that they should not.
The key point in the article is when she suddenly starts talking about how her parents weren't rich. That's the thing about Wurtzel; she is part of an elite but she doesn't like to think of herself as part of an elite. She likes to think she earned her place in life.
Then she goes on to talk about how that elite life is about to disappear and how it's a sad thing that the rest of the world isn't subsidizing it anymore. That's important because New York magazine did publish her article and they did so for a reason.
But let's go at this from another angle because you know Elizabeth Wurtzel. I am going to be crude here. She had, and you can still see traces of it in her latest photo, what my friend Alison once called "a blowjob face". She once said of an ex-girlfriend of mine, "Guys will put up with endless bullshit from her because you love to picture that face looking up at you when she's giving you a blowjob."
That's the thing about Wurtzel that no one wants to say out loud. Wurtzel is a talented writer but she gets rated higher than she deserves because of her looks. (Wurtzel mentions that Harvard has published a circular in which she is the only female famous alumnus mentioned under the heading of "literature". Think about that. Harvard put her, and no other woman, in the same category as " T. S. Eliot, e. e. cummings, William S. Burroughs, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Norman Mailer, John Updike, George Plimpton, David Halberstam, and Henry David Thoreau".)
As a consequence, women like Wurtzel are always forgiven for what they do and never have to forgive anyone else. Notice the contrast between the self-righteousness in these lines,
I am committed to feminism and don’t understand why anyone would agree to be party to a relationship that is not absolutely equal. I believe women who are supported by men are prostitutes, that is that, and I am heartbroken to live through a time where Wall Street money means these women are not treated with due disdain.Then contrast that with the incredible self-forgiveness a paragraph later,
For a while after my first book came out, I went home with a different man every night and did heroin every day—which showed my good sense, because the rest of the time I was completely out of control.The arc of a life like hers is not hard to predict. In a Jane Austen novel it would work out just as you would guess. Nowadays, the critical view is that we have shaken off the shackles of the classic English novel. Nowadays, we write stories that are grimmer but, we like to insist, freer because they acknowledge the randomness of life.
And yet, life has a disturbing tendency to play out like an Austen novel.
It had all gone wrong. At long last, I had found myself vulnerable to the worst of New York City, because at 44 my life was not so different from the way it was at 24. Stubbornly and proudly, emphatically and pathetically, I had refused to grow up, and so I was becoming one of those people who refuses to grow up—one of the city’s Lost Boys. I was still subletting in Greenwich Village, instead of owning in Brooklyn Heights. I had loved everything about Yale Law School—especially the part where I graduated at 40—but I spent my life savings on an abiding interest, which is a lot to invest in curiosity. By never marrying, I ended up never divorcing, but I also failed to accumulate that brocade of civility and padlock of security—kids you do or don’t want, Tiffany silver you never use—that makes life complete. Convention serves a purpose: It gives life meaning, and without it, one is in a constant existential crisis.It isn't hard to imagine Mary Crawford saying something like that if we were to track her down twenty years after the events described in Mansfield Park.
Wurtzel wrote this piece because of her desperate need for attention as opposed to any desperate need for money; which is to say that neither Crawford's life nor Wurtzel's is likely to be tragic. Their lives just won't be as good as they once seemed. All that rich promise their lives seemed to have, for others as well as themselves, when they were young and still had sexual power is now gone and it all gets kind of sad from here on in.
One temptation is to read the practical issues as moral ones. One reason to hate Wurtzel is because you believe she is finally getting the comeuppance that she has long deserved. (Or, for feminists, because the defiant role model they once loved is now an embarrassment.) This is misguided because life works out the way it does and morality will not ensure practical success. The thing about both Elizabeth Wurtzel and Mary Crawford is that they are both aware of and savvy about the practical consequences of their actions in a way that Lydia Bennet or Sid Vicious, for example, are not.
Wurtzel and Crawford defy convention not because they hate it but because they see themselves as above it. It's not so much that they don't see that the practical consequences of life will apply to them but that they feel that they should not.
Even now, I am always in love—or else I am getting over the last person or getting started with the next one. But I worry about growing old this way.Well, now she worries.
Tuesday, January 8, 2013
"Libertine" is back
I took the word "libertine" out of my profile, as in "crypto-Catholic libertine" a while ago. Thinking about it, it struck me that it was silly to get worried about the word as the irony ought to be obvious. So it's back.
By the way, it isn't a frequently asked question but every once ina while someone will ask the origin of the tag. As one of my readers put it:
By the way, it isn't a frequently asked question but every once ina while someone will ask the origin of the tag. As one of my readers put it:
By the way, what on earth is a crypto-Catholic libertine? Do you "continue in sin, that grace may abound?"The answer is:
A "crypto-Catholic libertine" is an expression I stole from John Mullan who teaches English at University College London. He used it when discussing James II. Mullan said that even James older brother Charles II who was a crypto=Catholic libertine, which is to say a fairly debased character from Mullan's perspective, was able to see the folly of James behaviour "in matters of religion and sex".The article that inspired me to start this blog, How the divine right went wrong, is still on-line in case anyone is interested. It may be a little difficult to connect it to what you find here as a lot of the connections are obscure and only make sense to someone with my precise history. The line that got me going was this description of James II, "Here was a royal rake who became a devout believer." That made me think of myself. I'm no historian but James II has always struck me as a decent guy (by the standards of his time) who tried to do the right thing as he saw it and it is no fault of his that he ran afoul of a bunch of Catholic-hating fanatics.
So the sense of the label applied to myself is to suggest that even as bad as I am I might have a moral, religious or literary insight now and then. Or, as the German proverb has it, even a blind chicken finds some seeds.
Seen on the bus
Six years ago, the Lemon Girl and I started thinking about living without a car. The car we owned at the time, a nine-year-old Honda, overheard us and promptly called our bluff. It broke down in a bunch of ways at the same time and we suddenly found ourselves confronted with a repair bill that exceeded the what the resale value of the car would have been after the repairs were done.
It has been six years now and the experiment has been a successful one. I should add, though, that it has only been possible because we live in a relatively densely populated part of the city. There is a bus stop a half block from our front door a bus goes by every fifteen minutes that travels straight to the downtown core. If we weren't privileged enough to live in this neighbourhood, and we are privileged, it wouldn't be possible to live without a car (and if it makes you feel better to hate me as a consequence, there is nothing I can do to stop you).
That out of the way, I'll get to my main point. I should warn you that it is a highly incorrect point and there is a very good chance that you will be offended by this. When you give up your car and travel on the bus all the time you get to see what poor people are like and a lot of what you discover about them is not good. The poor in spirit are definitely blessed, the people who are simply poor are not necessarily so.
We see a lot of hatred directed at rich people who only care about themselves, who never give back, who have no concern whatsoever about good of the greater society that makes their life of relative comfort and security possible. And such people do exist. But the brutal truth is that you find far more poor people who only care about themselves, who never give back, who have no concern whatsoever about good of the greater society that makes their life of relative comfort and security possible.
It's not a difficult thing to show a little concern for your fellow passengers. it's not difficult, for example, to move ten to fifteen feet further into the bus so that you aren't blocking the entrance for everyone else who is getting on an off. It's not difficult to resist staring at a woman's breasts intently for twenty minutes so she can travel comfortably too. It's not difficult to take your back pack off and carry it so you don't block the aisle for everyone trying to get by you. It's not difficult to move over to the window so someone else can have a seat. It's also not difficult to not sit with your knees wide apart. It's not difficult to not scratch things into the windows with your keys or to not right angry, woman-hating things on the back of the seat ahead of you with a Sharpie.
If you ride the bus a lot you will see hundreds upon hundreds of people who simply will not do those things for others. They stand right in the doorway. It's not that they don't know that they are causing inconvenience for others. They know damn well what they are doing and it shows in the way they hunker down defensively and avoid eye contact. (When someone on public transit studiously avoids looking anyone in the eyes you can be sure they are planning to be an asshole about something.) The have decided that a relatively small gain in convenience for themselves is more important than showing any concern for other people.
The corollary to this first point, and one some will find even more offensive, is, as the Lemon Girl noted last Friday, that this lack of concern for others has a lot to do with why these people ended up on the bottom of the heap. No, I am not saying that all poor people are selfish or that poor people deserve to be poor. But the simple truth is that if you don't care for others, they will return the favour. They won't trust you and they won't form bonds with you. You won't have friends who will help you, a spouse willing to marry you and employers won't trust you with anything but the most unimportant, menial jobs.
Not only do these people not contribute much, they also cost society billions of dollars every year. They do damage to public property, the make operations like public transit less efficient, they cause more people to drive cars in the first place by making the experience of using public services less pleasant (and if you think they make public transit unpleasant, you should see what they do to public parks and public washrooms). And because they do such a poor job of talking care of themselves, others often end up having to take care of them.
The thing is, if we want to attack the rich for "not paying their fair share", we have to do the same for everyone else too. I'm not sure it's entirely a good thing to insist that everyone pull together all the time about everything but when we move from the private realm to the public, that everyone who takes public transit should contribute by behaving themselves is a tiny thing to ask.
It has been six years now and the experiment has been a successful one. I should add, though, that it has only been possible because we live in a relatively densely populated part of the city. There is a bus stop a half block from our front door a bus goes by every fifteen minutes that travels straight to the downtown core. If we weren't privileged enough to live in this neighbourhood, and we are privileged, it wouldn't be possible to live without a car (and if it makes you feel better to hate me as a consequence, there is nothing I can do to stop you).
That out of the way, I'll get to my main point. I should warn you that it is a highly incorrect point and there is a very good chance that you will be offended by this. When you give up your car and travel on the bus all the time you get to see what poor people are like and a lot of what you discover about them is not good. The poor in spirit are definitely blessed, the people who are simply poor are not necessarily so.
We see a lot of hatred directed at rich people who only care about themselves, who never give back, who have no concern whatsoever about good of the greater society that makes their life of relative comfort and security possible. And such people do exist. But the brutal truth is that you find far more poor people who only care about themselves, who never give back, who have no concern whatsoever about good of the greater society that makes their life of relative comfort and security possible.
It's not a difficult thing to show a little concern for your fellow passengers. it's not difficult, for example, to move ten to fifteen feet further into the bus so that you aren't blocking the entrance for everyone else who is getting on an off. It's not difficult to resist staring at a woman's breasts intently for twenty minutes so she can travel comfortably too. It's not difficult to take your back pack off and carry it so you don't block the aisle for everyone trying to get by you. It's not difficult to move over to the window so someone else can have a seat. It's also not difficult to not sit with your knees wide apart. It's not difficult to not scratch things into the windows with your keys or to not right angry, woman-hating things on the back of the seat ahead of you with a Sharpie.
If you ride the bus a lot you will see hundreds upon hundreds of people who simply will not do those things for others. They stand right in the doorway. It's not that they don't know that they are causing inconvenience for others. They know damn well what they are doing and it shows in the way they hunker down defensively and avoid eye contact. (When someone on public transit studiously avoids looking anyone in the eyes you can be sure they are planning to be an asshole about something.) The have decided that a relatively small gain in convenience for themselves is more important than showing any concern for other people.
The corollary to this first point, and one some will find even more offensive, is, as the Lemon Girl noted last Friday, that this lack of concern for others has a lot to do with why these people ended up on the bottom of the heap. No, I am not saying that all poor people are selfish or that poor people deserve to be poor. But the simple truth is that if you don't care for others, they will return the favour. They won't trust you and they won't form bonds with you. You won't have friends who will help you, a spouse willing to marry you and employers won't trust you with anything but the most unimportant, menial jobs.
Not only do these people not contribute much, they also cost society billions of dollars every year. They do damage to public property, the make operations like public transit less efficient, they cause more people to drive cars in the first place by making the experience of using public services less pleasant (and if you think they make public transit unpleasant, you should see what they do to public parks and public washrooms). And because they do such a poor job of talking care of themselves, others often end up having to take care of them.
The thing is, if we want to attack the rich for "not paying their fair share", we have to do the same for everyone else too. I'm not sure it's entirely a good thing to insist that everyone pull together all the time about everything but when we move from the private realm to the public, that everyone who takes public transit should contribute by behaving themselves is a tiny thing to ask.
Monday, January 7, 2013
Most viewed posts of 2012
A a couple of caveats:
#1 White Girl Singers Who Sound Black
This surprised me because I thought I was writing about something that would only interest me when I put it up. I've tracked the subject in a terribly informal, not serious way over the years and wrote about some singers I remembered. I suspect its relative popularity stems from the fact that very few people write about this subject and the few that do use it as an excuse to moralize about race rather than talk about the singers. I may be the only game in town for readers who are simply curious.
#2 Mad Men: What is Lakshmi up to?
True confession time: I expected to hate Mad Men when I first watched it. Everything about the show and the people who were praising it to me led mo to think it was going to be an over-rated bit of fluff. Instead it turned out to be a fascinating show that digs deeply into the moral ambiguities of our time. (So far anyway.) This particular episode was a perfect example of that. TV critic Matt Zoller Seitz, on the other hand, was upset about one scene this past season that he described as the ...
#3 A little light culture: That anal sex question
It's one of the oddities of the sexual politics of the current era that the near-universal popularity of fellatio both with men receiving and women giving is seen as a problem whereas anal sex, which is of little attraction for most men compared to other options available to them and hated by most women, is promoted as something everyone should try. This post examined one of the the more blatant and offensive examples of this promotion. Offensive, by the way, because it promoted anal sex to young teens.
#4 Neo noir Thursday: Swimming Pool
Anything that seems ripe for parody is probably much harder to do than it looks. A prime example of this is neo noir. Often attempted but rarely pulled off, a good neo noir is a rare thing and a good neo noir with a female lead is nearly impossible. The relative popularity of this post probably is probably because it directs people to one of the very few examples of the latter out there.
# 5 What are they selling: Another image
There is certainly a right to pursue dignity, just as there is a right to pursue happiness, but it is problematic to suggest that people are entitled to success in these pursuits. That is unless you are part of the poverty industry and looking for a pitch that will pull the money in.
# 6 A lighter political item
Stacy McCain has a blog that probably draws more viewers every five minutes than this post picking on a momentary indiscretion of his has in a year. That said, there is a tendency on the right to shoot off mouths before really thinking things through and that is especially true when mocking women's sexual self-presentation. If Rush Limbaugh had read and thought about this post he never would have made the mistake of calling Sandra Fluke a slut.
#7 Neo noir: Impulse
A thorough trashing of a film that richly deserves it. This is, as I keep saying, a very low-profile blog but it's not impossible that more people read this post than saw this movie. Well, no, not really but I still suspect the post's relative popularity is a reflection of the issue it raises rather than any interest in the movie I write about. And that issue is this: Why can't a woman misbehave sexually in a film and yet remain a sympathetic character? There are thousands upon thousands of male roles that pull this off. Why can we not, despite all our much-bragged about "liberation" and "enlightenment", appreciate a sexually misbehaving female as a complex but ultimately sympathetic character?
# 8 Well worth reading
A post recommending a piece about Susan Sontag. I doubt anyone has ever come to this blog looking for interesting stuff about Susan Sontag. Lots of people come, however, to read what I have to say about Mad Men and it was probably my suggesting that the barbarism that Sontag first encouraged and then came to regret was an important bit of background for understanding the show that attracted readers.
# 9 A little light culture: Jenny McCarthy's hot dog
A recurring theme on this blog is the paradoxical way that our culture obsesses about women's sexuality but still remains utterly naive about the things women actually do with and about their sexuality. This is one of many posts on the subject and it probably drew traffic because the words "Jenny McCarthy" are Google bait.
# 10 Sorta political: Why David Weigel deserves our contempt
Collectively speaking, the news media are currently incompetent and morally despicable. In this post, I went after one target in a target-rich environment.
- This is not, and does not aspire to be, a huge traffic blog. I am not claiming these posts were huge successes in absolute terms. They just drew more traffic by my humble standards.
- These are the posts that I put up in 2012 that drew the most traffic in 2012. There are posts I put up two or three years ago that drew more views than some of these in the last twelve months.
#1 White Girl Singers Who Sound Black
This surprised me because I thought I was writing about something that would only interest me when I put it up. I've tracked the subject in a terribly informal, not serious way over the years and wrote about some singers I remembered. I suspect its relative popularity stems from the fact that very few people write about this subject and the few that do use it as an excuse to moralize about race rather than talk about the singers. I may be the only game in town for readers who are simply curious.
#2 Mad Men: What is Lakshmi up to?
True confession time: I expected to hate Mad Men when I first watched it. Everything about the show and the people who were praising it to me led mo to think it was going to be an over-rated bit of fluff. Instead it turned out to be a fascinating show that digs deeply into the moral ambiguities of our time. (So far anyway.) This particular episode was a perfect example of that. TV critic Matt Zoller Seitz, on the other hand, was upset about one scene this past season that he described as the ...
... most incoherent scene in season five of Mad Men, and the one that most lends credence to the notion that this is ultimately a male-centered show that understands many of its female characters in an academic rather than intuitive way.I argued that the exact opposite was the case and there were enough people out there who felt likewise to make this my second-most viewed post of the year.
#3 A little light culture: That anal sex question
It's one of the oddities of the sexual politics of the current era that the near-universal popularity of fellatio both with men receiving and women giving is seen as a problem whereas anal sex, which is of little attraction for most men compared to other options available to them and hated by most women, is promoted as something everyone should try. This post examined one of the the more blatant and offensive examples of this promotion. Offensive, by the way, because it promoted anal sex to young teens.
#4 Neo noir Thursday: Swimming Pool
Anything that seems ripe for parody is probably much harder to do than it looks. A prime example of this is neo noir. Often attempted but rarely pulled off, a good neo noir is a rare thing and a good neo noir with a female lead is nearly impossible. The relative popularity of this post probably is probably because it directs people to one of the very few examples of the latter out there.
# 5 What are they selling: Another image
There is certainly a right to pursue dignity, just as there is a right to pursue happiness, but it is problematic to suggest that people are entitled to success in these pursuits. That is unless you are part of the poverty industry and looking for a pitch that will pull the money in.
# 6 A lighter political item
Stacy McCain has a blog that probably draws more viewers every five minutes than this post picking on a momentary indiscretion of his has in a year. That said, there is a tendency on the right to shoot off mouths before really thinking things through and that is especially true when mocking women's sexual self-presentation. If Rush Limbaugh had read and thought about this post he never would have made the mistake of calling Sandra Fluke a slut.
#7 Neo noir: Impulse
A thorough trashing of a film that richly deserves it. This is, as I keep saying, a very low-profile blog but it's not impossible that more people read this post than saw this movie. Well, no, not really but I still suspect the post's relative popularity is a reflection of the issue it raises rather than any interest in the movie I write about. And that issue is this: Why can't a woman misbehave sexually in a film and yet remain a sympathetic character? There are thousands upon thousands of male roles that pull this off. Why can we not, despite all our much-bragged about "liberation" and "enlightenment", appreciate a sexually misbehaving female as a complex but ultimately sympathetic character?
# 8 Well worth reading
A post recommending a piece about Susan Sontag. I doubt anyone has ever come to this blog looking for interesting stuff about Susan Sontag. Lots of people come, however, to read what I have to say about Mad Men and it was probably my suggesting that the barbarism that Sontag first encouraged and then came to regret was an important bit of background for understanding the show that attracted readers.
# 9 A little light culture: Jenny McCarthy's hot dog
A recurring theme on this blog is the paradoxical way that our culture obsesses about women's sexuality but still remains utterly naive about the things women actually do with and about their sexuality. This is one of many posts on the subject and it probably drew traffic because the words "Jenny McCarthy" are Google bait.
# 10 Sorta political: Why David Weigel deserves our contempt
Collectively speaking, the news media are currently incompetent and morally despicable. In this post, I went after one target in a target-rich environment.
Friday, January 4, 2013
A little light culture: Anne certainly Hathaway about her
And all the Shakespeare scholars groaned because that pun is one of the hoariest in their trade. In this case, however, I'm talking about the actress. You may remember that the last time we discussed her, Hathaway had gone out with a dress with major slits and no panties, revealed a slit not in her dress to photographers and then claimed that she was surprised and humiliated that this had happened. Well now we know why she did it:
Even more oddly, she admits that she knows here erratic behaviour off the set could hurt the prospects of her latest movie.
And then she spills the beans:
She will still be able to get the attention an exhibitionist like her needs after that but she'll have to do it the way Jennifer Anniston and Angelina Jolie do it—which is to say by being a drama queen for the tabloids.
By the way, I ask the question I keep asking again, If things are going so well for women right now, why do things like this keep happening? Why is it that Hollywood actress's careers are still pretty much over by the time they hit their thirties?
"I'm not Rihanna," she told Harper's Bazaar. "I'm not cool. When people come up to me in the street, they often want a hug not a photo, and they want that because they like my work.Think of how bizarre that is. An actress doesn't want to be known for her work; she'd prefer to be known as a bad girl.
Even more oddly, she admits that she knows here erratic behaviour off the set could hurt the prospects of her latest movie.
And then she spills the beans:
Now, after her "secret" marriage to Adam Shulman in September, she has told of her worries about turning 30, as well as the effect of her personal life on her performance. "It doesn't help that the new crop of girls is so gorgeous, and so 22 years old," she said of her recent birthday. "But I'm excited about it."As great as her supposed success in Les Miserables has been, Hathaway realized "a few days" into the shooting that she was moving from sex symbol to character actor. In today's entertainment industry, even character actresses have to be really hot to get major roles. Best case scenario, Hathaway has five more years of good work ahead of her and she will increasingly be playing supporting roles.
She will still be able to get the attention an exhibitionist like her needs after that but she'll have to do it the way Jennifer Anniston and Angelina Jolie do it—which is to say by being a drama queen for the tabloids.
By the way, I ask the question I keep asking again, If things are going so well for women right now, why do things like this keep happening? Why is it that Hollywood actress's careers are still pretty much over by the time they hit their thirties?
Thursday, January 3, 2013
Evil as a man can be
There's two kind of peopleThe question of evil came up in the comments on another post. To be honest, I've never thought about evil much in my life. Not in a philosophical way that is. I tend to think that evil will always be a part of human life but that has mostly played out in my political views. One of the many reasons I am impatient with progressives and liberals is that they keep acting as if evil can be engineered out of our culture.
I just can't stand
Evil-hearted woman
And a lyin' man
Don't you lie to me
Now don't you lie to me
Because it makes me mad
Evil as a man can be
Ironically, my certainty that evil will always be with us comes from my having grown up in an old-style east coast environment where everyone was unfailingly polite to one another, where family members loved and supported one another and really bad things hardly ever happen to anyone. And yet, even there, evil things were done.
But what sort of thing is evil?
That may be a deceptive question. It tends to bias us towards a Platonic approach. We ask "What is Evil?" and assume that there is a "thing" that corresponds to the word. A very useful word "thing". We can use it to describe things without getting too specific about what they are. If I asked, "What sort of substance is evil? you would immediately know I'd said something stupid for if we know one thing about evil it is that it isn't a substance.
That said, we never wonder that evil doesn't seem to have any substance and that is odd.
To think of evil as a thing is also to unconsciously assume that it is always and everywhere the same thing.
A more useful approach, I think, is to approach the problem like analytic philosophers and ask ourselves how the word is used. In that case it is a superlative used to describe badness outside the realm of ordinary badness. And we have a whole lot of words to describe badness: immoral, naughty, unkind, cruel, callous, uncaring, destructive .... These words, as Iris Murdoch would remind us if she were here, describe a rich palette of human behaviour and that is important to remember, as she would insist, because we tend to impoverish our vocabulary when we put our philosopher hats on.
Evil then is the word we reach for when words such as immoral, naughty, unkind, cruel, callous, uncaring, destructive and many, many others no longer seem enough to describe the degree of, well, evil we see. When we want people to know, for example that Angela wasn't just careless about the sexual relationships she and others were in but that she was so to a superlative degree, we say she was "evil".
It's also the word we use to describe when we are lying about people we want to defeat. The temptation to paint political opponents as evil is often irresistible as we saw just recently as proponents of gun control unleashed their hatred on Wayne Lapierre whom they saw as evil simply because he stands in the way of what they want to do.
When we think of the ways we use the word "evil" instead of thinking of it as a sort of "thing" we can also see that one of the odd paradoxes about the word is that it can be used as a compliment. We can, and I have, say to someone that they are evil when they have understood us better than we understand ourselves. When we say this we recognize a power to seduce us and we play it as highest compliment because the idea of being seduced by this person fills us with pleasure.
And keep that in mind because the thought of an enemy understanding us better than we understand ourselves would not be pleasurable at all. That would be frightening in a way that few things in life are.
To go back to what I originally said in the comments to the previous post, I can think of two broad approaches to the problem of evil:
- We could treat the decision to be good instead of evil as some sort of fundamental choice a person makes. This is the view we get in the world of graphic novels. Batman and The Joker are relatively similar in terms of their "virtue", the difference between them is that Batman has made some fundamental choice to fight on the side of good and The Joker on the side of evil.
- The other avenue we might take is to think of evil in the same terms that the Catholic church thinks of a depraved conscience. That is to say that every time we willing choose to do what we know is wrong or choose not to do good we degrade ourselves. Do this long enough and I will reach a state where I am so depraved that it would make sense to call me evil.
Another thing I would add is that otherwise virtuous people can allow themselves to go so far as to be evil in one aspect of their lives. We have seen, for example, thanks to Twitter, that people who are otherwise civilized will say vile things of people about whom they know nothing other than that they have different views about public policy.
Perhaps the most disturbing example of this is racism. In literature and movies, racist hate is always shown as part of an entire package—the hater is evil in every way. In real life, racism shows up in people who are well-mannered, kind to children and puppies and often braver and more thoughtful than is the norm in our culture about just about everything except their attitudes towards people of certain races.
I could say much more but I won't.
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