Back to reality

It might have been better if Obama had been a disastrous failure.

Psychologists have noted that we often have a hard time being honest about people who are really important to us. Thinking about our mothers, for example, we either tend to make them saints or villains. What is really hard to accept is that she was just another sinner like the rest of us. That, of course, makes it impossible for us to forgive her.

You have been loaded with virtues too refined to be envied, and accused of crimes too picturesque to be condemned.

Unable to be honest about her faults, we never name them never mind forgive them.

Obama sold himself to us as a saviour, a transformational president who'd change the way politics is done. He wasn't that. The problem is that he wasn't a massive failure either. What he has been is a mediocrity. As a consequence, we have a whole lot of people acting as if Obama has a greatness woven of magical thread that only non-racists can see. No one can bring themselves to say what they know out loud because that would make them feel racist. (The irony, of course, is that it is racist not to evaluate the guy honestly.)

If he'd been an unmitigated disaster, it would be obvious and no one could deny it.

Unfortunately, mediocrity isn't harmless. A lot of important things that should have been done well have been done poorly or not at all. The potential for things to slide from badly managed to right out of control is very real. And neither of the two people nominated by major parties inspires much confidence.

At the Codfish Ball

The random number generator has given me two of the better shows from Mad Men back to back. Last weeks choice, Shut the Door, Have a Seat, was one of the very best episodes they did, possibly the best and certainly in the top three. With this week's choice it's hard to tell whether it was really as good as all that or whether it just stood out in the midst of the desert that was the last four seasons. The show lost its bearings after the third season and, while there were some good episodes like this one, it never regained its sense of purpose.

I looked up what I wrote on my other blog when the show was first broadcast and my reaction was positive. It's different to see it now with the benefit of hindsight. We know that Sally will grow up well. We know that Don will overcome the seemingly crushing barrier he is told of. We know that Pete will triumph. On the other hand, we know that Megan's choice to follow her passion will end with her being a mediocre actress and will destroy her marriage. We know that Peggy and Abe will not make a good couple. We know that Émile and Marie Calvet's marriage will fail. And, I suppose, we know that Roger and Marie will end up together. (I say, "I suppose", because, while they are a compelling couple in the long run, I find their actions in this episode unrealistic.

I think if there is one message to take from the episode it's, "Don't follow your passion". Find your direction in the challenges and opportunities that life deals you and not in silly fantasies. Probably the best part of the episode is that the impractical dreams come from the mouth of a Marxist.

It's an interesting example of hiding the truth in plain sight for most critics didn't see it coming. They only saw that lovely shot of Émile, Marie, Megan, Don and Sally all looking miserable at the end. As I was saying last week, however, Don has an amazing ability to restart that is the basis of his heroism. The important truth that shot really tells us is that Megan is a child, a woman who has never matured, and that Sally is in danger of failing in the same way.

Orientalism

You have been loaded with virtues too refined to be envied, and accused of crimes too picturesque to be condemned.

The "you" in that quote is interesting. Kakuzo Okakura, writing 1906, is telling us that some Japanese have done to western culture what we have done to their culture. This is perspective very different from Edward Said who sees distortion of other cultures as a one way crime that only western nations are guilty of.

I wonder if it's true? My first temptation is to say yes but I have been conditioned to think that way by academics. It strikes me that there are two problems with that. The first is that it tends to make us distrust any history that makes for a good story.

The second, and I think much more important problem, is that the vanity of seeking virtue to refined to be envied and committing crimes to picturesque to be condemned is pretty common. Even the most sordid little affair starts off as some combination of these two.

And that raises a final question: Is seeking these things in the exotic evil? Perhaps it isn't.

Is the freedom to think what you want "in your head" a freedom worth having

At first glance I would think not. Freedom of thought would appear to be of little value if you cannot actually express those thoughts in words and action. And yet, here we have someone insisting on the value of being free to think what you want "in your head".




"The freedom to think or believe what you want in your head. That's the first amendment to the US constitution."

Actually, no. Here is the first amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

That's very much about stuff outside your head.

It would seem that I can believe whatever I want inside my head and no one need know. I can be polite to someone while thinking they are an idiot for whom I have no respect. For a while, anyway.

And therein lies the problem with this sort of freedom. Keeping it "inside my head" would require constant vigilance. At any moment a gesture or word could give away my real beliefs.

All this talk of freedom of thought is based on a philosophical mistake that takes it that our thoughts are private. I have a complete world of meaning inside my head and I share it with you by analogy. You've experienced pain so you can imagine my pain. In fact, no such thing goes on. Nothing is naturally hidden. We have to make an effort to hide our thoughts. Normally, it's quite easy to read our thoughts from our facial expressions and posture.

We put very little effort into reading people. One of the lessons I've learned in the last decade is that you can read someone else's thoughts quite easily. All you have to do is start trying.

It's quite frightening once you start. And here we can get some idea of the terror that comes when people try to control others' thinking; when simply doing what is hoped of you is no longer enough. But this is a terror we live with all the time. Anyone who has ever worked under someone who is determined to "change the corporate culture" will know how awful it can be.

As can anyone who has been a child. Parents, with the best of intentions, try to shape their children's thinking. And they'll keep doing it well into adulthood if you don't stop them.

That said, freedom is never inside your head.

Femme noir

Here are two quotes that feature the same moral analysis of a woman's behaviour. The two quotes are from separate shows several years apart. In both a man is accusing a woman of mistaking her need to see herself as a good person with what it takes to actually be a good person.

"Because you're good and everyone else in the world is bad. You're so hurt. So brave. With your little white nose in the air and all the time you've been building a life raft." 

"Alicia, here's the thing, you like to think you're a good person, and maybe at one time you were, but we both know, you'll do whatever it takes*."

The first of those quotes is Don Draper to Betty in the last show of the third season of Mad Men. She has been saying she wants to leave him because she is unhappy with him. And she is. But she has also been preparing her exit for a long time. It's not entirely clear to us or to Betty Draper which is the real motivator. The second quote is from the second-last episode of the first season of The Good Wife. Cary is angry at Alicia because she has used her contacts in the spectacularly corrupt Chicago political machine to win a competition between the two of them for a job. Cary is bitter and speaks as a bitter man might but Alicia is also more than a little uncertain that what she did is right.

In both situations the man is in a morally ambiguous position. Don Draper's actions are far from defensible. Cary is letting his bitterness get a hold of him. Both men have also incorrectly assumed that the woman they are accusing has been using sex to get what she wants**. And yet, they both have a point. Both Betty and Alicia have a lot invested in being able to think of themselves as good and neither really is as good as the image she desperately needs to hold of herself. There is a very deep truth about female moral psychology at work here.

I've written elsewhere about film noir and how a lot of the noir classics turn on a particular twist of male moral psychology. We men tend to allow ourselves to get bewitched such that our desires become entitlements. This applies to everything we desire but the place where it is most evident is in sexual desire and neo noir films have exploited this to maximum dramatic effect. The typical male noir hero has made, a Robert Glover puts it, a covert contract with the world that if he follows the rules he should get a trouble free life and that he should get "sex". I put the scare quotes up here because sex symbolizes much else: it symbolizes a certain level of financial success and social status. Even in the unlikely event that he gets a trouble-free life he seeks, it won't be enough. He needs the recognition of being a person of status in the larger world and good lover in the privacy of his own bedroom. He can't supply those, so he needs the world to give it to him. And this desire becomes an entitlement. And that becomes his justification for now breaking the rules. He sees the denial of his entitled status as proof that the system is crooked and concludes that he is no longer morally bound by the rules.

At some point in our lives (and maybe at several points) every man does that trick to himself. And not just to himself, he causes pain to others. I think a majority of affairs are justified by the man on the grounds that, "Okay, this is wrong and I made a commitment but I'm entitled to this once in my life." Take that basic scenario and complicate it with some serious crime and you've got any one of a dozen classic film noir.

But what about women? The same scenario doesn't work. The male who does what I have described above is wrong but can remain a sympathetic character. You could not do the same thing with a female character. There are women who occasionally decide, "Okay, this is wrong and I made a commitment but I'm entitled to this once in my life." But they don't garner sympathy. It's unfair, I know, but we judge women by a different standard.

But there is a different sense of entitlement that I think women are prone to and that we tend to understand and thus sympathize with the woman who has it and that is the sense of being entitled to think of herself as a good person no matter what happens. Part of the motivation for this is fear of shame.

I'll return to the male case first to show how shame works there. The man who gets cheated on or cheated out of something worries that this makes him a loser. He knows that life isn't fair and that success in this world depends to a large degree on lucky and that some people succeed by cheating. In reality, he hasn't done anything to earn the things he wants and then the insult-added-to-injury when someone else hurts him helps him believe that he is somehow entitled to, Robert Glover's phrase, "a happy, trouble-free life". When he doesn't get that, he feels personally shamed. People are sneering at me and I've always been a good guy who follows the rules. (Think of the opening scenes of Breaking Bad in which Walter White has been working hard at two jobs to support his wife and son, who hs a disability, and no one respects him.)

With women, the problem is a bit more complex because there is an unfair double standard to begin with: women are held to a ridiculously high but not actually impossible standard of sexual purity that no one expects from men. If it were actually impossible, the problem would disappear but every woman knows that there is a very small number of women who actually achieve what is nearly impossible and a much larger number who fake it successfully. She too knows that life is unfair and that being perceived as good according to the unfair standards that women are judged by is mostly a matter of luck and that lots of people cheat. In reality, she hasn't done anything to earn the good-woman status she wants and then the insult-added-to-injury when someone else hurts her helps her believe that she is somehow entitled to think of herself as a good person no matter how ruthlessly she pursues her selfish needs. And, just as we start off on Walter White's side, we also start off on Alicia Florrick's side. We don't necessarily think that what she subsequently does is right but we understand (tricky word that) her desires and her having been wronged by her husband, whuch she clearly was, seems to give her the moral high ground as the "good wife".

I think that the solution to both is the same: to develop a conscience. That is a much bigger challenge than it might seem forever for there is deadly trap and that is that we might simply internalize shame. If our conscience is just the nagging little voice inside that tells us that we've done wrong then we don't actually have a conscience. All we have is our mothers inside our head tearing us down. We will resent that such that, no matter how hard we try, we will quietly sabotage our attempts to "be good".

Again, both positions are about being rather than doing. The man wants to feel like a winner and the woman wants to feel like a good person. Yes, the goal is ultimately to be a better human being but we become better people by doing good things. Doing good things focuses me on something outside myself, something that can be evaluated in a cool, objective way. It also makes progress possible for each bad thing is a bump in the road instead of a terrifying shame that I meet be no good after all.

*In my all-time favourite movie, Body Heat, Ned Racine makes a similar judgment on Matty Walker; that she could, "Do what is necessary, whatever is necessary." Before we join in condemning this, however, we should remember that Jesus tells us to do what ie necessary, whatever is necessary. This appears to make it look like any means will justify the end but if our character is our destiny, and it is, then actions will make us what we are. We might gain something we want by stealing it but what we will become is a thief. Do do whatever is necessary but do it for the right end. Meanwhile, as the Book of Ruth tells us, sometimes using sex to get what she wants is exactly what a woman should do.

**The only reason that these fictional women haven't been using sex to get what they want  is because the audience would lose all sympathy for them if they did. Because women are held to an unfair standard, we never see fictional women having affairs. In real life, women in these situations would have most likely had affairs. Even at that, the prime motivation for not dong so in fiction is the desire to continue thinking of herself as a good person. It's not that they don't want the or that they give even a moment's though to the issue of betrayal—they don't have the affair so they can maintain a sense that they have the moral high ground.

Shut the door, have a seat

In rewatching Mad Men episodes on a random basis, I had hoped to force myself to rethink the whole series and not simply rewatch the shows I liked the most. My favourite episodes, after all, are the ones most likely to confirm rather than challenge my views. As a consequence, I felt a slight twinge of regret when the random number generator gave me one of my favourite episodes of the entire series for the second show to watch. It's not only great television, it's Don Draper at his best. What we see here is the stuff of heroism. But there's more! We also see the show making a deeply important point about politics and morality.

Because there are people out there who buy things. People like you and me. And something happened. Something terrible. And the way that they saw themselves ... is gone. And nobody understands that. But you do. And that's very valuable.

The heart of conservatism is an understanding of loss. Conservatives understand that loss is inevitable and that it changes us and not just the circumstances of our lives. From the outside, conservatism can be seen as trying to retain all of the past but it's never that. That's simple traditionalism. Conservatives recognize that we will suffer loss and we will be changed by it and that understanding that is the key to moving forward. And you see that in the rather cryptic statement that Don makes to Peggy when recruiting her to move to the new agency with him.

It happens during an oddly quiet moment of an otherwise fast-paced episode.

The change of self that goes with loss helps explain Don's comment to Betty that "Mourning is just extended self pity," back in season 1. That sticks in a lot of people's craws. It is an overstatement. A more accurate version would be, "Mourning is often only extended self pity." That's certainly what we saw in the way many characters responded to the Kennedy assassination and to the death of Marylin Monroe. Nowadays, we see horrible displays of narcissism in response to every mass shooting.

It's certainly what's in the air today following the shooting of Dallas police officers during a Black Lives Matter protest. We wake up and see that our world has changed and it has changed in ugly ways such that we ourselves have lost something even though we don't know any of the people involved. And the way we saw ourselves ... is gone.

But how do we avoid mere narcissism?

The biggest danger is to feel we are entitled to get back what we lost. That is what drives men in the best neo-noir films. One of the things that makes Don Draper such a good role model (although he is rarely recognized as such) is his willingness to cut his losses. When something is gone, he lets it go. He doesn't come to these recognitions easily. That Betty is a bad wife takes him a long time to face and he can never fully shake the emotions that go with her, although his initial reaction is anger, an anger driven by the feeling that he should be able to control his life, he comes to recognize that he cannot control what happens to him and that she needs to be let go and, much more importantly, he acts on it.

At the same time, he looks to his past for ideals to uphold. Although we call the scenes where Don remembers "flashbacks" they aren't that. They are stories he tells himself, as we all do. The historical accuracy of such stories is less important than the fact that we tell them and keep telling them. It is the retelling of the story that confers value.

The particular story Don tells himself here is important not just for him but for all of us who grew up with distant fathers or with no father at all. Nostalgia is often a feeling for what we never had or only had brief glimpses of rather than for something we had fully and then lost. For many in my generation, that is the relationship we have with our fathers. As boys, we'd watch television shows in which fathers played catch with their sons and wondered what we did wrong because nothing like that ever happened to us. But we loved this distant man anyway and when he was gone we needed some continuity. We couldn't hold on to what we never really had but we needed to find something in him to carry on. Don does that this episode and its beautiful and good.

Okay, now for some disillusionment for those who think the series is historically accurate. Conrad Hilton did not hold the kinds of beliefs that the character with his name does in the series. But that's okay because he acts like a father figure for Don. There is a symmetry between Don finding Conrad and Betty finding Henry. Both are like magical father figures. As typically happens in the series, Don reveals himself to be an adult and Betty reveals herself to be a child. And it is through that interaction that Don evaluates his real father and decides where the continuity and disjunction should be.

You can't live your life reacting to your father. You have to become your own man and you'll nevr do that so long as you are angry at him. Don finds a value in his father that he can treasure. He doesn't become him or even try to.

Television doesn't get any better than this.

Overcoming shame

Shame is a good thing. It's not an unmitigated good thing but it is good. That's worth noting at the start for there is a school of psychology that translates emotions into good and bad and tells us that we should never feel emotions such as shame, resentment, jealousy, envy or hate. These emotions can, the theory goes, only do us harm.

There is some evidence for this view—there is some evidence for most bad theory. Negative emotions really do subject your body to stress and that stress can have negative health effects. But, as evolutionary psychologists remind us, if these emotions didn't also have positive benefits they wouldn't have survived thousands of years of evolution.

Without shame none of us would be able to learn moral behaviour. It is shame in reaction to your parents' disapproval that first taught you that there even is a distinction between right and wrong. Later, it was shame that helped you start developing the ability to make such distinctions and to talk about them with others. Even as adults, fear of shame plays an important role in keeping our behaviour in check.

But it's not all good. We can feel shame when we know we've done nothing wrong. And there are people who try to use shame to control us. Worse, you can internalize shame. Anyone who has ever had their mother say to them, "If you look deep inside yourself you'll realize that what you've done is wrong," will know how powerful internalized shame is.

That motherly argument, by the way, is pure bullshit and it's purely manipulative. Anyone who has a real moral argument to make will make it with factual claims and not by trying to make you feel shame and think that shame is guilt. There is an emotion that goes with guilt but it arises in response to moral claims and not some "looking deep inside". Here, as always, to "look inside" yourself is just a metaphor meaning to think hard about something. You can't actually look inside. You can only look outside at factual claims.

Which brings me to the most important lesson we need to learn if we are going to become mature moral beings: to develop a sense of guilt you have to be a moral realist. You have to believe there are verifiable moral truths that can be checked the same way you can check to see if the plums in the fridge are gone as William Carlos Williams has confessed.

The standards to determine guilt are the same for yourself as they are for anyone else. We can easily imagine that Williams feels no guilt and that his apology is bogus. What would establish his guilt, whether he is willing to feel it or not, is whether he was entitled to eat all the plums or if he should have saved some for his wife. Likewise, we can easily imagine a situation in which he feels guilty even though there is no reason he should not have eaten the plums. Why else would food be in the fridge except to be eaten?

We can't make shame go away. What we can do is train ourselves to feel according to verifiable standards if right and wrong.

Of course, if we live in a culture that increasingly says there are no such standards except in the very limited case where others are hurt, we will not be able to become morally mature. Eventually, there will be some in such a culture who will so deeply resent the feelings of shame that they do have that they will narcissistically insist that others treat their feelings as sacrosanct.

And that is hell we are currently living.

Incidentally, and this is relevant to the Irish experience in North America, there is a kind of pseudo-pride that is really just shame projected outward. Robert Glover describes this strategy that leads to this false pride well in his book No More Mr. Nice Guy,

I call this shame dumping. This unconscious strategy is based on the belief that if the Nice Guy can shift the focus to the other person’s badness, he can slip out of the spotlight. Typical shame dumping techniques include blame, bringing up the past, deflection, and pointing out the other person’s flaws.

This is a pretty common strategy and hardly unique to Irish Catholics descended from famine exiles. But it can, as I say, manifest itself as something that only looks like pride. Pride is often condemned but it is an essential and usually good emotion, however, for it has a tendency to elevate the person feeling it. It is a way of fighting off other people's attempts to shame us. (Those who would have you believe that pride is always bad cover their asses by coming up with different terms, such as "self respect" as if that were something completely different from pride.)

To really understand what is going on here, we need to contrast pseudo-pride with excessive pride. Excessive pride, which can also be called "hubris" or "vanity" tends to lure us into taking chances we should not. We learn that it is unwarranted when we discover we cannot actually perform at the level we convinced ourselves we could. The pseudo-pride that is just shame dumping, however, is the work of someone who does not take chances; it's a defensive strategy driven by shame and fear rather than excessive pride. They believe they will fail and cannot stomach that thought so they bluster. That bluster, however, will crumble at a challenge so they avoid such challenges.

They tend to do this not just to themselves but to others. Some parents, terrified at the thought of failure will undermine their children privately so that they will not try things they might fail at publicly.