I know exactly how you feel

Posted on March 2, 2017 by hessd

Well first, can it possibly be true? Can anyone who is not me know just how I feel? No. It cannot be.

But it can be largely true? Yes, and it almost certainly is. I am going to think a little today about why we choose the first answer more often than the second. (Hint: it isn’t because it is more accurate.) But first, let’s do a little cleaning up of the underbrush.

grief-3The first question we might ask is, “Do you know how you feel?” You wouldn’t know it from reading introductory psychology texts, but emotions don’t come with discrete labels. You feel what you feel, of course, but when you get around to calling it something, you are in the same mess anyone else is. It isn’t quite like the Snickers ad that assures us the we aren’t quite ourselves when we are hungry, but I think the truth is off somewhere in that direction.

When you are emotionally distraught for some reason and someone says, “I know just how you feel,” you might plausibly say, “Really? How do I feel?” [1] And the person attempting to reassure you offers some labels like angry or sad or happy or horny. You compare the words you have chosen to represent those feelings and compare your list to his and you feel quite justified in rejecting his understanding of you if the lists don’t match.But here’s the truth.  You are guessing just as much as he is. Maybe you ought to back off a little. There is no reason to think that the lists will match or, if they do not, that his is less accurate than yours.

grief 4.jpg

But that’s not really what is pushing my button today. The diagram above is a way of thinking about which personal experiences we will claim as unique and which we will grant to be widely shared. The representation of what is widely shared—nearly everything as the yellow area shows—is the way community-oriented societies picture it. This represents both the fact of the matter and the ought of the matter; it represents how things actually are and how they should be.

In individualistic societies like ours, on the other hand, being unique is a highly desired status. It is, as I say a status; a recognized position. As a matter of actual fact, each of us really is unique, but that’s not what we are after. We want our uniqueness to be recognized. This has been apparent to advertisers for many years, of course, but you do notice it as the incessant drumbeat of uniqueness dominates the way we push products and services.

So what would it mean to be completely one of a kind if we are talking about an experience like grief? It would mean that no one understands what you are going through. You wouldn’t think that is a good thing. It makes you wonder why we demand it.

When someone says he or she knows how we feel and we, ironically or snarkily orgrief-2 furiously deny that it is true, we are left to our own incomprehensible, unsharable grief. I was told by someone I asked about it yesterday that it was “an arrogant thing to say to another.” [2]

I argued above that no plausible mechanism exists by which I can say as a matter of careful determination that you do NOT know how I feel. I am arguing here that the terrible aloneness of grief is an artifact of our demand for uniqueness.

What would happen if we decided that the emotions we feel—what we call “private inner emotions”—are pretty much the same as those felt by others who have gone through what we are going through? A man whose wife had died could say, for instance, to another man whose wife had died, “I know what you are going through,” and be received warmly. “I know you do,” he might say in reply, “Isn’t it just horrible?”

Or he might say, “Does it ever get to the place where it doesn’t hurt all the time?”

Or he might say, “Did you do anything that helped you? I’m not having much luck with what I’m trying.”

Or he might say, “I know there are a lot of differences between the situation I am facing and the one you faced, but I take great comfort is seeing that you have emerged whole and ready to help.”

Those sound attractive to me.  I have benefitted, myself, from being on both sides of that experience and have been warmed by the generosity and the empathy of others. All that goes away when I say I would rather be incomprehensible than comforted.

Consider this, for instance, from Harry Triandis’s well-known Individualism & Collectivism. [3]  I am going to change his word “collectivism” in the quotation to “group-oriented.” It is a shame that “collectivism” is such a scary word in our time, but it is and I want you to be able to hear what Triandis is saying.

Identity among group-oriented cultures is defined by relationships and group memberships. Individualists base their identity on what they own and their experiences. Not surprisingly, the emotions of [people in] “group-oriented cultures” tend to be other-focused (e.g. empathy) and of short duration (they last as long as the [members] are in a situation). The emotions of individualists are ego-focused (e.g. anger) and of long duration (do not necessarily change with the situation).

One of the implications of this focus on relationships is that the range of common experience it imagines is quite large—I imagine your experience to be largely like mine—and the range of feelings thought to be appropriate is also large. And one of the implications of organization that Triandis calls “individualism” is that emotions are organized in terms of oneself (by ego-centered, he doesn’t mean egotistical). That means that there may be a good deal of payoff for rejecting the applicability of the experiences others have had.

Groups like Alcoholics Anonymous have, of course, defined the similarity of experiences by group membership. That’s what being a member means. The structure of rewards is reversed in an AA meeting so that the experiences of each are declared to be very much like the experiences of all. Members are said to take great comfort in this, but alcoholism is the ticket to membership in such a group.

Why would common humanity not be enough?

[1] I said it was plausible. I’m not recommending it. It has a belligerent sort of sound to it.
[2] And maybe it is. If we have organized our society so that “nobody knows how I am feeling” and that anyone who says he does in engaging in some form of oneupmanship, then maybe a gesture of this kind is arrogant. I don’t think it would have to be, but maybe it is.

[3]  Westview Press, 1995, pp. 71,72.

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How not to save civil society

Posted on March 1, 2017 by hessd

I am going to urge you to take a look at Paul Krugman’s column in today’s New York Times. I don’t like it and I very much hope that you won’t like it either, but let’s start by reading it.

civil-1Here’s the argument. Trump has his heart set on authoritarian control of all the major institutions in the country, not just the political and economic ones. If we just sit back and let him do it, as some self-styled “voices of reason” counsel, we will lose our democratic system and may never get it back. [1]

So here’s Krugman’s counsel. It is the last line in the column and it is a bell-ringer.

When neither the president nor his allies in Congress show any sign of respecting basic American values, an aroused public that’s willing to take names is all we have.

Of course, “ringing the bell” isn’t all Krugman has in mind. He is an economist, after all. He provides specific instances of the kind of opposition he thinks is crucially important. Here are the examples he provides:

  • It means patronizing businesses that defend our values and not those willing to go along with undermining them.
  • It means letting public figures, however nonpolitical their professions, know that people care about the stands they take, or don’t.
  • For example, it is not O.K. for newspapers to publish he-said-she-said pieces that paper over administration lies, let alone beat-sweetening puff pieces about Trump allies. It’s not O.K. for businesses to supply Mr. Trump with photo ops claiming undeserved credit for job creation — or for business leaders to serve on “advisory” panels that are really just another kind of photo op.
  • It’s not even O.K. to go golfing with the president, saying that it’s about showing respect for the office, not the man.

The examples make it clear what he would like to see happen. His initial phrasing—“an aroused public that’s willing to take names”—is very spirited; the examples, not so much.

Let’s remember that Krugman’s announced goal is to protect civil society. His proposal is that formerly civil society be relentlessly politicized. It means in point one that we patronize the businesses with the right political values and, I suppose, boycott those with the wrong political values. It means in point two, demanding of all public figures—writers, lecturers, actors, athletes, people who are famous for being famous—that they trade their fame in for public position taking. It means, in point four, that the highest office in the land be treated as a partisan office ONLY, and not also a ceremonial office. [2]

That’s what Krugman says. I have three things to say in response.

plowshare

First, you don’t protect civil society like that. Krugman defines “civil society” as “institutions outside the government proper.” I agree, but I would define it a little more broadly. I would say that institutions that are principally political or principally economic are both outside “civil society.”

Second, Krugman portrays this an an emergency measure as if when the need for it is over, we will stop doing it. Isaiah 2:4 celebrates the beating of swords into plowshares and the spears into pruning hooks. I am glad that can happen, but the much more common transformation is from plowshares into swords and pruning hooks into spears. Not very many people ever feel it is safe to change them back. It’s like not carrying a gun after a period of carrying it. It’s like turning off your burglar alarm now that it is safe to. These things just don’t happen.

Third, Krugman seems to feel that when we have done the right thing—we have risen up against the impending Trump dictatorship—we will stop and then it will be over. Why would it be over? When we stop, the other side will start. Everything we politicize, they will politicize. And when we are done, they will feel that it is their turn, especially if we are successful at it. What we do as an emergency measure, will become the new norm as they respond in kind.

I have profited greatly from reading a communitarian sociologist named Frank Hearn. In his book, Moral Order and Social Disorder: The American Search for Civil Society, he looks at things in the common three-part way. There is the polity (the political system) and the economy (the economic system) and the society (the social system). As a communitarian, Hearn finds that most problems are best addressed in the social system. He writes soaring and persuasive prose about social institutions and how reliant we are on their proper functioning.

And along with all the beautiful language, he provides a few really ugly words: politicization and commodification. These are processes (the -zation and the -ification tell you that) by which an issue that was at one place is taken up and put somewhere else. Some issues that are properly social have been “politicized;” they have been taken out of the setting where good outcomes might be achieved, and have been put somewhere else. If they have been put into the political system, Hearn says they have been “politicized;” if they have been put into the economic system, he says they have been “commodified.”

Krugman’s proposal is, using Hearn’s language, a massive politicization of civil society. If we do that, we won’t get it back.

[1] Revolutions, just in case your mind was going that way, are very poor ways to establish democratic systems for the same reason that “broil” is not a good setting for croissants.
[2] We have already had parents of soldiers killed in action refuse any recognition of their sacrifice if it is to come from the President, the Commander-in-Chief of all our armed forces.
[3] A perfectly ordinary triad of social institutions reflects this: polity, economy, society.

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The Re- of Resurrection

Posted on February 26, 2017 by hessd

The argument in this essay is that whoever put the re- prefix on resurrection did us no favors. We’ll see. Despite the imminent onset of the Lenten season, this is not a doctrinal investigation. This is a linguistic investigation. There is, of course, a doctrinal background, but the problem is going to boil down, eventually, to how to describe three things in a word that is able to point to only two things.

In Christian circles, the notion of the resurrection of Jesus is important for several reasons. One has to do with his own resurrection, sometimes called “The” Resurrection. He was alive, as everyone knows, then he was dead for awhile and then he was alive again. [1] The second reason Christians think of this as an important event is that it is taken to be the first of many, as if some wall had been breached and now that it was open, everyone could go through.

Resurrection has also been contentious among Christians because, on the one hand, there seems no way to understand it and, on the other, no way to do without it. As I have thought about it recently, it seems to me that the part of the word I am having trouble with is the first part: re-. If it means “again,” which it most often does, then something is like it was before. There are three stages required here: it was, then it was’t, now it is again. That’s “re-”

Three words are common in the re- business. I thought it might be worth while to check out the root metaphors. These metaphors were devised by people who, like us, want to give a sense of what has happened or could happen, but can’t describe it more exactly. The three words I have in mind are: reanimate, resuscitate, and resurrect. [2]

The Etymological Infrastructure

Animate looks straightforward. The Latin anima, now often used as an English word thanks to Jung, means “what makes us alive.” It is what “animals” have in common; they all have anima. They are animate (slipped an adjective in there) because they have been animated. Just how they were animated depends largely on what kind of animal we are talking about, but since we care about the word rather than the beast, it doesn’t really matter.

For anything to meet the requirements of the word “reanimate,” it must have been animate, and then not animate, and then animate again. The word needs those three steps. That doesn’t sound too hard. We look up what anima meant in Latin and we are almost home. But when you look it up—I use the Webster’s New World Dictionary phone app for nearly everything on the first pass—you discover that it meant “breath, air, life principle, or soul.” The first two aren’t that hard—we know what breath and air are—but what are the “life principle” or the “soul.” Are they the kinds of things you can have and then lose and then get back? I don’t think the etymology helps us here.

Maybe resuscitate will be better. We have the familiar re-, with its little three step test, and the Latin verb suscitare, “to arouse.” I had a quick hope, just as quickly dashed, that there might be a relationship between the sus- of suscitare and the suss of “So, you sussed it out, did you?” [3] But the actual source of “resuscitate” leaves us with only another video of what happened. Something was aroused and then not—dormant, inert, dead?—and then “aroused” again. Resuscitation as an empirical matter is not at all uncommon. Aren’t we resuscitated from sleep every morning? Who has not wakened a person from an unconscious inert position and seen the “resuscitation” firsthand?

That brings us to resurrect and to a new metaphor. The Latin verb is surgere, “to rise up.” Of course a lot of things can rise up. Waves can, springs can, voltage can, underdogs can. [4] Rising up is not a particularly animate thing, which distinguishes the root metaphor from both animate and suscitate; rather it is a low to high thing. Anything that can move quickly from low to high can “surge” and the second time it does it, it has “resurged” (actually an English word, which I have never encountered before.) The old tagline, “The South shall rise again” could be rendered “the South shall resurge,” but of course, when you say it out loud, you see why it shouldn’t.

We have completed the etymological infrastructure now. I found it interesting and informative, but not very helpful as a theological matter. Biblically, the big distinction is between resuscitation and resurrection. As a matter of metaphors, it requires us to choose between “arousal” and “surging up” and there is no rationale at all to guide us. As a matter of the significance of those events themselves, there is a lot to guide us, so let’s turn to that.

Resuscitation and Resurrection

Here we have to confront the difference between the words and the meanings. Only resuscitation can properly use re- as a prefix. Resurrection does not postulate a “going back” to anything, but a going on to something. This something happens after death, so we need a prefix the points forward. We have several, though so far as I know, none has been used so solve this problem. At the very least, we have trans- from the Latin collection and meta- from the Greek collection. Why not use one of those? Here is why we need to distinguish them.

Resuscitation is the postponement of death. Resurrection is “something else.” I’m not sure just what the “else” is, but as we look at the development of the stories, I think we will see that the early tellers and re-tellers were more interested in what meanings it excluded than they were with exactly what meaning it specified.

I wouldn’t want to say that resuscitation—“unexpected arousal”—stories are a dime a dozen in scripture, but there are too many of them to try to cover. Let’s remember that we are looking at the three stage “re-” pattern and let’s try it on Jesus’ friend Lazarus, as John tells the story in chapter 11. Lazarus was alive and then he was dead and then Jesus “raised him from the dead” and he was alive again.

That’s the way the story goes. But notice that when we say “raised” (a low to high word) to describe the resuscitation (an inert to aroused word) of Lazarus, we have mixed the two root metaphors. I don’t think that’s a big deal—or at least, I didn’t before today—but it would be tidier if we kept them together. If we did that, we would say that Lazarus was “aroused from the dead” (following suscitare) and that Jesus was “raised from the dead” (following surgere).

In any case, there is a fourth step to resuscitation, which is that you die again. The “arousal” doesn’t last; It is a postponement of death, not a transcendence of it or a revocation of it or whatever else the New Testament writers might mean. Resuscitation is a good thing to the extent that being alive is better than being dead.

In the biblical sense, however, resurrection brings us to new ground. Resurrection is not a temporary reanimation. The word describes a new status entirely. And that brings us to ask why reaching a completely new level of life is described by a word beginning with re-. Why is that?

I think the language problem we are facing here is that we have only one visual reference. We do have “living;” we know what it looks like. If you want to point to a new status—a life beyond death—you have to say either that it looks just like the old life or that it looks like something new.

Resuscitate works just fine for returning to the common referent. Lazarus is “alive again, just as he was before.” But Jesus is not “alive again just as he was before;” he is alive in a different way entirely. Theologically, just what that new way is, is crucially important, but linguistically, the problem is that it is new and that means we can’t use re- to describe it.

Are there other terms we could use?

We could use a Latin prefix like trans-, which points to a crossing over, rather than to a coming back. The Greek meta- is even better with its principal meaning of “beyond.” But if we use those, we lose the common referent, which is what re- gives us. “Re-“ says, “Remember what living looks like? He has come back to it.” “Meta-“ says, “He has gone beyond what we know, whatever state that implies.” Surely that is not very satisfying.

A partial solution is to make the referent “death,” rather than “life,” and we could say not that Jesus “returned to life” but that he “transcended death.” I call it a partial solution because it doesn’t really tell us anything. On the other hand, it avoids a word we already know is wrong. Jesus was not re- anything. But he was meta- something. He went “beyond” death.

The Greek noun thanatos, “death” is an available word for this purpose. If we latched the Greek prefix meta- to it, it would enable us to define the experience of Jesus not as a “return” to life—which we know is not correct—but as a “going on beyond death,” which is correct as far as it goes, even though it doesn’t tell us what “beyond death” is like. Besides that, it would require the development of some truly ugly words, like metathanatos for “resurrection” and we might even have to say that Jesus was metathanatized; he was “beyond deathed.” Word like that seem a high price to pay just for being right.

If we want to skip references to life and death entirely, we can say that the Jesus who appeared to his disciples after his death had experienced “metamorphosis” or “transformation.” The combination of prefix and root is identical; the difference is that metamorphosis uses the Greek morphē, (form) while transformation uses the Latin forma. The good thing is that these are already common English words pointing to a fundamental change of “form.” The bad thing is that in concentrating of the form, we lose the focus on life and death, which is also fundamental to these ideas.

Maybe this is going to be one of those language problems where you have to say X and it’s OK to do that if you remember that Y is actually the case. We do, after all, say that the sun rises, when we all know that the earth turns. Maybe we could just say that the Son also rises.

[1] This had a substantial impact on his followers, who went very quickly from people who had high hopes, but had been deeply disappointed in how things worked out, to people who were exultant and began making nuisances out of themselves.
[2] I have chosen to work with the verb forms because it is the action of becoming something again, not the state of having become something again, I want to look at.
[3] Alas, suss is an altered contraction of suspect and has been with us for only the last 50 years. The sus- of suscitare is actually sub- (under) where by linguistic convention, the b- of sub assimilates to the s- of suscitare and disappears except for etymological inquiries. The other part of suscitare is the Latin verb, citare, “to arouse,” and if you think it looks familiar, it is probably because you have seen it in incite and done it in recite.
[4] The crack about the voltage meter reminded me that anyone who uses computers knows about “surge protectors.” And since there is a religious background to the use of resurrection, not to its core meaning, it leads my mind to what the Sadducees and the Romans would have given for a really good “surge protector” early in the first century A. D.

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How “it” really happened

Posted on February 18, 2017 by hessd

I am going to wind up saying that I don’t know how it really happened and before you start pressing me on just what “it” I have in mind, I want to say that I don’t have one in mind. I do have an illustration.

Let’s touch down very briefly at recent at the chemistry of memory. According to the latest it-1reading I have done, memories are not “accessed” in the way a filed document is; it is “recreated” each time. One thing that means is that although pulling a document out of a folder—either the paper kind or the electronic kind—doesn’t alter the document at all,  recreating a “document” out of the elements of memory most certainly alters it.

That’s what I know about memory and chemistry; more than I know, actually.

Then I think of Annie Dillard’s lecture in Portland. A woman asked her, after the talk, to reflect on some aspect or other of her childhood. It seemed like a reasonable request to me. Dillard has written a very good book, An American Childhood, about that time in her life. But she shook her head sadly and said, “I don’t have a childhood anymore. I cannibalized it for spare parts.”

I knew exactly what she meant. She had ransacked her childhood memories for the details that would make the book work and now she doesn’t know what really happened anymore. I think I would have said that she had “commodified” her early memories, but I have probably read more Marx than she has.

My family is the kind that treasures the stories of our childhood. Mostly, we don’t remember the actual events that make up the story. What we remember is Mother’s retelling of it. Well, Mother had a goal in mind in shaping that story to begin with and a separate goal in retelling it over and over and probably yet another goal in writing it down in the form she wrote it in the books of family lore. Asking, after all that, “what really happened” is completely futile.

But I want now to tell you something that happened to me. I remember a couple of actual facts pertaining to the event—none of them particularly important. I had an experience I have been calling “a vision.” I call it that because I don’t know what else to call it; I don’t remember any visual part of the experience at all.

This happened to me in 1959 on a Friday afternoon in the spring. I had just finished teaching an 8th grade class in a suburb near Wheaton, Illinois (we called it “practice teaching” back then) and I was walking east across the parking lot to my car. “It” was instantaneous. I ordinarily say, in describing it, that “it” happened between the time my left foot hit the pavement and the time my right foot hit, but that’s just an accommodation to a narrative style.

it-3I describe it as a vision so that I can say what the vision was like. All of this is pure invention (except for the obvious debt it owes to Peter’s vision in Acts 10) but it enables me to say that something happened first and something after that, and so on. I say that I saw a great grey filing cabinet [1] coming down from the sky and a voice speaking to me. It might have begun, “Listen up, dummy.” Or not.

It said that the filing cabinet was made up of drawers, the drawers of folders, the folders of documents, the documents of paragraphs, the paragraphs of sentences, the sentences of words, and the words of letters. And it might have concluded with an admonition like “Look and understand and learn.”

Not only is that “all I remember,” it is all I have ever made up in telling the story over and over again. I have a really good memory for “how I tell that story about my vision,”since I have done it many times, but how I actually experienced “it” at the time, much less just what it was that happened, I have no idea at all. None.

However, “it,” whatever it was, transformed my life. I had been a less than mediocre student, going to a very good school. My problem, as I reflect on it, was that I didn’t have any notion of subordinating one fact to another. Headings and peripheral observations and subpoints and illustrations of the main point were all just “things to learn” to me. I dumped them into the same box and at test time, fished around in the box for some number of them and then presented it in as intellectual-sounding language as I could command. That had served me very well before Wheaton. Wheaton wasn’t buying it.

Immediately after “my vision” and ever afterwards, I have seen the structure of things—an argument, a description, a personal reflection—first, and then the major subordinate elements and then the minor subordinate elements, and so on. Just as “the voice” told me to do. I never got another bad grade, ever, and my career as an elementary and high school teacher and as a professor of undergraduates and graduates was transformed. I tried to teach them, with limited success I will say, the beauty to which my vision had pointed me.

Two years ago, I taught a course in “the Bible” at the First Presbyterian Church in Portland, Oregon (hereafter, “my church.”) The Bible! Daunting, you say? Not at all. There are two testaments, each of which is made up of “books” each of which, with an exception or two, is made up of chapters, which are made up of “verses” and so on. Does anything sound familiar?

As a class project, the members of the class wrote an essay in answer to the question, “What is the story the Bible tells?” I gave them a 300 word limit; they finished it in 284. Nothing of “the story” the Bible tells is left out so far as the scope of the story is concerned. They began where the story begins (Genesis 1:1) and ended where the story ends—not where the Bible ends. How did they do that? Well…about halfway through the 34-week course, I told them about my “vision” and we went from there. [2]

Since I have lived my life this way for—let’s see, in 2019, it will have been 60 years in the life of a man who won’t turn 80 until later this year—a long time and in that time, I have found little clippings that represent the approach in a more palatable manner. Here, for instance, is Max Eastman in The Enjoyment of Laughter.

The mind should approach a body of knowledge as the eyes approach an object, seeing it in gross outline first, and then by gradual steps, without losing the outline, discovering the details.

Then he gives an example.

A book on American history, for instance—I mean a textbook, for I am not talking about literature, thought, argument, or education in the full sense, but only instruction—should begin by telling in a few sentences the author’s conception of the significant form of that history as a whole, America was inhabited by Indians, Europe discovered it, certain phases of development were passed through, and we arrived at the Great Depression—not more than a page. [3]

So an overview of the Bible or anything else is a matter of structure first, then depth, then detail. I have just agreed to read a very densely written book called Jesus: Symbol of God by Roger Haight. According to my first quick pass over it, it is going to be really good and I chose it so I could discuss it with a resident here, who suggested it to me. We both like theology and I thought I should play in his yard before I invited him to come and play in my yard.

How to handle a book as dense and difficult as Haight’s book? No problem. You look over the way the book is laid out and choose the crucial spot. The crucial spot might be the methodological weakness or the part of his case that matters the most to me or the place in my own thinking that is the weakest and where I could use the most help. Any of those are potentially good criteria for choosing what to read first.

I chose Chapter 4, “The God of Jesus.” I could justify that choice theologically, but that’s not what this essay is about. That chapter is 31 pages long in small print and its internal structure is very complex. What to do? No problem. The chapter is made up of headings, right, and the headings are divided up into subheadings…you get the idea.

Over the years, I have devised a way of visually representing this approach. It looks like this.

it 4.jpegAnd so on. 2a might be further divided into 2a-1 and 2a-2 by horizontal lines, but that is seldom needed and never very useful. There are, as you can easily see, four major parts to this “chapter;” the introduction and four substantive sections. The first section has seven subsections. The second section has 12, and so on. A, B, C, D provides the “outline” of the “chapter.” Subsections 1—7 provide the “outline” of Section A.

I taught this to my 8th graders beginning in 1960 and to my doctoral students beginning in 1998. In both cases, it was obvious to some, achievable by other, and completely mystifying to still others. I can do without the visualized table—although ordinarily I use it when I am working out the structure of something for myself—but I cannot conceivably do without the top down organization of the material.

And this happened to me between the time my left foot hit the pavement and the time my right foot hit. At least, that’s the way I tell the story.

[1] You remember filing cabinets, right?
[2] There were conflicts, of course. Some wanted this doctrine or that, this event or that to be included, but the absolute limit on words was pretty unforgiving and they had to perform a doctrinal triage, which rejoiced the heart of their teacher.
[3] In my few years at Malone College, I had the chance to teach American history several time and this is how I taught it. A single page first. Then the articles from the World Book Encyclopedia and from the Great Bolshoi Encyclopedia, telling the story briefly from the American and Soviet perspectives. Then two weeks spent in a short and well written American history, then, finally the course text.

Posted in Biblical Studies, Books, Living My Life, ways of knowing | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Deviance Amplification

Posted on February 14, 2017 by hessd

I wrote a piece on the word “racism” a few years ago. The first line was, “Am I a racist? No. I am not.”[1] Quite a flourish, I thought, for an essay that was going to propose a more modest and therefore more useful use of the epithet, “racist.”

One thing you might ask of an epithet is that it is supportable by publicly available evidence. People who call President Obama an alien on the grounds that he was not born in this country need to find some way to refuse to accept the evidence that he was. It doesn’t seem too much, to me, to ask of a word that it mean something.

But sometimes that is asking too much. Southern advocates for the equal rights of black Americans were called “Niggerlovers.” It is not a word that appeals much to evidence. For all the specific meaning it carries, it might just as well have been a belch. It is an epithet that translates to “I hate you” or possibly the more constrained “I hate what you are doing.” It does not extend to an actual meaning like “I am quite sure that the policies you are pursuing will leave the country worse off and here is why I think that.”

devamp-1There is a story I attach to Julian Bond’s first experiences in the Georgia State Legislature. The way the story goes, Rep. Bond was the first black State Representative in Georgia and he wondered whether he would continue to be treated as a pariah when his vote made the difference between a bill passing or failing. He was not. When he carried the passage of a bill in his hand, he was treated the way the bearer of any other irreplaceable resource was treated.  He was actively courted.

And that is where I would like this inquiry to turn next. When you call someone a name—I am thinking here especially of names that have no empirically verifiable content—there is the risk that the person will accept the characterization and use it as part of his own guidance mechanism. You don’t want that.  What is the effect of calling someone a “racist,” for instance, or a “sexist” or, more generally, a “hater?”

We tend to think of those as names for deviations; if not deviations from the norm, at least deviations from the goals we would like to see pursued. In some cases, they could be justified as “true”—evidence for them can be cited—but that is a very thin justification for two obvious reasons. The first is that not everything that is true is a useful part of this situation. The second is that not everything that is true is helpful.  I think this kid’s question is a good one.  Besides, I think she is cute.

The notion of deviance amplification needs to be explored very briefly here so that I can julian-bond-3use it to draw the threads of this argument together. There is an approach to sociology called “symbolic interactionism.” I got deeply into it in grad school and have profited from it ever since. Here is a line I would like to share from the abstract of a paper presented at the American Society of Criminology. It comes from a paper, the short title of which (the part before the colon) is “Labelling the Labelers,” by Jeffrey Ward. The question is, “What happens to the individual after being labeled?” [2]

We can assume, I think, that the Georgia state legislators who approached Julian Bond to sway his vote, did not begin by calling him repulsive names. At the very least, they would have identified him as “a colleague,” and, given the extra padding that language often takes on in legislatures, “my esteemed colleague.” They might even have identified him as “someone who often votes against measures like this but who, we are sure, shares our concern…”

This is a social practice so obvious and in such wide use that it almost seems like a waste of electrons to spend this much time on it. But if labeling runs the risk of amplifying the deviance (“deviance” again, from the standpoint of the person doing the labeling) why do it? Why not use labels that have the effect of diminishing rather than amplifying the deviance.

By “diminish,” I do not mean “deny.” In the imaginary interaction with Rep. Bond, I had julian-bond-5the legislators begin by recognizing that he often voted in a particular way, but they did that for two reasons. The first is that it left them free to argue that he and they had the same goal. Those other votes had to do, according to this strategy, with disagreements about means to achieve that goal, which of course “we all share.” The second is that it frees them to grant that those other votes might have been appropriate, but “this situation is different from those.”

Those are two very good and very common strategies for getting something done. They either avoid labeling entirely or they devise a label that emphasizes the common goals. These strategies work really well. It makes you wonder what important purpose is served by vilifying our political opponents.

Imagine, for instance, that there is one way and only one to pursue racial equality or the legitimate interests of women or to reduce the systematic disparagement of the elderly. One way. If you accept those goals but define them differently or pursue them differently, then you are a bad guy and deserve to be called a bad guy. But if there is more than one way, then people who agree about the goals and disagree only about the means, have every reason to find common ground. They have every reason, in other words, to treat potential colleagues the way Julian Bond was treated when he was the tie-breaking vote.

This is a deviance-reducing response. You still get to call it “deviance” in your mind because they don’t agree with you in every way and you happen to be a picky person, but your response reduces, it minimizes, that “deviance” in the service of a common agenda.

Leftists who call their opponents Fascists and Rightists who call their opponents Communists are engaging in deviance amplifying behavior. If these are people you are not going to be working with anyway [3] you can probably call them all the names you like. Every liberal wants to take away your freedom; every conservative is a “hater” of various racial, ethnic, gender, or age groups.

But the best time to cut a deal with potential colleagues is before you have consigned them to outer darkness, not after. After they have been excommunicated, there is not much reason for them to be willing to talk to you. So, obviously, a deviance minimizing approach is more likely to lead to civil discourse and to broad cooperation than a deviance amplifying approach.

I am not saying that “making nice” (West Side Story) is always the right thing to do. I am the guy who called our president “a pathological liar” and who spent some part of that essay justifying every part of that charge. I am not worried about amplifying President Trump’s deviance.

julian-bond-1On the other hand, I live with some people and am related to some others, who think that Trump’s approach is the right way to go. Privately, I call those “misguided hopes.”  I assume these people can be talked to if someone on the other side is willing to grant them good motives and to work at showing them that the collateral damage of the movement they are supporting will be unacceptably costly to other things they hold dear. I think I owe them the Julian Bond treatment if there is going to be a time on down the road when we can work together. Besides, they are family and friends, not just fellow citizens.

I don’t think I owe them that behavior. The rule I am devising here is not moral; it is strategic. I think that is the behavior that will best allow me to pursue my own objectives. I like pursuing my own objectives and if you don’t like pursuing yours, you might just think about getting some new ones.

[1] March 28, 2014. I called it “Racism and Sin”

[2] I provide a specific context for this meaning of deviance amplification because it means other things in other settings. It is, according to Wikipedia, “defined by media critics as a cycle of increasing numbers of reports on a category of antisocial behavior or some other ‘undesirable’ event, leading to a moral panic.” That’s not what I am talking about.
[3] Unless, of course, the people whose deviance you are amplifying own “a printing press” (Mark Twain) or a radio station or a twitter account. In that case, you have no idea who you are really talking to. There is a place for dramatizing how evil their behavior is, but that is not the way you want to approach potential colleagues.

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You like me. You really like me.

Posted on February 12, 2017 by hessd

I take it for granted that the Trump administration will be a disaster as a governing body. When you look ahead to the horrors I imagine, you might wonder why the necessary electoral majority chose him to be our president. I have an idea I would like to offer, but because it is an argument that cuts across the grain a little, I want to put some time into making a context for it.

I saw the previews of a movie in 1996 and based on those previews, decided I didn’t want to see the movie. On the other hand, I have remembered one of the scenes from the movie quite clearly.

The movie is Mr. Wrong. In it Whitman Crawford (Bill Pullman) is courting Martha Alstonlike-me-3 (Ellen DeGeneris) and trying to persuade her that his feelings for her are intense. “I’m going to show you how much I love you,” he says as he grasps and breaks his little finger. Martha tries to persuade him not to do it and fails and when he does it, she is horrified. But it was all really clear to him and that is the point I want you to remember.

The (mis-)quotation with which I began is the way I remember Sally Field’s line as she accepted an academy award. I am drawing on it as a common memory because it is the sentiment I want to use as the center of today’s argument.  Here is what she actually said.

So let’s imagine now that there is a presidential contest underway. A presidential contest is like a courtship in sense. There are multiple suitors (two main ones) and the lady they are courting represents the number and distribution of voters who will exceed 270 votes in the Electoral College. They are courting us. Or, in another metaphor, they are courting Miss America.

So the courtier and his intended sit on the porch swing. He is saying the things that he thinks will win her heart. Just inside the window, her parents are listening, hoping to have a chance to talk to her afterwards.

likes-me-4He says, “I know there is a guy in science class who keeps hitting on you. To show you how much I love you, I am going to kill him so he won’t do that any more.” Her heart races. “Oh,” she says to herself, “He must love me a lot to be willing to do that for me.” The parents, listening through the window are thinking, “Did he just offer to kill someone to demonstrate the intensity of his love for our daughter?” Was he joking? He didn’t sound like he was joking.”

The young man returns the next night to ask the young lady to take a ride in the car with him.

“Really?” she asks, “I didn’t know you had a car.”

“Oh, I don’t,” he says, “I stole this one because you said you really liked hot sports cars. I’ll take it back before they ever know it was gone.”

And she thinks, “What a passionate young man! How very much he must love me to do such a dangerous thing for me. And I just said I liked that kind of car.” And her parents, listening through the window, say to each other, “Did he just tell our daughter he had stolen a car? Does he have any idea that is against the law?”

Maybe just one more.

He shows up in the evening and sits on the porch swing with her. “Oh,” he says, “I heard you say that you were worried about your chemistry test tomorrow. I hate to see you worried so I set a fire in the lab. There won’t be any chemistry tests of any kind tomorrow.” And her parents think, “Murder, theft, and now arson. This guy is a screwball and needs to be kept far away from our daughter.” And the daughter thinks, “Oh my. The perfect man for me. He will take care of me at whatever cost to himself. What a pure and powerful love he has.”

I’ve been thinking about the speeches the Clinton/Kaine campaign made to coal-like-me-5dependent populations as opposed to the speeches the Trump/Pence campaign made. The Democrats said that coal is dirty, that getting it out of the ground is environmentally hazardous, and that we need to move to sustainable forms of energy. The Republicans said that coal is wonderful and that people who make their living mining coal are wonderful as are the women who wait hopefully for them to return safely from the mine. We will, the Republicans said, find a way to return coal jobs to the prestige they used to have and to honor the brave men who risk their lives to bring that energy to us.”

And the voters in those areas said, “That was thrilling. He likes us; he really likes us.”

In areas where people believe (and it isn’t always untrue) that lax immigration practices are depriving them of the jobs they used to have, the Democratic courtiers said, “We take great pride in being a nation of unrestricted immigration. We love Emma Lazarus and the few lines of her poetry that everyone had to learn. People who are wary of over-immigration are xenophobes and should be ashamed of themselves. The Republican courtiers said, “We understand what it must feel like to be overrun by illegal immigrants and to be told by our government that there is nothing they can do to stop it. Maybe they can’t stop it, but we can. Choose us and we will defend you no matter what the cost.”

Please don’t stop here and try to decide just who the nut job is.  If you stop, stop to think who is going to get the girl if the girl gets to make the choice.

The Democratic courtiers go in the house to have a chat with the only relevant adults in this scene. “Did you hear what that other guy was saying? He promised murder, theft, and arson to your daughter. He promised an impossible dream of a coal economy and a mammoth wall against immigrants. You aren’t going to allow that, are you?” And parents say, “We don’t seem to be able to do a thing with her. She’s in love with love and she doesn’t really care about practicalities.”

You get the idea. If “he likes me, he really likes me” is all that matters, then the substance of what is promised is beside the point entirely. The promises are only vehicles for expressing “how much I love you;” and not at all about the substance of what is being promised.

Back in the old days, it was imagined that the parties (the courtiers) would propose policies and that the people (Miss America, on the porch swing) would choose among them. And if she failed to, the parents would swing into action and bring her attention back to the life she thinks she would have with this freewheeling criminal and talk her out of it.

Madison had hopes for the quality of the courtiers. Here is a description of his hopes from the justly famous Federalist #10.

In the next place, as each representative will be chosen by a greater number of citizens in the large than in the small republic, it will be more difficult for unworthy candidates to practice with success the vicious arts by which elections are too often carried; and the suffrages of the people being more free, will be more likely to centre in men who possess the most attractive merit and the most diffusive and established characters.

This is bad news, of course, for “unworthy candidates” and good news for candidates “who possess the most attractive merit and the most diffusive and established characters.” These are absolutely the courtiers who would be chosen by the parents, but the parents aren’t calling the shots anymore.

That means that promises that illustrate affiliation with a group of voters and empathy with their plight or their hopes or their anger and going to work politically. It means that people who make promises that will just work out, they will do what they say they will do, will be unsuccessful in competition with the others.

So, to go back to Whitman Crawford and Martha Alston again, Crawford’s breaking his finger to show how much he loves her does not horrify her, as it did in the movie. In this new scenario—the porch swing scenario—she takes this perverse action not as proof that he is dangerous, but as proof that he really loves her that much.

I think that is where we are. The wacko promises that are based on the appearance of empathy will work for voters who can no longer bring themselves to care about what a policy is likely to accomplish. And sound public policy, when it is part of a campaign for office, will fail miserably with voters who want only to be courted and not to be well served.

 

 

 

 

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If you play defense, you get to serve

Posted on February 10, 2017 by hessd

We’re talking about volleyball, right?

It is taking all the discipline I have to ignore the Trumpery [1] in the White House. I think it is worth doing, though. If I don’t ignore it, I will lavish my disdain on it and very likely feel that I have done something worthwhile. I will not have.

If I were part of the Trump group, voters or Congressional allies, or new executive offense-1department players, and thought the my President had done something wrong and had entertained feelings of disdain, that would be worth doing. Costly, probably, but worthwhile.  You can spare some disdain for members of your own team without doing much harm.

That’s not where I am. I am part of a crowd that relishes every new faux pas as if it were a chocolate confection of some kind and joining in my own team really isn’t worth doing from the political side. On the other hand, it is nice to have colleagues as I notice at college football games, where the visitors’ side wears different colors than the home side and I know that feels good.

In American politics today, it is really hard to do anything meaningful. It is easy to stop action and hard to start it. It is easy to play defense—keeping the other team from scoring—than offense, where you have to find a way to score some points yourself. As I say, we need to talk volleyball.

In volleyball, you don’t get to serve unless you have stopped the other side’s attempts to score. If you have a really good defense, you can stop the other team time after time and get a chance to make some points yourself.

Defense Now

Now is the time for the Democrats to play defense. Incalculable damage is being done daily by the Trump administration. Some of it is going to be very hard to heal. This is particularly true because Trump is really not a presidential type: he is a local political boss type—not a ward heeler, maybe, but someone who organizes and deploys ward heelers. They pay money to friends to get jobs done that are not authorized and possibly not even legal, but everything is off the books, and who is going to know? You get compliance by threats and bribes, not by policy and persuasion. Does anything sound familiar yet?

offense-3That means that the Democratic opposition is wasting its time playing defense by using policy. Policy isn’t relevant yet. You beat a political machine by bringing publicity to their operations, by prosecuting them to the full extent of the law, by protecting crucial resources who are vulnerable to threats and threatening people who are vulnerable to bribes. We (Democrats) have to work harder and more consistently and with more discipline than they do and since we represent the majority of the voters so far as political outcomes is concerned, we will “win” in this limited way if we do that.

OK, back to volleyball. We won the point. Now we get to serve. Now we need to have an offense. We don’t have one.

Then Offense

In volleyball, there are two parts to having an offense. There is the setup and the spike. That’s how you get points. The setup is the context which makes the spike work. The spike is the actual scoring of the point. In political terms the “setup” can be thought of as the conceptual and institutional machinery for carrying out a policy. The “spike” is some way of selling it to “enough” people that it will be supported even though some of the effects (we will call them side-effects) are unfortunate.

offense-2This is, as I see it, the Democratic problem. Let’s take income as one example. “Income” is two problems. There is how to have enough of it spread broadly enough to sustain a consumer spending economy. There there is the distribution of revenue, which looks at who has a lot and who has only a little.

These are simple problems from a conceptual standpoint. President Nixon proposed a “negative income tax,” which, had it been adequately funded, would have solved the problem. If you make more than a certain amount, you pay taxes; if you make less, you get subsidies. Problem solved.

Or, with an income floor, such as is common in the socialist democracies of Europe, a robust safety net protects workers from the economic consequences of rapid changes in the economy. That attaches workers, unions particularly, to an economic direction if the nation takes one, and it supports a stable life without intolerable deprivation while the changes are being made.

There are two simple ways of dealing with the problem of inequality. You can restrict the gap between the pay of the workers and the pay of the managers as, according to Robert Reich, they do in Japan. Or you can allow any variance in salaries you like and tax the rich to redistribute to the poor as they do in Sweden. Either way.

Those formal solutions are conceptually simple. They are the setup.

Less Filling/Tastes Great

The spike will require some way of selling the program. “Selling” means both that enough people are in favor of it that they will sustain the elected officials in office and who will pay the taxes necessary to support it. It also means fending off the strong emotional opposition, both popular and elite, that would make every new step another battle.

How to sell such a program? And because I am not going to have a chance to go into it, let me just note that there are many such “programs” that would need to be considered. [2] Take addressing the environmental effects of our industrial practices, for one, and our need to cuddle up with dictators all over the world if they have some resource we need.

offense-4

You sell a program, you spike it, by showing that it is required by or justified by values “the people” already hold. “The people” of course hold a diversity of values, which means that a diversity of appeals to those values would be required. And if you think that is beyond us, remember that Miller Lite sold a lot of beer by inventing a conflict between people who drank Miller Lite because it was less filling and others who drank Miller Lite because “it tastes great.”

We could afford to have many such “wars” in politics.

Here’s my favorite recent example. Nancy Jackson is my hero. If anyone knows how to spike the ball and win the point, it’s Nancy Jackson. See Leslie Kaufman’s article here.

Only 48 percent of people in the Midwest agree with the statement that there is “solid evidence that the average temperature on earth has been getting warmer”…

Like opposition to abortion or affirmations of religious faith, they felt, it was becoming a cultural marker that helped some Kansans define themselves…

Yet Ms. Jackson found plenty of openings. Many lamented the nation’s dependence on foreign oil. Some articulated an amorphous desire, often based in religious values, to protect the earth. Some even spoke of changes in the natural world — birds arriving weeks earlier in the spring than they had before — leading her to wonder whether, deep down, they might suspect that climate change was afoot.

So Ms. Jackson sold the program—a program that a more systematic thinker would have said would have to be supported by a shared understanding that the world is getting warmer and that the human contribution to that effect is large—without any of that. She started with the values Kansans had—some wanted to “protect the earth,” some to be “independent of foreign nations’ oil.” These are “more filling/great taste” arguments. There is no reason for them to oppose each other. Everyone in this Kansas project is “drinking Miller Lite,” so to speak, and Nancy Jackson doesn’t care which reason they use.  Her father does, but she doesn’t.

What if it were true, for instance, that the health of wealthy people were better in societies where the discrepancy between the very rich and the very poor was ameliorated? What if it were true, in these societies, that educational attainment is higher and that rates of schizophrenia per 1000 of population were lower, and the proportion of low birth weight babies were lower? [3]

These rationalizations are not the way for Democrats to organize to redistribute wealth. There are no complaints about “the evil 1%” here. [4] This is not a program for “income distribution.” That would be what the setup is about. The spike has to do with a desire to provide better healthcare for the wealthy and better health for infants. More filling, tastes great.

This could go on and on, as you can see, but I want to bring it back to my great concern of the moment. Making fun of the buffoonery of our President is such fun and it is, after all, a team sport if you belong to the right team. And there is serious work to be done by Democratic officeholders to limit the damage President Trump can do. [5]

But that’s all defense. That’s what we have to do to get a chance to go on offense. We don’t have an offense at the moment, and I am arguing that the volleyball metaphor is a good one because it helps us picture what we will have to do when we next nominate a presidential candidate who will have a chance to serve.

[1] See Webster’s (New World Dictionary) definition “something showy but worthless” on my phone app.
[2] There are, by my count, 15 discrete (note the spelling) such proposals in the campaign book collected for Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine—Stronger Together. The “setup and spike” notion could be developed for every one of them. By someone else, please; I’m your guy for the volleyball metaphor.
[3] I highly recommend Richard Wilkinson’s book The Spirit Level and even more highly his TED lecture on the same topic. The data he uses are ordinary everyday publicly available data. What Wilkinson has done is to show that the results do not vary consistently between rich and poor nations, but between highly unequal and less unequal nations.
[4] I just caught, in typing that, the similar sounds from the Lord’s Prayer. When Jesus prayed that we should be protected “from the Evil One,” was that a misunderstanding by Matthew. Maybe Jesus meant “the Evil 1 (%).” How can we know for sure?
[5] I nearly always remember to say “President Trump.” I want the office to continue to be respected because I expect to see someone respectable in it soon. And it might not be a bad example for people who called Michelle Obama “that black bitch” and who are prepared to take offense at whatever you might like to call Melania Trump.

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The Season of Valentine’s Day

Posted on February 5, 2017 by hessd

Bette seems never to have cared about Valentine’s Day one way or the other. I always did: I hated it. As an elementary school child, I ran into the “valentines for everyone in the class” rule. Hated it! Why would I send a valentine to Bumpy Gray [1] and if I did, what would it say?

I don’t remember the Valentine scuffles in my first marriage. I suspect there were some because I learned with great relief that my second wife didn’t care about Valentine’s Day one way or the other. I took that as an opportunity to put the practice behind me and very likely railed against “Hallmark Holidays” invented for the sole purpose of selling cards.

I met Bette late in January, twelve Januaries ago. [2] And Valentines Day was upon me before I could devise a strategy for it.

Buffalo Alums.jpgThis was a whole new thing for me. I was completely smitten and was rooting around for occasions that would allow me to say something that I very much wanted to say. This wasn’t being fastened upon me, as in grade school, or a matter of mutual disinterest, as with my second wife. No, this was me looking for an occasion and seizing on Valentine’s Day as an excuse. That changed my attitude toward it entirely. {The picture is from the right era, at least. In it, we are celebrating Bette’s alma mater, (North Dakota State) which is represented by the same colors as my alma mater (the University of Oregon.)

Besides that, I got from Bette that Valentine’s Day a much-treasured confirmation that this lady was something special. I showed up at the door of her condo prepared for courtship. I had arranged four kinds of flour—I did quite a bit of baking back in those days—in plastic bags and I gave them to her as we stood there at the door. I said that I didn’t know her well enough to know what her favorite flowers were (implying that I would have bought them if I had known), so instead, I brought these (handing them to her) because they are my favorite flours.

She was very gracious about receiving the flours from me. We chatted for a little while in the kitchen until I thought I had been there long enough. But when I started to leave, she said, “Thank you for the flours” in the tone and with the look of a woman who has just been given a dozen perfect roses, which happened to be her favorite flower. That look. That tone.  It was wonderful!

I really liked that and Bette and I have celebrated Valentine’s Day in a big way ever since. I have decided that her willingness to marry me ought not to mean that I stop courting her. She is willing to continue to be courted, particularly during what I have come to think of as “the Valentine’s Day season.” So it works out really well.

This year, Starbucks is featuring a shortbread cookie as a valentine. It has the stereotypical “heart” shape and a truly cryptic message on it. It says XO OX, as you can plainly see. I’ve worked a little on cracking the code this year and I want to tell you what I have discovered.IMG_0487.jpg

As I see it, it means “bovine barbecue.” I’m not entirely sure why that is specially appropriate for Valentine’s Day, particularly because you don’t get to be an ox without parting with a precious part of your anatomy. You can be Presbyterian without that, I am glad to say, an allusion that will be explored in just a moment.

Looking first at XO. The only language I have found in which this is actually a word is Chinese. Xo is a spicy seafood sauce originating in Hong Kong. Why you would want to put that on the flesh of an ox is puzzling, of course, but then naming a celebration of courtly love after a priest [3] isn’t all that straightforward either. And if you call beef with barbecue sauce on it “barbecued beef,” then Xo Ox is perfectly understandable.

You may have thought that the reference to Presbyterians was casual, but it was not. Etymology comes once again to the rescue. Presbyterianism is a form of church governance characterized by rule by “elders.” The Greek presbyteros is not very far away; it means “elder.” But why does it mean “elder?” The prefix pre- meaning “before” is not a puzzle. That leaves us only -buteros, from the root bous, meaning “ox.” There was, according to one of the accounts I read, a favored position saved for an old man, leading the ox to the place where the ox would be sacrificed. [4] So it is the combination “the old man in the front with the ox” that gives us presbyteros and prestyteros that gives us Presbyterianism, the rule of the church by such elders.

So much for meaning. There remains the question of just why XO has come to meanXOXO2.jpg“hugs and kisses.” First, it ought to mean “kisses and hugs” because the X is the symbol that is supposed to refer to osculation. Still, we make do with the language as we find it.

As to just why the X symbol means what it is supposed to mean and the O what it is supposed to mean, I recommend a bouquet of speculations collected and arranged by Deborah Honeycutt at Today I Found Out. Some of the explanations have to do with Tic-Tac-Toe; some with X as a lingering symbol for Christ; some with the purported practice of Jewish immigrants “signing” with an O because they didn’t want to sign with “a Christian symbol.” [5]

So this “Valentine’s Day season,” there is a great deal to think about. I have, I am delighted to say, a wife who still likes to be courted. There is the whole season of Valentine’s Day which provides a context that otherwise I would have to invent. And there are cards which say little fragments (each) of the things I would like to say to Bette in the Valentine’s Day season. Some are a little goofy; some are sweet; some are sexy. Some are borrowed from other occasions; if I like the picture enough, I just change the message.

So much to do. So little time.

[1] I actually did have a classmate named Bumpy Gray. I didn’t find out his name was Paul until a substitute teacher called the roll one time. We all said, “Who?”
[2] We just celebrated the 12th anniversary of our first date. At Starbucks. I had learned in six months of dating that “coffee” is a god amount of time for a first date because you never know how it is going to turn out.
[3] One of the plausible actual Valentines who might have been associated with sainthood was a Roman Catholic priest, who presumably would have been celibate. I understand that there were exceptions, but the combination of a non-participating priest and a castrated bovine in the celebration of romantic love is just too much to pass up.

[4] Partridge in his Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English says originally meant “(an ox) leading the way.” Barnhart, in The Barnhard Dictionary of Etymology thinks it might refer to an old man (presbyteros is the comparative form of presbys, meaning “old”) who leads a herd of cattle.
[5] In the middle of this explanation, I learned that kike, a derogatory term referring to Jews, comes from kikel, the Yiddish word meaning “circle.” And if it is true that Jewish immigrants signed with a circle while other immigrants signed with an X, that would actually make sense.

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Groundhog

Posted on February 3, 2017 by hessd

So here is what Punxsatawney Phil actually said today. [1]

“It’s mighty cold weather, you’ve been braving. Is it more winter or is it spring that you’re craving? Since you’ve been up all night and starting to tottle, I, Punxsutawney Phil, shall not dawdle,” the proclamation read. “My faithful followers, I could clearly see a beautiful, perfect shadow of me. Six more weeks of winter, it shall be!”

So now we know. What we don’t know is whether life means anything if it isn’t “going anywhere.” It’s a question worth asking, so I think we ought to begin with a Japanese existentialist novel. What better place?

dunes-1Kobo Abe’s 1964 novel The Woman in the Dunes is the first treatment of this theme I know about. The protagonist , Niki Junpei, is an entomologist who is trapped in a sand pit because the locals won’t let him leave. All day every day he must shovel back the ever-advancing sand dunes. A young woman lives in the cave as well and they both work at this task. Eventually, working at this endless task along with the young woman comes to seem an appropriate way to spend his life.

The movie of the same name by director Masaki Kobayashi is also well known. Reviewer Michelle “Izzy” Organa characterizes the entomologist’s original reaction to his plight as “his arrogance and desire to leave.” So someone—either director Kobayashi or reviewer Organa—feels that the entomologist’s desire to go where he wants to go and do what he wants to do is “arrogant.” [2]

Grappling with the trials of Niki Junpei is much heavier work than grappling with the trials of Phil Connors, played by Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. Groundhog Day is the same story as Woman in the Dunes in every thematic sense, but no one has ever said Woman in the Dunes is a comedy. Groundhog Day is certainly a comedy.

In each, however, there comes a point when the protagonist either “chooses” (Junpei) or “accepts” (Connors) his fate. Here is Wikipedia’s summary of the plot.

Murray plays Phil Connors, an arrogant Pittsburgh TV weatherman who, during an assignment covering the annual Groundhog Day event in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, finds himself caught in a time loop, repeating the same day again and again. After indulging in hedonism and committing suicide numerous times, he begins to re-examine his life and priorities.

Note that “arrogant” shows up again. We could make Groundhog Day a much more serious movie than director Harold Ramis wants it to be by asking just what rights the “arrogant” Connors has “arrogated to himself,” but that is not the way the movie goes.

And when Connors says, “I’m happy now,” it means a lot more than it would mean if I said it. If I said “now,” I would be contrasting it with some “then” or other. Maybe “back then” or some “will I still be happy then” in the future. But for a man who knows that “now” is all he will ever have, to be happy “now” is a very big deal.

Connors has become happy “now” by taking his recurring day—just the one day: every daydune-5 begins with the same weather forecast and the same music and the same pointless jokes on the radio—and turning it into a ritual of good deeds. He changes the flat tire on a car, peforms the Heimlich maneuver on a man choking to death in a local restaurant, catches a kid falling out of a tree, rescues a homeless man from starving and freezing to death. And…he honestly courts a woman he loves, knowing that she will continue to reject him and that he will continue to deserve rejection.

Of course “she,” Andie McDowell, does in fact fall in love with him and either that or something else breaks the spell and magically “tomorrow” arrives with its resolution of absolutely everything.

Still…I like to find and cherish the serious questions embedded in comedies. Perhaps I don’t feel so threatened by them if they are in comedies. But the question is, What would you do with your life if nothing “mattered” in the sense of leading to anything. Your actions, good or bad, have no consequences at all for “tomorrow.” In that context, would you choose to do good to your fellows?

Would you really? Why?

[1]  For the benefit of western or non-North American readers, Punxsatawney Phil is a groundhog is western Pennsylvania who is supposed to come out of his hole on the second day of February and look around to see if he can see his shadow.  If he can, that means there will be six more weeks of cold weather.  It may sound like the sheerest nonsense, but it is dear to the merchants of Punxsatawney, Pennsylvania.

[2]  There is the question, of course, of what is arrogant about wanting to get on with your plans for your life.  Etymologically, you are arrogant if you arrogate to yourself some good, to “claim or seize with out right,” says my Webster’s phone app.  That makes the relationship between arrogate and arrogant clear.  But both come from the Latin verb rogare, which means “to ask.”  That connection does not seem clear to me.

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Narcissist-in-Chief

Posted on January 30, 2017 by hessd

Imagine a man [1] who is a father, an employer, and a mayor. Oh…and he is a narcissist. What does that personal condition [2] imply for the three roles I mentioned?

Let’s start at the other end of the question. In two of those instances (employer and mayor) there are expectations and permissions that go with that status. A person comes to occupy that status and learns, suddenly, that he is expected to behave in this way and that way and that quite a few behaviors that were previously criticized are now expected or forgiven. He may very well begin to act in those new ways not so much because he needs to, but because he is expected to and finds that he gets a kick out of it.

If I had to have a name for that sequence, I think I would call it “role-oriented narcissism-4narcissism.”  But the case I presented is not like that. This guy—the father, employer, mayor—IS a narcissist. It is what he is like ; he overestimates his abilities and has an excessive need for admiration and affirmation. [3] And that means that he will be a narcissistic father, a narcissistic employer, and a narcissistic mayor. He brings his condition, in other words, to the statuses he occupies and as he plays out the roles those statuses demand, characteristic traits of NPD show up at home and at the workplace and at city hall.

What should we look for? Here’s a series of signs rather grandiosely labeled “the seven deadly sins of narcissism” by Sandy Hotchkiss. [4] She names them

  • shamelessness
  • magical thinking
  • arrogance
  • envy
  • entitlement
  • exploitation, and
  • bad boundaries.

Let’s take the mayor’s role for our example. Hotchkiss’s descriptions overlap a bit, so I will choose the ones that seem most distinct from each other. [5]

Shamelessness: the mayor does things he should be ashamed of, but he is not. This lack of shame is seen as a deficiency. When shame works properly, it signals that important social norms have been transgressed. Being “shameless” means having to do without those cues.

Magical thinking: the mayor uses distortion and illusion to maintain his image of himself and his office and he projects faults, personal and political, onto others.

Entitlement: the mayor feels that he is entitled to particularly favorable treatment and is not to be held to the standards to which most mayors are held.

Exploitation: the mayor exploits the vulnerability of others, without regard for their legitimate interests or the interests of their departments.

Poorly defined boundaries: The mayor sees his office as central to everything that is going on—whether it is or not—failing to realize that other people and other offices are not just extensions of himself and his office.

The point to notice here is that this is “person-oriented” narcissism. The person who is the mayor—and the employer and the father—is a narcissist, so he takes these traits with him to every status, every position, he holds. He is a narcissist no matter what, but the effects of his narcissism are magnified as he has access to statuses that give him power over others.

It would be a really bad thing to elect a narcissist to be President of the most powerful nation in the world. That would be a very bad thing. And it would not be, in the way I have been defining it, because this man would be less narcissistic without these roles to play; it would be because the effects of his narcissism will be more widespread as he gets access to more and more powerful roles.

narcissist-5That brings me to Donald Trump. And for those of you who are wondering why it took me so long, the answer is that I am trying to distinguish between the effects of narcissistic behavior, on the one hand, and the causes or the signs of it on the other

I saw a short news story on the Rachel Maddow Show a few days ago. [6] She showed a collection of interviews with Republican candidate Donald Trump (not President Trump) in which he said that as long as we were in Iraq, we should just take the oil. I think that’s a bad thing to say, even for a blowhard jingoist like Trump, but that isn’t what horrified me. It was the justifications that horrified me.

There are two. First, that there is no entity that can be meaningfully identified as Iraq. This will come as a great surprise to Mohammed Ali Ahakim (below), who serves at the United Nations representing the Republic of Iraq. “Iraq” is just a bunch of tribes who spend their time killing each other, according to Trump. And if there is no legitimate entity called Iraq, then “Iraq” cannot own the oil and therefore there is no reason for us not to take it.

Second, if there were a nation of Iraq, they owe us for the security services we provided them. They didn’t pay us for all the money we spent there and all the lives we lost there, so we should just take the oil as our just payment.  So the event that I always saw as an invasion–President Bush called it that at the time and gave some democratic cover for it–is now recast as “security services.”

Are there, in these remarks, any evidence of the traits Sandy Hotchkiss saw as associatednarcissism-2 with narcissism? It seems to me that we can find three there at least. Shamelessess is the first. We have done grievous harm to the nation of Iraq and to the Iraqi people. Some U. S. President some day will apologize for what we have done. We have been aggressive beyond any modern precedent in a great power democracy in our behavior toward other nations. Some Americans are ashamed of what we have done. I am one of those. My President is not.

Exploitation, clearly, if it is defined as behaving toward other nations without any recognition of their legitimate interests. If the weakness of a nation whose defenses are not adequate to defend itself against our military is seen as no more than the ripeness of a banana that is ready to be picked, then “exploitation” seem a fair charge.

I think what I called “poorly defined boundaries” (and Hotchkiss or her editor called “bad boundaries”) is indicated as well. What can be taken militarily and what can be purchased financially and what can be negotiated diplomatically seem all to flow into each other. “Why is it,” the narcissist asks, “that you persist in saying that you have legitimate needs when they clearly oppose my wishes? Why is that?”

narcissism-3I need to find a way to get off this horse before I disappear over the far horizon and I have an idea. There is hardly a more innocuous movie that The Wedding Date, starring Debra Messing and Dermot Mulroney. Messing takes Mulroney to the wedding of her sister, pretending that he is her fiancé when in fact he is a professional escort. Messing is concerned that the proceedings will go well, but they start going badly as soon as she and her “wedding date “ arrive.

The house is crowded with guests and over the speaker system comes the voice of Messing’s mother, a woman with no social sense whatever. “Oh sweet Jesus,” says Messing, “Who gave that woman an amp?”

Now the mother, the person herself, is who she is. And if she were that person in a receiving line or huddling quietly in a corner with long-time friends, that would be one thing. Giving her the tools to dominate the auditory space of all the guests at the same time is another thing entirely.

And that’s what I’m talking about. President Trump isn’t newly narcissistic. But he is newly President.

[1] Men more than women, according to a recent study. I doubt that, myself. I haven’t done any studies and I don’t know the literature, but I am quite certain that as interest in this topic proceeds, we disc”over that there are “different kinds of narcissim (depending on the trait being measured) and that men are more commonly afflicted by some kinds, women by other kinds. Watch and see.
[2] That is the first line or so of Wikipedia’s very chaste account of the condition.
[3] I am referring here the the full-blown personality disorder now being called NPD, which probably does not please the German political party (Nationaldemokratische Deutschland) with shares the acronym.
[4] That is, in fact, the subtitle of her 2008 book, “Why is always about you?”
[5] For the record, I deny the charge that I chose these particular traits because they spell SMEEP and are, therefore, easy to remember.
[6] Rachel Maddow is a commentator/new anchor of the far left, a proponent of what I called in my most recent post “niche journalism.” I am not relying on her judgment about the merits of the news clips, only that they are, in fact, circulating on social media in the middle east and that they are subtitled in Arabic, as shown.

 

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