In an email to a friend this morning, I wrote “interested” when I had intended to write “interest.” The sentence contained the phrase, “your interest has outlasted…”
I noted it because the Watcher (that’s what I call the alien intelligence they have attached to my word processing program) put a dotted red line under “your.” My guess is that It wanted me to write “you’re” because it is more likely that I would want to say “you’re interested” than that I would say “your interested.” Certainly It is right about that, but the mistake wasn’t a bad contraction of “you are,” it was a typo of “interest.”
That’s not a simple typo repair. If I had written “gimnasium” instead of “gymnasium,” It would catch the mistake and correct it. I would have to see the correction being made just to know what had happened. If, on the other hand, I had been trying to distinguish the uses of what we currently call a gymnasium from the much broader set of uses that Hellenistic gymnasium has under the generals of Alexander the Great, I might very well have tried to flag that distinction by referring to the modern kind as “merely a gimnasium,” and not really a “gymnasium.”
There are two issues here. The first is that I sometimes make words up in order to help me make a point. I have no objection when It calls those to my attention. In It’s world, it is much more likely that I have made a mistake than that I am inventing a new spelling or a new form of a word in order to make a point. For many years, I used the “word” maleficiaries in Public Policy classes to distinguish them from beneficiaries. I explained what I was doing and why when I first made the distinction, and it lasted for the whole term. There may have been some eye rolling toward the end of the term.
The first issue is this. I think It should call my attention to a nonstandard use and assume, if I don’t go back and fix it, that I want it the way it was. When it does that, I feel that it has performed a service for me.
The other issue is that sometimes It just won’t let go. I could even go back and instruct It to “learn” that spelling (which seems too much, to me) but to do that, I would have to have it stable on the page, and sometimes that is a struggle. There is a literary device I have needed to refer to from time to time. It is called “chiasm.” I had to fight to get that one. I reiterated the spelling I wanted many times. Finally, I slapped a “learn this spelling” order on It and proceeded. That being done, today’s use of “chiasm” created not so much as a murmur.
And It was right today, in suspecting that there was something wrong with the expression “your interested.” It guessed the wrong thing, but it gave me a chance to go back and fix it. But what happens when It develops a sense of acceptable grammar and I have to fight it to say what I want to say in the tone I want to use. Then what?
Does anyone think It will tire of the game before I do? Is there any way to instruct It to give me a little more freedom as a creator of messages? I’m really not sure.
I have been attracted today by a character created by Simon Van Booy in his The Illusion of Separateness. We never learn the character’s name. As a German soldier, then a former German soldier he is referred to as A. When he is cared for after he is shot, they know nothing about him except that he has a book in his pocket by Victor Hugo so they call him Mr. Hugo.
Mr. Hugo as we come to know him is shaped by his long hospitalization, then years living on the street, and finally some years as a janitor. His life has not led him to expect much and he takes in small pleasures that have intrigued me. From the hospital, they sent him to Gare du Nord, a transit station in the north part of Paris. At night he listens to the signboards change and he calls it “the applause of falling letters.” Just right.
He refers to the coming of the morning after a long cold night as “the armor of dawn” and says it brought relief. He slept under the bridges in the summer. He says, “It was cool in the summer with my back against the stone. I didn’t mind being alone. I watched all. I listened. Slept. Felt okay if I never woke up.”
He is offered a chance to live in California by a man who is now a famous film director, but who was a broken 14 year old boy in London when he knew Mr. Hugo. He likes the idea of living in a sunny climate, but he frets over what he will miss if he leaves London. He would miss, for instance the names scratched into the glass of the back window of the bus he takes on Tuesdays. Then, he says, he would not know that: Daz luvz Ram or that Gareth is a Twat or that Lizzie is a slag. It is hard for him to leave, not really knowing.
A reviewer from the Wall Street Journal says that Simon van Booy “deftly portrays his characters’ raw emotions.” His treatment of Mr. Hugo is very simple and it moved me.
I’ve been noticing the way some very accomplished people attribute their accomplishments to luck and I’ve gotten to wondering whether that is a good idea.
At the personal level, I suppose it doesn’t do very much harm. It isn’t really permissible to say—however obviously true it might be—that the skill you have learned or the job you have mastered are the result of persistent and disciplined effort. So long as everyone knows how hard you have worked at it, they will hear your demurrals as simple modesty.
At the societal level, I think it is catastrophically bad. You can, naturally, go wrong on either direction, but if I were to evaluate a society that accounts for successes by attributing them to hard work and compare it to a society that believes, really believes, that the successes are the result of luck, I would choose the former.
If people believe that they are accountable for the quality of their work and are rewarded for it, it is reasonable to think that there will be more hard work on the part of more people. On the other hand, it is also true that some people are born with disadvantages, and hard work is not going to do the whole job for them. Every society with an interest in “fairness” has to recognize that the starting line is not at the same place for all the competitors.
Liberals have done quite a bit of work to fix that. The idea is that if it is a race, every competitor ought to have an equal chance of winning it. It’s a nice thought, but genetic endowment and family background and educational quality are all against it. Those things cannot be standardized across a society and they are not fair.
We have moved, as a result, in the direction of calling “privileged” those who have the fewest or the least prominent disabilities. It is true that some are born with better chances of success in life than others, but it is also true that “privileged” takes away any recognition of the work that is needed to turn that initial advantage into something valuable that belongs to the person.
And on the other side, we have moved in the direction of calling people who have not achieved success for one reason or another—I have argued already that there are the two kinds of reasons—“marginalized” or, more bluntly, “victims.” There are several things wrong with these terms as I see it. One is that both identify the least successful people as being the victims of someone or some group. That is clear in “victim,” a term which first referred to a sacrificial animal and which has not moved very far in the interim. It is not quite as clear in “marginalized” except that the “-ized” part identifies it as the work of someone else. Without it, it would just be “marginal.”
From the standpoint of social justice, the case can be made that everyone ought to have the resources they need to thrive. Karl Marx states that quite clearly. From the standpoint of the language we choose to describe who deserves what in our society, there is no point in hiding from the fact that any position of initial advantage can be squandered by failures of understanding and effort. Likewise, nearly any position of initial disadvantage can improved by consistent and careful effort.
That isn’t going to change very much, but it will keep people who have labored long and hard to achieve success from being required to attribute it to luck. It might also keep people who have squandered every opportunity to improve their position from claiming that they have been “marginalized” by someone.
That’s a small change. It will not achieve social justice. It might, however, help us gain back a little control of what we can say about what we have done or have failed to do with our lives and that seems worth doing.
I remember using the argument that people should not be worried about me—and that I should not be worried either—because I was “on track.” My wife had died of cancer and I was done with all the busywork associated with a death and now it was just me and getting on with my life. As I pictured it, it was going to get worse for awhile and then it was going to start getting better. That was the “track.” And as long as I was on track, moving—even as things were getting worse—toward the time when things would be getting better, then things were “bad” but not worth worrying about.
I was in my mid-60s then. I am in my mid-80s now and I am losing abilities I once took for granted. So what I want to know, as I look at this process, is whether I am on track. You wouldn’t think, would you, that because life ends in death, there would be a good way to approach it and a bad way, but anyone who lives in a community of old people, as I do, knows that is not the case.
I want to consider here the process by which I experience the loss of my abilities. The first step is becoming aware of them. So long as you are performing them well, there is no reason to pay any attention to them at all. I remember, for instance, that in the late 1970s, I was involved in a project that required running a lot of miles every week. Because I got behind, I added a daily three-mile run before breakfast. I never really liked it, but I never wondered whether I could do it. That was presupposed.
The disappearance of presupposed abilities has been the biggest surprise of getting old. It is not (yet) the inability to do things—running is the major exception—but the inability to count on those things without thought. I could give a lot of examples, of course, but it was the sequence of experiences that caught my imagination today, and the next stage in the sequence is doing it carefully rather than casually. You can still do it, but you stop and prepare; and then do it more carefully.
And, when you have to stop and think about it, you begin to wonder what will happen when even thoughtful care does not come to your rescue. I continued running long after a more prudent man would have stopped by running the first two miles 18 steps at a time. I would start to get a little foggy in about 18 steps, so I would walk for 18 steps and then run for another 18. I would keep this up until whatever system needed to come on line had arrived and then I ran naturally and without stopping for the rest of the route, whatever that was.
In the next phase, you begin to substitute different activities that provide some of the same benefits. In my case, that was walking, first, and after a few years, bicycling. In these substitutions, the distance covered changes a good deal with no significance at all. It is the benefits to the body and the costs to the body that matter.
That being the case, the phase of careful substitution of one activity for another comes to an end, and we move next into the reduction of the activity. I do the same things—again, running is the exception—but I do less of them and I do them more slowly.
The drawback to the sequence I have just described is that they all have to do with “activities” as I thought of them when I was young. But the things you have to begin to think carefully about are not all activities. There is the matter of staying conscious, for instance. That meets the standard of assumed competence, just as the activities did. Who does not start out on an activity, be it as routine as a trip to the supermarket, without presupposing that he can do it without passing out?
On the other hand, if you have had the experience and the inconvenience of passing out now and again, for reasons still unexplained, you begin to scan your body and mind for signs that might be precursors. You become “sensitive” until it borders on vivid imagination. You don’t need to know just how they are related to the likelihood of syncope. [1]. The same is true of vertigo. If the precursors suggest you might have to cope with vertigo, [2] you are thoughtful in the same way and possibly even choose not to try an activity at all.
That brings me to the last phase of the sequence, which is marked by being perpetually cowed and fearful at one end of the spectrum and completely foolhardy and brash at the other. It is possible to build a way of living life as an old person that is marked by timidity and decline. These traits are not marked so much by the way they constrict your choices, but by the way you think about them. If you are foolhardy, you attempt thing you probably ought not try at all and wind up either calling for someone to come and rescue you or having extended conversations with the EMTs who came when someone called them. Foolhardy in this sense is not good—even beyond the obvious drawback of it’s being expensive. If, on they other hand, you are cowed and timid, you pass up a lot of things you could otherwise do and you become a weight that everyone else in your group will have to take turns carrying.
I would like to come to the end of this sequence by doing boldly all the things I can still do. I want to be careful, but I don’t want to be timid. I want to live in the constrained environment of my declining mind and my declining body by doing boldly all the things I can get away with still doing. I will not do them, as I once did, thoughtlessly. I will stop and calculate the costs to myself and to others, but I think I would like to launch out confidently whenever I think I can cover the cost.
I once came across a study of the uses of schools that were not longer needed for the school age population. I am sure it was a good study. I borrowed some of the examples for a smaller paper I was working on at the time myself. [3] But I remember it mainly because of the title, which I thought was both descriptive and witty. It was called “Rising Above Decline.”
I think that is what I want to aim for.
[1] I have learned a lot of medical terms I earlier had no use for at all.
[2]. The prevailing use of that term among the medical people I see is that it in not the name of an illness; it is the name of a collection of symptoms. The adjective form “vertiginous” is often convenient.
I like watching movies over and over. Not all movies, of course, but they don’t really have to be good movies. In my first approach, I think of myself as an audience member and I consult myself about whether I am pleased by the performance. Often, I am unimpressed. Maybe I should watch better movies.
In the second approach, I move the level of understanding up so that I am looking at things like the nature of the obstacle the characters need to overcome and the inner and outer resources they mobilize to do it. I look at the whole arc of the plot and wonder if it would be better in another configuration. It’s still an audience kind of role, but it looks for different things.
In the third approach, I look at the project the way I imagine the director looks at the project. To make a theme meaningful to the audience, it needs to be introduced and reinforced and eventually you cash those investments in by revealing something the audience really gets and that matters.
It will not surprise you, I suppose, to learn that I have a recent experience and a recent movie in mind. It is the Hallmark movie, “A Christmas Visitor.” I’m not going to mess around with what the plot is really about, but there are two moments that I saw (finally) side by side and enjoyed immensely.
You have to know something about the plot, of course, but I will keep it brief. John, the first-born son of the Boyagian family, enlisted in the military against his parents’ wishes and was killed in Operation Desert Shield. Both George (William Devane) and Susan Boyagian (Meredith Baxter) were saddened by the loss of their son, but it became a cause for Susan and one of the ways she expressed her sadness and her anger was to refuse to celebrate Christmas. This was not entirely by happenstance; they received word of their son’s death on Christmas Eve. As a result, the Boyagian family had not celebrated Christmas, by the time the story begins, for twelve years.
Susan is angry at George for “permitting” John to enlist. We see in flashbacks how eager John was to enlist, so these are things the audience knows, but that Susan does not know. She is angry at God and at the church they used to attend and at George because something precious was taken away from her. When she expresses this anger, it is not pretty, but we feel that we understand her point. If the director (Christopher Leitch) had failed to get that done, nothing else would have worked.
I said there were two scenes that I had (finally) seen back to back. In the second of these two scenes, George and Susan’s daughter, Jean (Reagan Pasternak) confesses to Susan that she has thought that the reason the Boyagian family had been refusing to celebrate Christmas was that they didn’t love her the way they did John.
There had been nothing like an introduction to this issue so far, so it comes to us like a revelation from nowhere. That is the way it comes to her mother, too, but she knows immediately that this is something she should have known. To Jean, she says, “I’ve been so selfish. I never considered how it would seem to you.”
And that makes instant sense to us. How could Jean not have felt that way? How could Susan not have known? But the answer to the second question is that we have been given an emotionally plausible reason. She is angry at George (and God and the church and the army). To the degree that grievance makes emotional sense to us, we should not be prepared to see it in another way.
And we aren’t. At least, I wasn’t. And I really enjoyed seeing the turn I had not foreseen and also feeling a little bit as if I really should have seen it.
At the risk of sharing domestic details, I am going to use my own recent experience as the illustration for a serious strategic dilemma. It turns out that what I like best about stories is finding out how they got “there.” There is an outcome of some kind, generally, for kinds of show I watch, a satisfying outcome. Once I know what it is, I take real pleasure is watching how the elements of that outcome are assembled. My wife, Bette, does not.
She likes the development, the tension, and eventually, the surprising resolution.
So we differ. I consider myself fortunate that she regards this difference as a difference of styles. The official view of most (previously, all) the members of our book group is that it is just wrong to read or watch a story that way. The reasons why it is wrong vary a little from time to time. Most often it is just “That’s not the right was to read a story!” Sometimes, it takes the form of what the reader owes to the author. The author wrote it to be read in this way—front to back—so we should read it as the author intended.
I consider myself fortunate in this matter because Bette does not take a position of this question. She just watches or reads in the way she most enjoys and that is front to back. Which brings us to the TV series A Man on the Inside, starring Ted Danson in the role illustrated in the picture. Bette and I watched the first episode together. Her response was that it was an interesting premise, even with what we both thought of as a clunky beginning. I proposed that we watch the last episode to see if it stayed clunky all the way through.
We both liked where the story landed at the end. It stoked my natural curiosity about how they managed to get from here to there. Watching the pieces fall into place is enjoyable for me and if it takes several viewings, then that is what it takes. Bette lost all interest in the show because she now knows how it comes out and the suspense of wondering how it was going to come out is the principal pleasure of watching.
I wasn’t really surprised by her reaction. It is fully in line with what she has usually said before. Nevertheless, I was surprised. I proposed that we watch the next to last episode, now that we knew it arrived at an interesting conclusion. She didn’t really see any reason to watch the next to last episode because after all, we already knew how it came out. So I am going to need to find times other than our main TV watching time to satisfy my own curiosity..
At the risk of offering what other people call “spoilers”—taking Bette’s view of stories for granted—I will offer her an example of what I like about the story. I now know that at the end, there is a reconciliation of two men who have somehow become estranged. Charles, the Ted Danson character, has been pretending to be a resident in a senior center. Because he is a genuinely good person, he does a lot of good while he is “on the job” there. The friend whose estrangement is most vividly portrayed, is offended that Charles was not the person he said he was. That is, of course, true.
I am quite sure that between these two men there will be an initial friction, that they will get over it, and that they will come to enjoy each other’s company. I haven’t see that happen, but I want to. Knowing what I know about the way the conflict is resolved, I will be free to pay attention to every small movement toward or away from it.
I will like that even though I will have to do it by myself.
Today, a friend shared with me a poem that I liked very much. I still like it. In fact, I like it more now that I did when I first read it, because I have put it through the mill of my own living and my own thinking and it means something very personal to me now. I am quite sure that if I were the poet, I would not like my work to be treated like this but when you give a gift to the public in general, there are bound to be people who will see their own lives in it and respond as they must.
Here is the poem, which was written, or at least passed along to my friend, by Jeff Chu.
Bless you who are weary, you who are flailing.
May you find rest.
Bless you who are burdened by grief, you whose heart is so heavy.
May you not be rushed from your feelings…
Bless you who can’t quite muster any pre-Christmas cheer.
May you plant seeds of goodness for seasons to come.
Bless you who bristle at mandatory merriment.
May you sense the solidarity and the hospitality of the ancient story, which made room for fear, confusion, and bewilderment.
Bless you who sit in the darkness.
May you find friendship there.
Here are some things I noticed, none of which take anything from the beauty of the poetry. The first is a good wish only. What it would mean to me as a person would depend on who said it. I did like the pairing of “weary” and “flailing.”
The second presents difficulties for me. The only good thing in this blessing is that you will not be “rushed from your feelings,” but, in fact, there are all kinds of mistakes you can make when you are grieving and, in fact, quitting too soon is only one of them. Refusing to do the things that will express your grief in the choices you make and the way you act them out might also be a mistake and it is a mistake that is commonly urged upon us by professionals. The touch that saves this one is the passive verb “to be rushed.” Being rushed away from feelings that can be better dealt with by experiencing them fully is a bad thing indeed. But then, who is doing the rushing?
Given the priority I place on taking action on your own behalf, it is not surprising that the next one is my favorite. You don’t have to experience cheer to do the things that will make genuine cheer possible later in your life. It is, in fact, one of the most sensible and difficult things I ever did and when I read that line, I felt like cheering.
The next one made me feel like booing. For the person toward whom the poem is directed, the two responses are “bristling” and “sensing.” Bristling is so easy, especially when you are under the compulsion that “mandatory merriment” implies. (Nice phrase, though.). Sensing the psychic welcome available to you in a very old story is harder—especially when you are grieving—but it is nice thing to wish on a friend.
The last one I take to be a kind of summary, not introducing anything new, but making room for friendship. I can’t help celebrating “sit in darkness,” which calls up the great hope of Isaiah 9 and brings Messiah flooding back through the ears. But even so, “finding” friendship is as passive as sitting in darkness and I would wish my friend more than that. I would go back to the “planting the seeds” metaphor I liked so much and I would wish for my sad friend that he would plant the seeds of friendship.
This morning, I happened on a letter by an Episcopal bishop, Sean Rowe. It was phrased in language I am familiar with and which I always like on first contact. But the more I think about it, the more uncomfortable I feel with it. In this post, I’d like to think about those two reactions.
This letter was sent to bishops of the Episcopal church on November 6. So…just after. Bishop Rowe recognizes that not all Episcopalians are going to feel the same way about the election. As people of faith, he says, we can work and pray…”whether we are joyful, hurting, or afraid.” It it hard to imagine being joyful about the new empowerment of a man as destructive as Donald Trump, but “hurting” and “afraid” don’t seem like alternatives to me. They seem like internal and external faces of the same response.
Having recognized the range of responses to the election, Bishop Rowe goes on to focus on the response of the church. We can still, he says, “combat the misinformation and fear by which the Enemy [that is Bishop Rowe’s capital E and ordinarily refers to the Devil] seeks to divide us from one another.”
OK and how will we do that? Currently, he says, there are efforts to undermine our trust in institutions and in one another. He cites a report by the Department of Homeland Security as evidence.
There are indeed, efforts to undermine our trust in institutions. What people like me call “the rule of law” or “civil society,” many other people call “the Deep State” or simply, “the System.”
The word “institution” was invented to distinguish the people who have roles within an organization from the organization itself. The word is based on the Latin verb statuere, “to cause to stand.” The institution “stands there;” the individual people come and go.
Trusting people is not that hard. Some are good; some are bad. Some are strong; some are weak. Some are lovers of routine; others are creative. You find a way to live with the strengths and weaknesses. But institutions are not like that and I think Bishop Rowe is right that the “undermining of institutions” is the crucial loss we are facing.
People were shocked, as I recall, when Nixon’s subordinates described one of the lies they has been caught in as “no longer operative.” If you are searching in that expression for any hint of apology, I wish you luck. The immediate meaning was “We realize we can not continue to tell that particular lie.” The practical implication was that some new one would be created that would last for a little while. The idea that it was false and known to be false is simply lost. The idea that lying as part of your regular interaction with the citizenry is simply wrong…is also lost.
Truth telling is an institution.
Truth telling is still a part of face to face communication. People whom you know and see regularly and who lie to you suffer condemnation and even, in some cases, reprisals. But face to face communication is a smaller and smaller part of our lives. The electronic and print media are not and cannot be controlled by truth telling norms. Social media cannot be controlled by truth telling norms. We all suffer from a loss of credibility in the messages we receive and in the people from whom we receive them.
I think there is no gift more valuable that Episcopalians could give—the rest of us, too, but I am grateful to Bishop Rowe for starting us off—than to restore trust in institutions. That will be a lot harder than restoring trust in persons who are outside your own silo, but that would not be a bad place to start. Trusting the people as a step on the way to trusting the institutions will seem an odd order to some, but when I think of the value of trustworthy institutions, I think it is worth considering.
If we need anything to remind us of the value of such institutions, we need only remember the English civil war in which Protestants killed Catholics when they gained a temporary ascendancy and Catholics killed Protestants when their positions were reversed. All you had to do to wind up on the hit list was to have been one of “them.”
That was brought to an end by the establishment of the monarchy as an institution that could be counted on to be evenhanded—at least so far as alternating assassinations goes. The U. S. is on the brink of such a failure of institutions and we need to find a way to trust them again.
It will not be the old trust—the compatibility of similar people in similar classes. There will have to be a new trust, based on new reasons. If it is any part of the Episcopal charge to resist the Enemy—to quench the fiery darts of the wicked, as Paul put it—I want to find a way to join with them.
I won a free throw contest once. A long time ago. It was set up as a tournament; I won my bracket and a friend of mine won the other bracket. So we met in the finals. The setup was that each of us would shoot twenty-five free throws, five at a time. That meant that there came a time when I had to make the last five, not having missed any yet.
As I stood there at the free throw line, I had the clearest picture of myself standing at the free throw line. I saw this person (me) wipe each hand on his shorts, holding the ball in the other hand each time. It was uncanny. I value it now, having not had such an experience since then, but at the time, my reaction was “Great! How am I supposed to focus on the basket with this picture in my mind.” [1]
After that, I lived the great majority of my life and then I started watching Zoom recordings of myself teaching a Bible study made up of some of the best students I ever had. I was struck immediately by how very different the experience of teaching a class is from the experience of watching the whole class while you are teaching them.
My experience of the members of the class while I am teaching is a little like a spotlight with a larger or smaller penumbra. The spotlight moves as the argument develops, lighting whoever is making the argument and anyone associated with the direction the argument might go. When I watch the recording, I watch with the knowledge of where the argument did go and with the clear recollection of what was lighted at the time. But now I also know what is going to happen next and I can watch it develop.
At about minute forty of a recent session, a student who had not been active in the discussion—and who had not, therefore, been in the lighted part of my observation—introduced a challenge that started at a different place than the argument we had been developing. During the session, I was surprised. Watching the recording, I could watch them prepare to make the point they wanted to make. They knew it was a proposal that we look at this scene not in the way we had been looking at it (as a literary construction), but as if we had experienced it ourselves. They shifted one way and another in the seat, they started to speak but then did not. There were plenty of cues available had I known what was going to happen. And in the recording, I also got to watch the reaction of the others in the discussion—the head nods and the eye rolls and the raised eyebrows. I had missed all of that the first time as I was absorbing the challenge and working out how to oppose the argument and support the student at the same time. On my second time, thanks to the recording, I had a chance to see it myself.
And, needless to say, [2] I was drawn to an evaluation. Did I handle it well. How did that student react? How did the others react? Is this a one off or the first of many such proposals? Should I be the one to respond or should I let the others respond, relying on what our approach to this issue has been in the past?
That second option would be ideal, I think. Our approach in the past has been that the way a biblical story is cast reflects the author’s best judgment about how to describe the event so as to have the right effect on the rest of the narrative and the right effect on the listeners. Every member of the class accepts that as our working method and about half of them could describe it as I just have. So maybe, I think as I watch myself leap to respond on the recorded version, I should have held back a little and see who else would have wanted to say what I eventually said.
I learned a lot by watching the interaction on the recording, but I think I ought not to do it very much. There is a “watching what happens next” cast of mind that I think will distract me from the actual teaching. I think I need to teach in a way that I will be willing to be surprised; willing not to see it coming.
Better for me; better for them; better for the development of the argument.
[1] I did make the last five. I have no idea how. [2] I have just learned that that rhetorical device is called paralipsis, roughly translated “left behind” or “left unsaid.” I say “needless to say” as a preface to actually saying it, which, since it was needless, I should not have said at all.
Deciding what is the right thing to do is hard enough when it’s just individuals interacting with each other. We could call that “conspiracy” if we wanted to. Complicity is a whole different matter.
I’m going to go at this etymologically first. I know as well as you do that the origin of a word does not determine what it will come to mean, but sometimes I think it points us in the right direction.
Picture a football huddle or an intimate little knot at a cocktail party or a coffee hour. The individuals are close enough together that the breath of each mingles with the breath of the others. That’s the picture that “conspire” gives us. Their breath (spiro) mingles (com-). It helps if we think of individuals as representing themselves only. If you can picture Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin comparing notes at Yalta, you will have a good notion of “conspiracy.”
Complicity is another matter entirely. Here we are considering being “folded in” to something. The something you are being folded into can be large and complex. You might not know about it. That would not keep you from being folded into it. The verb plicare, “to fold” is the root of a lot of interesting English words.
Let’s just keep those tendencies separate and see if it helps us.
Imagine three dinner settings. In one, let’s say a recently integrated restaurant in a border state, two white couples agree to harass their black server. It’s not hard to imagine. If “blackened sole” is on the menu, it would offer an easy transition, but the insults don’t need to be witty; they could just be mean so long as they are racist and have been agreed upon by the group.
In the second setting–the same white couples–one person suggests that it might be fun to “needle” the server. They, the one who proposed it, are supported by one other person and opposed by the other two. This sets up an elementary conflict of conspiracy and complicity.
In the third, a group of five guys, who have stopped in for a beer at the bar after their bowling league, are within hearing distance of the interaction with the server, but are not privy to the conversation among the two couples.
There is no question of conspiracy here and the question of complicity is oddly distant. What to do? Why?
We are not considering what the right thing to do is. We are considering how the various actions should be understood and critiqued. What standard is to be used? In setting #1, everyone has agreed and everyone will be required to participate in the harassment. If one of the group did not, they could be criticized by the others for failing to participate in a group action that had been agreed upon.
In setting #2, some have agreed and some have not. It is perfectly appropriate for those who did not agree to intervene in the actions of those who did and to ask them to stop. There is a lot of play in just how that request can be put. It can be a reproof; it can be an appeal; it can be an effective change of subject. Should the objection itself become the subject at the table–I can nearly guarantee that it will–it will take some form of “Who do you think you are, criticizing the behavior I have chosen!” The answer–I can nearly guarantee it–will be “I am part of this group and I do not want to be part of the behavior you have chosen.”
This is complicated enough imagining that everyone is sober. If it is late in the meal and some are sober and some are not, it becomes more difficult.
But now we come to setting #3, the guys who just stopped in for a beer. They overhear the harassment and have a quick conversation among themselves about what to do. Let me pause briefly to say again that I am not considering in this post, what would be good behavior. I am trying to think about on what grounds behavior could be criticized or defended. I have suggested that settings #1 and #2 involve questions of conspiracy. I want to say now that setting #3 involves complicity.
The guys in the third group will have to say something like this. “I know that we are not a part of that table of couples, but what they are doing is wrong and we should say something.” And someone else would say, “What they are doing is a shame, certainly, but it does not involve us. Let’s just leave.” [1]
The normative question that faces the guys in setting #3 is whether they are required to do something about the behavior of their neighbors. In the social setting such that they are folded into it? Are they folded in because they have heard what was said? Is it because they are acquaintances of those people? The people in setting #3 would surely not make the case about a similar situation that was going on in a restaurant across the street. They would hear about that event the next day if they heard about it at all and they would look at each other and say, “What a shame!”
Just one more step toward questions of complicity. You live in Springfield, Ohio, where, according to J. D. Vance, hordes of undocumented Haitian immigrants are abducting and consuming their neighbor’s cats. You are now folded into an event that is large and ugly. You have the choice of lamenting it or counteracting it. You will probably describe one choice as better than the other.
I would. But on what grounds? Any rationale I can think of jams the accelerator to the floor and disconnects the brakes. Why is that a good idea?
[1] Or possibly, we know them in other settings–work, volunteer activities, book groups–and what we do here will have implications there. Is it worth it? Maybe a quiet word in private would be better than a scene in a restaurant.
The Dilettante's Dilemma 