Holy Mirth

Some thoughts inspired by the recent slaughter of French cartoonists responsible for the comic Charlie Hebdo, a slaughter perpetuated by Muslim extremists angered by the comic's crude mockery of Islam.

When I put myself in the public sphere, with an agenda that I want you to accept (or at least grapple with in some way), then I become fair game for ridicule.

When I was younger, I served an LDS (Mormon) mission to northern Spain. As a result of being out and about talking to people regarding religion, their own and mine (which I was available to offer those who wanted it), I was fair game for ridicule--and I was ridiculed. While this experience was not always pleasant, I think it was valuable--and I did my best (succeeding for the most part, I hope) to "roll with the punches" (which I knew that my position invited, and even required). I learned that people often use humor to facilitate friendly relations with outsiders whom they might otherwise hate (and perhaps physically injure, even to the point of death). I would much rather be mocked than beaten (let alone killed). But we do not all tolerate mockery the same way. I think we learn to deal with it better, as a population, when we must endure it without the means of an escalating retaliation: as a Mormon missionary, I had neither the friends, the time, nor the resources to plan a violent strike against the people who mocked me (some kindly, some viciously, all with some kind of moral justification that I respected and still respect). I might go home and cry, or get mad on the street and make some aggressive gestures, but there was no such thing as declaring war on society. (There really isn't for the jihadis, either. As a result of their activity in Paris, most of them are dead--right?--and more people will die. Even if society falls apart, the people of France are not going to rise up and convert to Islam en masse. Even if they did, they would promptly divide into separate Muslim factions--such as exist already in dar al-Islam--and commence hostilities with one another. If they were lucky, these hostilities would involve lots of mockery and little actual violence. If not, France becomes another Syria or Iraq.)

I think mockery is actually an important human art, a liberal art that people generally need more practice giving and receiving. The art of laughing at others without losing sight of one's own absurdity is really one of the most civilized--and civilizing--arts available to us. Too many people study how to laugh at others without learning to laugh at themselves. Too few among us are brave enough to face our own absurdity and laugh (instead of crying or becoming very angry and wanting to make someone else suffer because we appear weak, foolish, or stupid at some point--as we all do). Thus, when I teach humanities today in the classroom and tell my students, in a jesting tone, that I see my role as that of a professional clown, I am actually being serious. Seriously silly. I am teaching humanity to laugh, at itself and the world--to laugh and let the little things (a cartoon here, an insult there) go, without rancor.

Rape, Chivalry, Sexual Dimorphism

Three related thoughts about the differences between men and women, and the way these become virulently poisonous.

I. Rape is an ugly reality in animal life, including the life of humanity. We have developed many tools to curb and contain it. Unsurprisingly, some tools work better than others, and any tool can be recycled as a weapon (perpetrating abuse instead of containing it). We have not found a final solution for rape that is universal (applicable to everyone always). I do not think we will. The most we can do is educate ourselves (about the dangers in the world and the reality that we cannot control them perfectly, as a species or as individuals).

We must not blame victims. That will not help them (as they seek healing) or us (as we seek means to protect them and others like them, including ourselves). Rape is out there no matter what you wear, no matter what god you pray to (or ignore), no matter what meetings you attend, no matter your education (etc.). Your job as a human being is to make sure primarily (1) that you don't perpetrate it, and only secondarily (2) that you equip yourself to fight or flee it when it finds you--as best you can. It is never your fault that you remain vulnerable. We are all vulnerable. Nobody says that a victim of assault or robbery "should have practised street-fighting more." That is a worthless comment, particularly when it comes from someone who has never been attacked. People are not the same, and neither are their circumstances. Bad things happen to good people all the time (I mean "good" in the broadest sense here, encompassing everything from "innocent" to "morally upright" to "prepared").

Therapy (religion, applied science) worth anything is not about pouring salt in the wounds of the innocent. A really righteous person would not waste time warning young women (or men) to cover their shoulders and then blame any rape on their failing to heed his warning. He would warn them not to be or become tolerant of rapists. If any of them were raped, he would respond with empathy: "I am really sorry that happened to you. Please don't feel that it was in any way your fault. You cannot be held accountable for the fact that some other people are monsters. You are not a monster. I love you." This is what bearing the burden of your fellow men and women looks like. You commiserate with them (rather than looking for a way to make everything awful in their life appear to be somehow their fault, a disaster of their own making).

The real problem we see today in modesty rhetoric, I think, is lack of empathy. People want to help, even conservative religious people, but they fail to notice that blaming the victim really isn't helping (anyone, at all, ever: even if the victim takes the message to heart and begins wearing burkhas and training for combat, that is no guarantee that rape won't happen). I like to imagine that if people could see more clearly into the mind of victims, perhaps if they themselves became victims (not that I wish that for anyone), they would realize their error and stop "helping" (and maybe even apologize for their sins).

I definitely agree that rape is a male issue (a meme I have encountered several times in society). But I think women should talk about it, too (as they do in real life). As one of the really tough, intractable problems in human experience, it is fundamentally a human problem (that we all share, that we all must struggle to solve, even though there is no such thing as a final solution).

The really tough reality I confront here is that we are not all alike. We do not see the same things in the world; even if we do, we do not see them the same way. We experience life differently, as individuals and communities. Our unlikeness means that we cannot approach rape the same way. My approach cannot be yours (or vice versa). My community cannot be yours (or vice versa). The solution I make for myself cannot be the solution the community makes together, and there is no such thing as a single, unified solution that applies to all situations universally. 

When we say that rape is a female issue, we are lying (it seems to me, and I think decent people agree). I am wary of making it a male issue because that too strikes me as a lie (or at best an incomplete truth: I think rape is fundamentally a human problem that we must all confront individually and together, in dialogue with one another).

The problem with making rape a female issue is that this provides criminals with an easy out (when they blame the victim for their bad behavior). The problem with making rape a male issue is that this leads to behavior that many women experience as benevolent sexism (that criminals can incorporate as a front for their bad behavior: "I held the door for you, so you owe me your life!"). The truth is that there are many different fronts we need to attend in the battle against rape (I think). Victims don't need the same therapy as perpetrators. Potential victims don't need the same therapy as actual victims. Men don't need the same approach as women, I would venture to say, though we definitely need to talk to each other about our mutual experiences and expectations (so that we have a reasonable chance of incorporating the best information into whatever solutions we end up devising to deal with the criminals). 

II. I am going to speak for a moment as a man (not a woman), a Westerner (Anglo-Saxon), and a religious person (with a fair amount of experience working in "rough" environments, among human beings whom some modern progressives would occasionally be tempted to execrate as boorish, homophobic, racist, sexist, misogynist trash). Coming from my background, I have to say that I see a real positive utility arising from chivalry. The men among whom I grew up were not a uniform bunch. Some were very educated (like my father); others were not (at all). Some were physical monsters (capable of picking up a small car and/or fighting wild animals in the woods); others were not. Some were decent; others were not. The decent ones, uneducated or not, typically adopted an approach to life that sought to demonstrate respect for others, particularly for those who might feel threatened by them (e.g. when circumstances put them and a weaker person in close proximity: "weaker" need not imply physical inferiority, though that was definitely a recurrent issue; it also indicates inequality in social privilege that recurs in human experience, as in baboon experience). Sometimes, decent people would get the respect signal wrong; they would misjudge the person they wanted to conciliate (e.g. when they opened the door for an angry young woman who didn't want that). Their response would be to take the blowback from that mistake on the chin: "I'm sorry! I didn't mean to offend you. What can I do to make it up? Leave you alone? Offer you something? I am at your service."

Whether rightly or wrongly, these men offered an approach to life that was accessible to me as a young man. I needed a way to relate to others, particularly those I didn't and couldn't really understand (e.g. most women and many men, too). I needed a way to exist without imposing myself (as I have never wanted to do), and they offered it. I think chivalry is historically as good a word as any for their attitude (though I am open to others that might sound less sexist), which I find echoed in old poetry and literature occasionally named (whether with approval or disgust) chivalrous. The worship of woman (which recurs in literature such as I am invoking here) has problems, of course (see my comment above), but the decent men in my life have convinced me that these are more artificial than fundamental (particularly when we notice how they apply also to relationships with "weaker" males). By that I mean that the fundamental attitude of polite deference to others, particularly when circumstances conspire to make one appear powerful, is a good one. The problem with chivalry is that many people (including many stupid men) confuse it with gestures rather than attitude. Instead of seeing the principle of respecting others' autonomy (granting them room to situate themselves comfortably relative to you), they see some arbitrary rule ("a woman's place is to sit around and wait for me to open the door for her").

The decent men I know would never accept shenanigans such as occurred (e.g.) recently in Steubenville. Though very physical, and on occasion even frightening (to me, as a man), they made it clear to me over and over--in quiet conversations in the locker room or at church or some other place where we happened to coincide, and in their interaction with people--that they had a deep sense of their own personal dignity, and the corresponding personal dignity of every individual human being that they interacted with (male, female, big, small, black, white, foreign, domestic, powerful, weak: it did not matter). I saw that other men might talk or make gestures like the really decent ones without being really decent. I noticed that chivalry (respect, whatever one wants to call it) is more than a collection of shallow rules. I also learned that the really decent folk with power (raw physical power or social privilege or whatever) were keenly aware of their own weakness--of the temptation that their position offered for "taking unfair advantage"--and that they took conscious measures to avoid becoming the perpetrators of abuse. They also made a point of noting how their strength inevitably depended on the cooperation of others, how it was not really their own. (Some of them expressed this by attributing it to God, not because they identified God as their own whim, but for the opposite reason: "God" for them meant "not me, the world outside me that I cannot understand but that I choose to confront with dignity.")

As a human, I see that chivalry has limits. I see that it cannot be the solution of every person (or even of every man). But I am not ready to throw it away, myself, as a man. I have found it more useful than not. 

III. To me it seems that there is only one distinction between the sexes (male and female) clear enough to be written into law: men cannot give birth, so final decisions regarding reproduction belong exclusively to women.

Everything else (the more or less imaginary gender preferences and aptitudes whose ebb and flow we observe in contentious scientific literature) should be sorted out extralegally (definitely) and without social coercion (e.g. in the form of referenda promoting one group's fantasy of gender roles at the expense of everyone else). If women don't want to be CEOs (as I don't, though I am not a woman), then they shouldn't have to be; but that should be their decision, not an expectation imposed externally. Society should have no definite gender roles enforced by law (certainly) and should resist the idea of softer enforcement (e.g. via the continuation of work requirements that make it unnecessarily difficult for qualified individuals to live as they find opportunity and desire). 

Love Is Not My Answer

"He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me" (Matt. 10:37 KJV).

This scripture is an interesting one, about which I have had occasion to think quite a bit over the past few years.  Here are some insights that have come to me, as a result of my personal experience with religion, family, and the community at large. 

The family is a problematic institution, historically. The love that it produces turns easily into hatred. The peace that it cultivates often produces seeds of war. Saints and ascetics have been trying to tame the wild human family for years (castrating it, chaining it, smothering it, attacking it with violent hatred or seducing it with sweet love). It is a myth that religion and the family are peaceful companions on the road to heaven. A nice myth. But reality shows that they are enemies more than friends, and the family doesn't always fight on the right side (any more than religion does: we all fight dirty eventually).

Read in a positive light, I think anti-family Jesus is appealing to people to step outside their tribalism (outside the mafia that is "the family" so often in history), recognizing that the other guy out there has a family just as real and worth preserving as yours. (Hector has a family as real, human, and valuable as the family of Achilles.) I support this kind of reasoning, up to a certain point: there is a limit to the pain I am willing to cause my own family in order to avoid hurting yours.

This limit is part of what holds me back from embracing "pure compassion" as preached in some Buddhist sects, or "the pure love of Christ" as it often appears historically (usually in contexts like the monastery, where the family is something dangerous and suspicious that we would do better to avoid). I don't have an equal love for all beings. I care about the things close to me (that I am conscious of) more. I love my people more than the people I have never met. I don't see this distinction as completely overcomable (and I actually embrace it, within certain limits: I accept that there are and must be limits to the lengths I am willing to go to defend my private love; I see that love is not equal, fair, or nice all the time, and I strive to keep my love as docile as possible).

For me, part of the process of growing up has been sorting out explicitly where I stand vis-a-vis my family, myself, and the community at large. I cannot help loving myself. But I can doubt my self-love as something useful when it causes me to do others obvious, unnecessary harm. I cannot help loving my family. But I can doubt my family-love when it causes me to do others obvious, unnecessary harm. I cannot help loving my community (less than I love myself or my family--that's simply how I roll). But I can doubt my community-love when it causes me to do others (including myself) obvious, unnecessary harm.  I cannot help loving.  But I can stop loving blindly, reflexively, unconditionally.

I have realized that love is not the answer. It is the question, often, but as an answer it is very dangerous (precisely because it has an historical tendency to turn into vicious, violent hatred: the worst crimes in history are those that come from love, with the worst love being the love for community that loses sight of the individual utterly out of an awfully pure desire to save and exalt the collective). 

If I had to respond to anti-family Jesus, who invites me to follow him, giving up my love for family in order to replace it with love for God, this is what I would say.  "In my experience, the best answer for one love is not another one. A better answer than love is indifference, doubt, hesitation, inaction. 'Do unto others as you would that they did unto you,' you say? Better not to do unto them, say I.  Let them be, and keep out of it until you see an obvious need that you can meet--because somebody needs it, not because you love them. Leave love out of it!  She is too wild and dangerous.  Her remedies are worse than the diseases they pretend to cure."

The more experience I accumulate, the more important it seems to me to notice that there is no such thing as life without death, success without failure, love without hatred.  Another way to put this: the nature of life is to die; the nature of success is to fail; the nature of love is to hate.  I think life makes its own morals, and these are inevitably mortal (causing death as well as survival: we live by making other things die, then prolong the life of organisms around us by dying ourselves) and parochial (favoring one party or parties at the expense of others: my love for life necessarily means that I long for the death of other things, and eventually for my own death).  In brief, I don't see any possibility for a world in which love (or life) is an unqualified good, something to be embraced without any reserve.  I cannot love God with all my heart, might, mind, and strength, because such love creates a hatred of the Devil that is too powerful.  My unconditional love of God becomes unconditional hatred for all that is Not God, and the danger threatened by this hatred is greater than the safety offered by love, in my experience. 

I do not renounce love, for that is impossible.  But I do renounce unconditional love, reluctantly but firmly.  Such strong brews are not for man (or this man, at any rate: I do not presume to dictate to others; this much love I can offer them!).