Jealousy and the Golden Rule

All my life I've handled jealousy the wrong way. As with many things, I've only begun to figure this out in recent years. As is also the case with many things, my problems with jealousy go back to my upbringing.

My mother had many fine qualities but she was prone to jealousy and would, from time to time, challenge me to prove my devotion to her. I, and my siblings, would be accused of liking our friend's families more than our own. Once, as I have discussed before on this blog, my mother tearfully accused me of not sharing any of her values. None of this strikes me as worthy of any condemnation; it was an ordinary human failing on her part and easily forgotten in favour of the many better memories I have of her.

What does seem worth focusing on his my response for I worked out a strategy for dealing with these outbursts of hers as a child that I maintained as an adult. As Robert Glover has taught me, we continue to use these strategies learned in childhood even though they never worked. My strategy was 1) try to assuage feelings of jealousy and, when that inevitably failed, 2) to hide things I was doing that might provoke these jealous feelings. What I never did was to recognize that feelings of jealous are never legitimate. As a consequence, you can't assuage them. As to hiding what you are doing, besides the whole dishonesty issue, there is no point in even trying because you couldn't possibly guess which actions of yours are going to provoke jealousy in another. Jealousy is always a projection of the inadequacy and self-hatred of the jealous person and has nothing to do with the objects of their jealousy; jealousy tells you a whole lot about the state of mind of the person who has it and nothing about reality.

Control not trust

Many years ago I was in a short-lived relationship with a woman who was intensely jealous. I dealt with it according to the strategy I had worked out as a child. I made my life an open book to her while not expecting the same from her. Indeed, I went so far as to assure her that she need not make the same gestures I was. I just wanted her to feel comfortable. It didn't work.

The punchline to the story is that my jealous girlfriend then cheated on me.

What's obvious to me now, and wasn't then, is that jealousy is about control. It's not a trust issue. It's a desire to control other people's lives felt by people who can't control their own feelings. People who can't control their own feelings live in a chaotic world full of threats. Jealousy is a way of forcing others to validate their chaotic feelings. Again, it's a strategy that doesn't work. It doesn't work because it's their feelings that are the problem and not you. By trying to assuage these feelings I was cooperating in feeding a monster that could never be satisfied. In doing so I was implicitly accepting guilt for blameless behaviour and thereby justifying her jealousy and thereby reinforcing it.

The limitations of the Golden Rule

Her affair(s) (there was one for certain and possibly another) should have been all the proof I needed that my strategy didn't work. My initial response to her jealousy—and to every case of jealousy I had to deal with since then up to a few months ago—was to try empathy and then to treat her as I imagined I would want to be treated if I'd been in her shoes. I'd imagine what I thought it was like to be this jealous person and conclude that what they were doing was sending out a call for help, that they didn't feel secure and loved and therefore couldn't trust. I'd pour on the love and make my life an open book hoping to make her feel like she could trust.

But let's approach the problem from the other end: How could someone prone to jealousy cheat? That seems like craziest thing imaginable. How could someone who didn't feel secure in a relationship destroy the trust of a person who has committed to them? Well, if the issue really was trust, as I had always imagined it was, it wouldn't make any sense. But it isn't about trust—it's about control. Seeing me have friendships with other women inspired feelings in her that she couldn't control. Cheating on me didn't.

From her perspective, she could only imagine that someone would cheat if they could.  Although she never connected the dots, the real reason she was worried I would cheat on her was because she "knew" (on some level) that she was capable of cheating on me. She didn't see that because, in her own eyes, she "wasn't that sort of girl". But that sense of herself was not the result of any commitment to real moral standards but because of shame. Her morality was driven by fear of what other people might think and she thought that was what kept everyone in line. By implication, she believed that people would all cheat if they weren't constantly watched. As always happens with shame-driven morality, that turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. All it took to make it happen was a situation where the odds of her getting caught were so small as to seem nonexistent and away she went.

The problem with the Golden Rule is that it assumes the person making the judgment and the person we are making the judgment about are morally reasonable. Treat others as you would have them treat you? Really? Cause I want others to give me special breaks and not punish me for my failings and expect nothing in return. Any real morality requires a real moral standard and not a state of mind (which is all empathy is) to work.

To try and empathize with a jealous person is to try to imagine what it feels like to be deluded. You can, and should sympathize with the person; for who has not been jealous? But the feelings of jealous are crazy feelings. They deserve no respect. These feelings are their problem to solve, not yours.

"Unconditional" love and testing

Earlier I wrote about how the promise of unconditional love from parents is a hollow one. What are the consequences of this?

One of them is that, because the existence of conditions is denied, neither we nor our parents know where the boundaries actually are. This means that your parents, thinking there are no boundaries, only become aware that something is unacceptable long after the boundaries have been crossed.

It's easier to get a grasp on this if you imagine a hypothetical situation. Imagine you are in your backyard and you have beer in an open cooler.  Someone comes in and you offer them a beer. They finish it and help themselves to a second. Your thinking that was a bit rude but you don't say anything. Then they do it again and you let that slide. Somewhere around the sixth bottle you're thinking that's a bit much. Or they leave and go home and then come back for another beer. You now have to establish a boundary but, because you've let things slide so far, you have to tell the person that something you've had no problems with up until now is too much. There is no non-aggressive way to do this.

Think how that feels to a child. They are going along doing things that no one has corrected them for and then they are not just corrected but pushed back aggressively. That is frightening and confusing. Children start thinking there are a set of moral landmines out there.

In the worst cases, a child will grow up to think that everything is a test. You'll find yourself, I certainly did, resenting every request anyone makes of you because you'll see it as a test you haven't been allowed to prepare for; you'll feel like you've been set up to fail.

I was forced to face this more clearly by going back to school. I'm doing this as an adult because I want to do it. And  yet, every time I faced a test—exam or essay—I started to feel a resentment and that led me to procrastinate. I didn't want to prepare and I didn't want to research. I still felt the resentment that came from being asked to perform without being told what all the expectations are. This is comes from being told that you are loved unconditionally only to find nothing of the sort is true.

And what to do about it? It's not a life or death issue. I've just realized that I have this lingering resentment now but it was there through some 17 or so years of schooling and an entire work career after that. I've done alright despite this but I don't think I've ever performed at my full potential until the last little while.

Part of the cure was to do volunteer work at my church. That enabled me to test myself, to set my own conditions for what was good enough. Ironically, those conditions were not only higher than what others would have set for me, they were much higher. But they were known conditions that were clearly set out. It also helped that they were set out by me.

I started applying the same approach to school work. The first step, something I borrowed from Robert Glover, will initially seem perverse. It was to give myself permission to fail. What that does is to wipe away any sense of being set up to fail because others have not set the conditions out clearly. Then I can ask myself what should be achieved (note the caveat below). Then I can ask what I can reasonably hope to accomplish in the time left to me. Related to this, I can ask how I might do this better next time as one of the things that will inevitably become clear is that I could have done better if I'd started earlier.

Caveat: passive aggressive responses

Any time we find ourselves saying something like, "I'll do it on my own terms," or "I'll do it at my own pace," we are lying. That's one great stinking pile of bullshit we are peddling to others and to ourselves. "My own terms" or "my own pace" is just another way pretending to have no boundaries. A boundary is something you can set out and measure whether you've succeeded. I'm going to deadlift four-hundred-and-fifty pounds means I'm going to take a barbell and plates weighing that much and lift it according to a certain procedure. "My own terms" is just a whiny little child resenting others and planning to fail. That's not only a recipe for failure, it's unkind to others. passive aggressive = malicious consent.

The bias in favour of Elizabeth Siddal

It's very difficult to judge a marriage from outside. It's not impossible. That we can say things such as, "They seemed so happy" or "I never thought they'd make it" tells us that sometimes we can judge correctly. That may seem odd but admitting you were wrong about something is only possible if you later were able to figure out the truth. "I used to think your house was blue" means that I now know it isn't.

And what of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddal? No one I've ever read thinks it was  happy marriage. That's not what's at issue. The question is, how good a wife was Elizabeth Siddal?

Most of us tend to think she was good. DGR himself loved her obsessively. And Siddal worked hard to flourish as an artist and as a person. And her life was tragic. To question her goodness now would be like kicking a puppy. A really cute puppy that everyone loved.

I don't know any different. For years now, I've seen her as an admirable figure. Just this morning though, I was reading a piece called "The bias against Fanny Cornforth" and it got me wondering, could there be an equal bias in favour of Elizabeth Siddal?

This is all hypothesis but here's the case.

The whole thing hinges on Dante Gabriel Rossetti himself. He loved her. Could he have been wrong? Could he have been deluded? Unfortunately, just to ask the question is to answer it. DGR was a man given to romanticizing women, exaggerating their beauty, their intelligence and their character. You might argue that DGR's praise of Siddal was exaggerated in a way that harmed her but you can't reasonable suggest it wasn't exaggerated.

Now, there is nothing unusual about this. A lot of men are capable of attributing all sorts of nonsense to a woman they love. And we are capable of maintaining these delusions in the face of incredible evidence to the contrary.

Don't be binary about this. To be honest about Siddal, we do not have to go to the opposite pole and conclude that she was evil. We just need to be willing to acknowledge that we have blinders on the subject, blinders we have inherited from DGR and generations of writers about him, and look around to see what evidence there might be.

Unconditional love?

The single biggest lie parents tell is that the love they have for their children is unconditional. Every child in the history of the world knows it is a lie because parents noticeably withdraw their love when the child disappoints their parents.

And yet parents continue to retail this lie.

The problem is in the language. "What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object?" The answer is that nothing happens for we are just running words up against one another. In this world, the only test we have of what is "irresistible" is that it has not been resisted so far. And likewise "immovable". Should what has heretofore been an irresistible object run up against what has heretofore been immovable, the end result will be that our understanding of one or the other will change based on what happens.

The universe is not obliged to conform to our reason. It works the other way around.

"Unconditional love" is just another "irresistible" or "unmovable". It stands until it doesn't.

Actually, it's much worse than that. Parents give or withdraw their love as a way of manipulating their children. That sounds horrible but it's just a way of raising children. It only sounds inhumane if you've allowed the impossible standard of "unconditional" to creep in to begin with.  And this love can be, and often is, withdrawn for trivial reasons. A child embarrasses a parent in front of guests and the parent becomes cold and distant.

"But, "perhaps you insist, "the parent still loves the child even though they are unhappy with them." You think the child understands that? For that matter, do you think the parent reasons, "I am unhappy with little Joey but I still love him"? Does that seem even remotely plausible?

As an adult, you have to differentiate yourself from your parents and the question of "love" is a good place to start. This is where we can begin to see the parent as a human being and not the god-like figure they start off being for us.

Trust issues

My father used to tell a story about a psychiatrist who put his own son on top of a mantelpiece and encouraged him to jump into his waiting arms. When the kid duly jumped, the father let him go crashing to the ground. The psychiatrist then explained to horrified onlookers, "That will teach him never to trust anyone."

Whatever the merits of the humour in the story, trust issues almost always go back to our childhood.

The way things should work is this: your parents love you and support you. They teach you morality by (mostly) example that is then reinforced by precept. Starting in your mid teens, they let you develop more and more independence and then let go.

It never works out that way. I once had heated argument with a  Catholic woman who was interfering in her daughter's life. She insisted to me that she had to do so because it was her duty as a mother to make sure her children didn't go to hell. Her daughter was in her late thirties at the time.

Sometimes it isn't anybody's fault. I knew a young woman 40 years ago now whose mother died when she was 16. It was a horrible death and the poor girl was left with a mother-sized hole in her life. I know a guy whose father died a similarly horrible death from cancer years before I was born. Both struggled all their lives to form close human relationships. They see-sawed between being too trusting and too suspicious. The thing is, they both had some understanding that the problems began with them. They could see that their behaviours were destroying their chances to bond with other people but they wouldn't stop.

I say "wouldn't" instead of "couldn't" because there was something willful about it. They felt others should accommodate their special needs. They had trust issues because foundational people in their lives had been taken away from them, this brutal disruption had left them unable to build trusting relationships with others, it wasn't their fault this had happened and. therefore, other people needed to take their trust issues more seriously. Not everyone, you understand, only people who wanted to get close to them.

This is, easy to say, the exact opposite of what should be done. Trust issues are damaging to us not because other people fail to take them seriously but because we take them too seriously. When other people ask, usually with actions and not in with words, to get over ourselves, we quietly scream inside, "Can't you see, this happened to me and now I'm owed!" To which the obvious rejoinder is, "By whom exactly?"

I've done that. Like most people, I've had my heart broken, my trust betrayed and then I felt entitled to special treatment. Yes, I'm probably capable of picking up and carrying on but I deserve some special love. As I say above, I think I learned this pattern of behaviour in childhood from parents who probably learned it in their childhoods.

I've been fixing the problem bit by bit but there is more to do.

The high cost of authenticity

Surface acting is when front line service employees, the ones who interact directly with customers, have to appear cheerful and happy even when they’re not feeling it. This kind of faking is hard work—sociologists call it “emotional labor”—and research shows that it’s often experienced as stressful. It’s psychologically and even physically draining; it can lead to lowered motivation and engagement with work, and ultimately to job burnout. 

Having to act in a way that’s at odds with how one really feels—eight hours a day, five days a week (or longer)—violates the human need for a sense of authenticity. We all want to feel that we’re the same person on the outside as we are on the inside, and when we can’t achieve that congruence, we feel alienated and depersonalized.

Faking it can be hard, depending on what you're faking. Most people can fake an orgasm when they're with someone they love and they don't want to hurt their feelings but just try faking lust for someone who repulses you. 

The explanation given above strikes me as false. I don't think many people have an issue with acting in a way that is at odds with how they really feel. When it is in our interest to conceal our feelings, we have no trouble doing it and everyone has an interest in hiding some of their feelings. It's a skill we all pick up pretty early in life and that no sane person willingly gives up.

If anything, I would argue that a need for authenticity is something people need to be trained to feel. It's only in a society where people are trained to feel entitled to authenticity that it becomes some sort of imposition to expect employees to be cheerful on the job. For anyone over fifty, what is weird about this situation is not that companies are asking employees to be cheerful on the job but that it even has to be said. 

The thing is, you have control over your emotions. They don't just happen to you like bird shit dropping on your head. It's just basic human courtesy to make an effort to be cheerful for others. It's not expected at all times—if you get really bad news, you can let it show—but, otherwise, putting people through your bad moods is what inconsiderate jerks do. And the more casual the relationship you have with a person, the more inconsiderate it is to subject them to your bad mood.

Authenticity isn't a real virtue but the simulacrum of one. The real virtue is moral integrity.

"The Protestant influence on modern ideas about religion has made sincerity and good intentions defining features of good religiosity"

That's from this article on religion in the movies of the Coen brothers.

It's an issue that has interested me ever since my first girlfriend criticized members of her church who had memorized the creed and recited it by rote. She thought it meant nothing unless they read it and thought about the meaning of each phrase as they said it. She was an Anglican girl of a low, or Protestant, bent. She'd been a very pious girl who taught Sunday school but had already begun to drift away when I met her. She had a copy of Foxe's Book of Martyrs on her bedside table.

The fact that I know what was on her bedside table is not as incriminating as it might seem. She had very little in the way of parental supervision, her mother had died and she and her father had become somewhat estranged in the aftermath following a very difficult death. But even left alone to socialize in any room of her house, with no one else under the roof, we were shockingly innocent.

We were, however, headed in different directions. She was ion her way to losing her faith and I, a cradle Catholic but not terribly convinced, was on my way to finding mine.

That experience is not, in itself, enough to cast doubt on the value of sincerity in religion. It takes a lot more. That said, I think the evidence is there to do it.

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.

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.

When and why should we care for other people's feelings? Or, for that matter, our own feelings?

Elinor and Marianne Dashwood both have cultivated feelings. That is to say, they have put a lot of effort into their feelings. They both believe their feelings should be taken seriously and the proof is that both have taken their own feelings seriously, albeit it in different ways. We see this most clearly in an odd section well into the novel when Marianne becomes very ill and Willoughby shows up to see her. He does not speak to her but he does meet with Elinor. It's very important to Elinor that Willoughby actually loves Marianne. Later, when she has recovered physically, it will be terribly important to Marianne that John Willoughby really loved her, that he, in fact, still loves her even though he has married another. And Elinor, sensing this, makes certain that she does know.

This novel, to a degree we never see again in Austen, takes the view that the validation of feelings is terribly important. People have behaved badly but all is okay if, in the end, feelings can be validated. John Willoughby really loved Marianne even though he tossed her over in order to get financial security. He ended up having to do that because he's been a first class shit in seducing, impregnating and abandoning Colonel Brandon's ward Eliza.

Here's a thought: another way for the novel to end would have been for Willoughby to go to his aunt, admit that he behaved abominably towards Eliza and say that he is willing to make all right now by marrying Eliza. That doesn't happen for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is that Willoughby is a shit and he'd never do anything so honourable. And he gets away with being a  shit because he's highly attractive to women. Marianne's vindication, to the very limited degree she has one, is that Willoughby, while married to wealth, isn't in love with his wife.

Which sounds rather like the mirror image of her own situation doesn't it?

In the meantime, Marianne has been rather worthless as a sister. She has been rebuking Elinor for what she perceives as Elinor's lack of feeling. When she finds out that Elinor was actually suffering terribly because of her own frustrations in love, frustrations that Marianne was utterly oblivious about, she apologizes. We need to note that all Marianne's fine feelings did not make her any more perceptive.

We think of feelings as a kind of sensitivity. Someone sees something, hears something or touches something and they are moved. Feelings are supposed to be connected to something on this model. But Marianne's feelings are remarkably disconnected. Her feelings for Willoughby come even though she has no understanding of his character. Her feelings for her sister are absolutely useless in helping her figure out what Elinor is going through. Her feelings have nothing to do with her judgment. Or, as Austen would put it, her sensibilities have nothing to do with her sense.

That's puzzling for us because the word "sense" seems to be related to the senses. It seems like a purely mental thing. For that matter, so could judgment.  We think of these things as being "in our heads". We believe that you have to have sense or good judgment and then you act on it. On this model, it's possible to conceive of someone who has sense, who makes very good judgments, and yet never acts on them. And that's kind of odd for how could anyone know that this person has good sense if the only place that sense existed was in her head.

A thought experiment

Let's imagine that Elinor is actually a sneaky little bitch who is only out for her own happiness. She has very little real power. Her mother is a ditz, the family has no money or influence and her sister is younger and hotter than she is. She is, for all intents, a helpless mouse who can only achieve happiness if others go along with her plans. Any one of a number of people could crush her dreams simply by not playing along.

Worse, her only chance for happiness is a longshot. She and Edward have connected. She senses that and she is probably correct. Why do we know this? Well, we do. This is not science requiring specialized knowledge and skills. Everyone has had the experience of meeting someone and feeling that a real connection has been made. We don't know this with 100 percent certainty, so we wait until there have been a number of conversations. Elinor has done this. There have been a series of conversations and she now knows that Edward feels something for her and she for him.

Unfortunately, this is not science requiring specialized knowledge and skills. Other people have noticed too. (And this ought to be a reminder for us that whatever sense, sensibility, feeling and judgment are, they aren't things that happen inside our heads but things that show up in our behaviour for anyone to see provided they are willing to pay attention.) One of the people who has noticed is her ditzy mother and the other is the evil Fanny Dashwood. Elinor has no power in her relations with these people. She is a helpless mouse.

We might also note that one person who has not noticed is her sister Marianne who only finds out by being told  by her mother. It's interesting that Marianne, who supposedly loves Elinor, cannot even be bothered to pay enough attention to notice what this sister she loves is feeling. She's more aware of her own (negative) feelings towards Edward than of Elinor's.

And Edward has not declared his love. He keeps showing interest in her but he never comes out and says it. There is no actual promise, no commitment. She hopes him to be a good man but she doesn't know. Her sense/judgments manifests itself in her reticence. She holds back. She will not risk the same sort of disaster that Marianne courts and finds.

And then she finds out that Edward, like Willoughby, has a prior attachment. Unlike Willoughby, he's not a complete shit about it. He has a real sense of responsibility towards Lucy Steele. He doesn't love her anymore but he made a promise and he's not going to break it. He doesn't know that Lucy is after him only for the money he will come into. No one could know and it's entirely possible that Lucy herself is unaware and her feelings or sensibilities towards him aren't going to help if she doesn't understand own motivations.

Elinor sees a shot at happiness but it's an outside chance. All she can do at this point is to limit the damage that others with more power—Marianne, her ditzy mother, Fanny Dashwood and Lucy Steele—can do to her hopes and the only tool she has available to her is her ability to manipulate these people through her understanding of THEIR feelings. It's not her ability to feel anything herself that works for her but rather her ability to sense what others are feeling and to direct, assuage and soothe these feelings.

We might get distracted by her behaviour towards Colonel Brandon here. He seems a genuinely nice guy who acts for the benefit of others and Elinor really seems to care about his feelings. On the other hand, he turns out to be incredibly useful to her. He sets Edward up with the living that makes her happiness with him possible. He also takes Marianne off her hands by marrying her and thereby freeing Elinor to concentrate on her own happiness.

And so too we might say of her being surprisingly understanding towards Willoughby when he shows up during her sister's illness. For it is essential that she can tell Marianne that her feelings for Willoughby were valid because he really did love her. Otherwise, Marianne might have crumbled completely and Elinor would have been stuck with a helpless basket case on her hands instead of w woman willing to make a (probably loveless) match with Colonel Brandon so that Elinor could stop worrying about her.

Okay, maybe the sneaky little bitch in this scenario is actually Jane Austen plotting her novel to achieve the desired end and not Elinor who is simply hoping for the best and merely has to wait until her creator gets all her ducks lined up for her. In the end, though, I think the moral conclusion we should draw is the same: we shouldn't care about other people's feelings. We might notice them and respect them because not this person will be more likely to cooperate with us but the feelings themselves have no moral significance for us. If someone loves me, I will see that in their actions and not their feelings. If someone consistently fails to deliver, they don't love me no matter how intense their feelings for me may seem. Those feelings don't, on their own, mean anything at all.

They can have tremendous consequences and that is why we have to be very careful about how we cultivate them. We should not just let them grow. And we should not trample on the feelings of others, even when those others have shown that they don't particularly care for our own feelings. But the moral significance of feelings is zero. They are just something we need to manage in life.

This is particularly true in love. There are feelings that go with love but to love someone is to deliver and to keep delivering. If you don't do that, then you don't really love.

Shame that manifests as anger

This is a pretty commonplace phenomenon but, as sometimes is the case, is really quite strange if you think about it. I saw an example of it a while ago in someone who momentarily seemed intensely angry but, I later realized, was actually feeling intense shame. I suspect everyone has done this at some time; I know I have.

But ... why?

I think it's a habit more than something specific to the situation. Googling around, I see that puts me at odds with professional opinion which tends to the view that deep analysis is the way to figure it out. My guess is that it starts in childhood when adults, especially our parents, shame us into doing things. We start to respond to feelings of shame with resentment. It's resentment and not anger because we can't act on our resentment.

But one day we lash out in anger and, to our surprise, it works. The adult is fully aware that they are manipulating might shame and they cave when we explode.

The problem is that we never learn how to process shame and guilt properly. We have to teach ourselves this skill as adults. We do things we feel badly about but know no way to achieve reconciliation. As a consequence, the feeling of shame is always there below the surface. When something happens to remind us, it feels like a rude invasion of our privacy and the anger flashes up because that is way we have trained ourselves to feel and to act. We have no notion. All we think we're feeling is shame but our face shows repressed rage to everyone else in the room.

Nothing good can come of this but, as I say, we have no idea how to fix it. We think we are faced with a series of individual problems that we cannot fix. But it's not really those things but our general habit of responding to bad feelings about things we have done.

I think that's it.

If the central character isn't an anti hero then he's a ...?

The answer is that he's a hero. I'm going to argue that Don Draper is a hero and that we cannot understand him or appreciate his appeal if we don't recognize that. My big challenge in convincing anyone of this is going to be that a lot of people believe that he is an anti hero.

Don Draper is the apotheosis of the antihero. He’s a selfish, self-destructive womanizing drunk who stole another man’s identity, but the character’s elegance and eloquence — coupled with Hamm’s sleek good looks and subtle performance — made it all OK, and typically quite interesting to watch.

On the flip side we have Draper's primary creator Matt Weiner who insists he isn't.

If you watch the video of Matt Weiner at that link you'll come away wondering what exactly an anti hero is. The definition that comes up first when you Google "anti hero" is, "a central character in a story, movie, or drama who lacks conventional heroic attributes". That's not much help for all heroes have flaws and some of them have a whole lot of flaws such that there are lots of heroes who at least start of lacking conventional heroic attributes. If Achilles isn't a hero then no one is and he spends most of the Iliad sulking in his tent.

What makes a hero a hero is action. He's the guy you can depend on to act effectively when it really matters. That's what makes Achilles a hero despite all his negative qualities and the same is true of Don Draper. Often times, a story will open with someone who seems deeply unconvincing as a hero but whom we find heroic by the end.

Okay, but what is an anti hero then? I think an anti hero is someone whom we we continue to resist accepting as a hero even after the story is over.

But that isn't helping my case much. Lots of people, starting with Robert Rorke quoted above, resist very strongly the notion that Draper is credible as a hero and advance all sorts of reasons for that. In fact, there are no shortage of people who feel a need to dismiss the character completely. He becomes just a peg to hang social criticism on, and mostly male bashing at that.

What I want you to consider is what Weiner doesn't quite get around to saying: that Don Draper is a hero! That he's a man worth emulating.

This requires an esoteric reading of the series. That is to say, it requires us to see a meaning that is in the series that is not merely hidden, that isn't just a "deeper meaning" but is deliberately hidden by writing that appears to say the opposite while laying clues that make it possible to dig out a different meaning. Not da Vinci Code style with all sorts of mysterious symbols and secret codes. That sort of thing can happen, of course, but most esoteric writing is more mundane than that.

Teddy the Greek

To get a grasp on it, imagine that you meet a child who has a villain—a sports figure, a pop star or fictional character. This child asks you if you too fear and dislike their nemesis. Only a jerk would crush the child's worldview but you actually quite admire the character. So you find something affirming to say. Okay, but let's further complicate the problem. The child has a hot older sibling and you want this hot older sibling to know that you're cool; that you don't have any illusions. You need to find a way to say something that will feel genuine and sincere to the child but will be just enough off that the older sibling that they get it.

It's my contention that Mad Men did this all the time. It fed the childish illusions that many want to believe about who the heroes and villains of the 1960s were while making mistakes that more thoughtful people would notice and begin to wonder about. One of these illusions is central to the way we tend to think about the period and that is that any positive aspects we might see in the 1960s and the 1950s before are obliterated by the racism and sexism of the period. Nostalgia, for modern liberals is an illegitimate and distorting emotion to be resisted. This is especially true of any nostalgia for the period before the sexual revolution, the antiwar and civil rights movement and feminism. A show like Mad Men challenges that simply by exiting.

The show's writers face the problem squarely in the final episode of the first season.

There is the rare occasion where the public can be engaged a level beyond flash. If they have a sentimental bond with the product. My first job. I was in house at a fur company with this old pro copywriter, Greek, named Teddy. Teddy told me the most idea in advertising is 'new". Creates an itch. You simply put your product in there as a kind of calamine lotion.  

He also talked about a deeper bond with the product, "nostalgia". It's delicate. But potent. 

Teddy told that , in Greek, nostalgia literally means, "the pain from an old would."

Now, the interesting thing here is that Don reverses the way our era treats these things. For our era, nostalgia is the easy sell. It creates the itch and then you give the people La belle epoque, American Graffiti, Animal House, Happy Days, The Waltons or some other nostalgic entertainment as a sort of calamine lotion and everyone is happy. Everyone except the professor teaching popular culture at the local university. He/she wants you to know that there were problems with that era that should trouble us because she/he doesn't want anyone admiring any of the values of that era. The professor wants you to embrace "new".

And Don Draper represents the past. He never changes. He always embraces a set of old values. They aren't mainstream values of the period to be certain but they are old. They could be loosely described as 'the hobo code". And he creates a nostalgia for a certain kind of man; a man who is secretive, strong and independent; a man who can cut his losses and move on, not without pain but he can and will do it whenever necessary.

That Don represents this challenge is no problem. He can be dismissed. He is easy to hate. The problem is that he is also easy to love and millions did and do.

The hint that there might be something esoteric going on is in the last line where Don gives a definition of nostalgia. It's not just wrong, it's very wrong. "Nostalgia" uses Greek components but it was coined by A German speaker to describe a condition where people were incapacitated by a desire to return home. The Greek words combined to make it literally mean "aching to go home". As conceived by Johannes Hofer, nostalgia means the exact opposite of what Draper says it means: it means a desire to escape a new wound into a safer past.

But this is where it gets interesting. Right from the beginning, nostalgia has been very compelling. Hofer's definition, echoed by the many who criticize it today, makes nostalgia into a childish emotion, an escapist fantasy. Don Draper gives us a more interesting option: that nostalgia isn't about wanting to escape but a way of confronting loss. And the show appears to back this up by giving us to aspects of the man: Don who deals with situations masterfully and Dick who runs. Those who see Don as an anti hero take that "inner Dick" as the real man. Those of us who admire him take the teleological view, that the man Don wants to become is the real man.

If we take this second option, we'll see the way events spin out in the rest of the story different. The common interpretation of the ending of that first season was that Don did such a good job of selling the men from Kodak that he sold himself too and returned home hoping to find the very thing he'd sold others on.

It's a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone ... it takes us to a place where we ache to go again ... back home again, a place where we know we are loved.

But "a twinge in your heart more powerful than memory alone" isn't real so much as it is religious. "Our hearts are restless Lord until they rest in thee."

Donald Draper did not, as Robert Rorke and many others claim, steal another man's identity. He used his dog tags to get out of the army and he kept up that deception to break ties with his past as Dick Whitman but he does not adapt the identity of the other man. Think of the man who pretends to a famous actor to get sex or who pretends to be someone else so as to apply for a credit card and then leave this other person stuck with the bill. That is what "stealing another man's identity" is. What Donald Draper does is more akin to giving a false name so as not to be arrested.

You may say, "So what, it's still illegal" and that it most certainly is. But it's still important to get a correct grasp on what is happening. Donald Draper is not a assuming another man's identity, he's a man running away from a shameful past. He's running away from "death". We might well say he is running away from sin.

The first man

Why does Adam commit suicide? "Because he finds his brother whom he thought was dead but his brother rejects him." Okay, but why would that dictate suicide? Adam has seen the loss of his mother and his stepfather. He's had to make it on his own and he has managed. Why would he kill himself? It doesn't make sense.

If I'm right, it doesn't make sense because it isn't supposed to make sense.

Adam, at least according to a flashback and I think we should treat these as mythology not history, was named so by his mother "after the first man". If you know your Saint Paul, however, you'll know that there is a second Adam who follows the first Adam and yet existed before him. I'll grant you that's an odd bit of mythology for a Jew such as Matt Weiner to seize upon and yet I think he does just that. Unlike a believer like myself, this mythology is just like any other mythology for Weiner. Adam is important, not as a real character, but for what he represents to Donald Draper, a past he flees but also a loss.

That's all for now.

Virtue signalling (2)

I do not know whether the term virtue signalling will catch on or not. I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, it describes something human beings actually do. On the other hand, it was quickly appropriated by the perpetual outrage community as a cheap and easy put down.

The key fact is this: virtue signalling is a normal and unavoidable thing that all human beings do. It's not evil. You, me and everybody else we know will, under most circumstances, express the values the we believe the people we are with want to hear. It's a normal, and even productive, thing to do.

A friend of mine is pregnant with her second child. She noticed that her first child has started to grunt when he bends over. He does this because mummy, heavy with child, grunts when she bends over. That's virtue signalling. He's expressing a value, bending over is hard, because his mother expresses that value. In her case, it's actually true. In his case, it's not. He does it because he, like all human beings, is hardwired to learn by imitating others and because his very life depends on his mother.

That is true of us too. Our very life depends on the community around us. If you find yourself stuck with people you don't know well for an extended period of time, you will begin to mirror their behaviours and attitudes.

There are two lessons to be drawn from this. The most commonplace one is the that it takes courage to speak up for your values. Most of us have had the experience of finding ourselves in the presence of someone who brashly says things we deeply oppose but found ourselves unable to respond. We just sat there while things we found hateful were said. But there is a deeper and more important lesson here and that is that our expressed values are often at odds with our real values.

Think of the example I give above in a slightly different light. Imagine you are in a group and someone says things you deeply oppose and you do not object at first but soon notice that the others in the group do. And now you join in. Or maybe you wait a little longer to see if a few others also join and then you join in. Perhaps you wait until it's obvious that the person is rejected and reviled by the rest of the group and then you join in (perhaps "pile on" would be a better term by that point).

We've all done these things. What this tells us is that fitting in is a value we treasure deeply.

To return to the previous example, let's consider a further hypothetical: if the group started to be angry with the person who had expressed offensive opinions, at what point would we pull back? We hope that it would be sometime before someone got a rope to lynch them with but who knows what we are capable of.

We live in a deontological culture. That is to say, we live in a world where morality is largely defined in terms of duty defined by rules. Be tolerant. Don't use violence. Recycle. Don't have sex with teenagers. Be faithful to your spouse. Don't text while driving. And many more. Each of these rules comes accompanied with a justification in terms of duty. "There is a garbage crisis and it is your duty to reduce landfill waste by recycling."

This is a very compelling morality. It's clearly expressed and relatively easy to understand. Compared to utilitarianism, Do what will give the greatest happiness to the largest number," or virtue ethics, "Act in a  way to train yourself to be a better human being, " there is clarity and ease of application to be found in, "There is a garbage crisis and it is your duty to reduce landfill waste by recycling." You know what to do and you can easily figure out if you've done it. It's also liberating in one sense—once you've done what the rules tell you to be your duty, you can stop. "I've recycled, I can get a beer and watch television." That's nothing to sneer at, although we all do sneer at it.

But, at the same time that we accept deontology, we also reject it because we cannot and do not fully internalize these values. My real attitude toward recycling is something like: "I will do this up to a point but if I just have to get the place cleaned up because guests are arriving or because I've been getting depressed at the kitchen being so messy and I know I'll feel better if I can clean it up quickly then those plastic containers are going straight into the garbage and I don't think that will do any real harm so long as I don't do it too often but, at the same time, I don't want everyone thinking this is okay so I will continue to hold the hard line when expressing my attitudes towards people who don't recycle."

It's not that we have some alternative set of values that we really follow. It's more that we are willing to make a whole lot of exceptions that we aren't honest with ourselves or others about. And that is why we fear and love the expression "virtue signalling". We fear it because we know it can be justly applied to what we do. We love it because it can be justly applied to what other people do and that makes it a useful tool for making others talk and behave in a predictable fashion.

What do we do about this? I'll try and come back to it.

Virtue signalling (1)

From On Heroes and Hero Worship and the Heroic in Society, 1840

By Thomas Carlyle

It is well said, in every sense, that a man’s religion is the chief fact with regard to him. A man’s, or a nation of men’s. 

By religion I do not mean here the church-creed which he professes, the articles of faith which he will sign and, in words or otherwise, assert; not this wholly, in many cases not this at all. We see men of all kinds of professed creeds attain to almost all degrees of worth or worthlessness under each or any of them. This is not what I call religion, this profession and assertion; which is often only a profession and assertion from the outworks of the man, from the mere argumentative region of him, if even so deep as that. 

But the thing a man does practically believe (and this is often enough without asserting it even to himself, much less to others); the thing a man does practically lay to heart, and know for certain, concerning his vital relations to this mysterious Universe, and his duty and destiny there, that is in all cases the primary thing for him, and creatively determines all the rest. That is his religion; or, it may be, his mere skepticism and no-religion: the manner it is in which he feels himself to be spiritually related to the Unseen World or No-World; and I say, if you tell me what that is, you tell me to a very great extent what the man is, what the kind of things he will do is. 

Of a man or of a nation we inquire, therefore, first of all, What religion they had? Was it Heathenism,—plurality of gods, mere sensuous representation of this Mystery of Life, and for chief recognized element therein Physical Force? Was it Christianism; faith in an Invisible, not as real only, but as the only reality; Time, through every meanest moment of it, resting on Eternity; Pagan empire of Force displaced by a nobler supremacy, that of Holiness? Was it Skepticism, uncertainty and inquiry whether there was an Unseen World, any Mystery of Life except a mad one;—doubt as to all this, or perhaps unbelief and flat denial? 

Answering of this question is giving us the soul of the history of the man or nation. The thoughts they had were the parents of the actions they did; their feelings were parents of their thoughts: it was the unseen and spiritual in them that determined the outward and actual;—their religion, as I say, was the great fact about them.

Praxis and theory

Melzer and, I assume, Leo Strauss, argue that esoteric writing arises from a perceived conflict between theory and praxis. The ancients believed that there was always such a conflict because "the many" would never be able to appreciate philosophy. The moderns, beginning with the Enlightenment leaders, believed that there was a temporary gap between theory and praxis but, once praxis had been reformed according to theory, it would disappear. On this modern account, esoteric writing is only a temporary thing until social practices had been reformed.

If that Enlightenment notion puts the stink of Auschwitz in your nose, go to the head of the class.

The ancient view also has its problems. Commenting on the Seventh Letter attributed to Plato, Melzer writes,

The passage begins, for example, with the classic Platonic view that philosophic knowledge is the supreme good of life and that helping others to acquire it, where possible, an act of highest beneficence.

There is something about this reading of Plato that has more in common with religious mysticism than with the kind of philosophy I like to do. I, like Wittgenstein, see philosophy as something we do on a temporary basis in response to puzzles that arise and we do it not as an end in itself but in order to be able to go back to leading our lives. That is not to say, as some have misread Wittgenstein, that all philosophical puzzles can be made to go away but rather that we should not be bewitched by the language. The central mysteries of life will always be there and one of the best things about doing philosophy in a Wittgensteinian manner is that we can face these mysteries as mysteries much as a good Catholic doesn't claim to comprehend the Trinity. We will recognize mysteries through ritualistic behaviour rather than try to dissolve them through analysis.

This approach puts praxis ahead of theory. To put it in ordinary language, it's more important to live well than to be able to say what living well is. And that reverses the order of esoteric thinking: we will now be esoteric in order to protect our praxis from theory, our own theory as well as that of others.

Encountering another as a person definitely does not mean "dissolving" that person, taking him or her apart psychologically and thus seizing power over the other, but seeing the other in his or her difference, even strangeness. Whoever wants to truly recognize another as a person must expect to encounter the unexpected and be led into a new world of which one previously had no idea—a world whose strangeness fascinates but also frightens.

That's Gerhard Lohfink and the primary example he has in mind is Jesus who needs to be protected from our ego which would reduce him to a concept. But the same is true of us in our encounter with social groups beginning with our own families. Others will always want to reduce us to their idea of what we should be. And this would lead to something like the reverse of what Arthur Melzer and Leo Strauss have in mind when they speak of esoteric writing: it would be a way of appearing to go along with theory so as to be able to protect a praxis that is at odds with that theory.

This will be more than what is implied by the common expression "lip service" for we will want not only to provide lip service but also to communicate with others who share our values not as expressed in some theory but as actually lived.

Psychological reactance

An excerpt from a NYT article about the appeal of Donald Trump:

Haidt describes reactance as

the feeling you get when people try to stop you from doing something you’ve been doing, and you perceive that they have no right or justification for stopping you. So you redouble your efforts and do it even more, just to show that you don’t accept their domination. Men in particular are concerned to show that they do not accept domination.

The theory, first developed in 1966 by Jack W. Brehm in “A Theory of Psychological Reactance,” is directly relevant to the 2016 election, according to Haidt. Here is Brehm’s original language:

Psychological reactance is an aversive affective reaction in response to regulations or impositions that impinge on freedom and autonomy. This reaction is especially common when individuals feel obliged to adopt a particular opinion or engage in a specific behavior. Specifically, a perceived diminution in freedom ignites an emotional state, called psychological reactance, that elicits behaviors intended to restore this autonomy.

I thought of something I wrote myself a short while ago:

If your life experience is anything like mine, one of the things you've had to face is sudden aggression from other people and yourself about things that make no sense. A conversation about subjects that it seems like no one should have any personal investment suddenly becomes very heated. Without knowing how you got there, you find yourself arguing about things that shouldn't matter. Part of you thinks you could just give in, as this is something that shouldn't matter, and part of you thinks you shouldn't give in as this is something that shouldn't matter so you are rightfully suspicious of this other person pushing so hard to make you give in on an issue that shouldn't matter.

Family does that to you.

I've been rereading Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing by Arthur Melzer. He lists a number of reasons why someone might engage in esoteric writing. All these are either to avoid evil or to attain some good. On the avoidance end:

• We might write esoterically to protect ourselves from condemnation by the larger society.
• We might write esoterically to protect the larger society from truths it cannot bear.

We might also write esoterically:

• As a form of propaganda aimed at similarly minded people.
• As a way of teaching for the reader will be obliged to figure things out for themselves.

I think psychological reactance raises another possibility: that we might write, indeed live, esoterically in order to gain a private sphere for ourselves. We could get this, of course, simply by locking ourselves in our rooms alone for long periods of time. Indeed, just about every teen does this when puberty comes along and they are suddenly subject to needs and desires that would cause extreme shame if they were not kept private. Ultimately, however, this privacy will be empty. We need a private sphere that includes other people, a world we can share with others, that also excludes people who "try to stop you from doing something you’ve been doing, and you perceive that they have no right or justification for stopping you".

The word "perceive" carries a lot of weight here. You might simply be wrong in your perception and you can never completely shake the feeling of doubt that comes with that. Combine that with a family member who has authority because they are a parent, or who is self righteous in their anger and is threatening you with exclusion, or, and this is gruelling, is both of those things, and you will crack. Thus the need to carve out a sphere where you can express thoughts esoterically that others might suppress.

The good news is that everyone feels this need and you will find others playing the same game and it, like most games, is more fun to play with others. And, because all games have an implied teleology, that teleology will become the basis of your personal mythology. You will have a notion not of who you are, which is what your family bombards you with, but of who you should be trying to become.

That creates tensions within the family. Seeing you develop independence as a consequence of having this teleology, some family members will try and reign you in. Mothers are particularly prone to this, which is why I advocate that every man and woman intentionally blow up their relationship with their mother at some point. There is another danger, however, and that is enablers: these are family members who set themselves up as the unofficial police for the family mythology. They do this largely because of fears and insecurities of their own but that doesn't mean they won't make you hurt.

Another subject about which there will be more to say.

Idolatory

While shopping I heard a pop song in which a woman sung about how happy she was to have a man who loved her, "Just the way I am". And it struck that it's odd that so many songs, so many books, so many movies take it for granted that an extraordinary person will come along and love us just as we are.

Why would they? Wouldn't you expect an extraordinary person to hold out for someone extraordinary too?

We think it's okay to hope for this and what we hope we expect and what we expect we feel entitled to.

The song is by Ingrid Michaelson (amazing thing the internet). She shows expresses her gratitude for this love by offering to do all sorts of things for him. What she most definitely not do, the whole point of songs like this, is want to be the sort of person someone else would love. I know I go on about narcissism a lot but it's because of stuff like this.

Why wouldn't you want to be a better version of yourself? Why would anyone think that anyone would want someone who wanted to be loved for being just the way they are?

"You don't share any of my values!"

About a decade ago, a couple I know got a dog. Both the man and woman were of strong feminist views and regarded their relationship as being one between equals and they attempted to share power in all matters equally. They believed that and, as far as they could tell, their friends believed it too. The dog messed everything up. She didn't know anything about ideology or feminism. She decided which of the two was the strong authority figure in her life based on what she observed in their behaviour. She picked the man. 

It was rather awkward. Everyone could see it and, while professing not to care, the woman talked about it a lot.

The woman set about fixing the problem by competing with her husband for their dog's respect. She tried to win that respect by showing the dog that she really understood its needs and wants. That had the reverse of the desired effect. The man, who didn't want a dog in the first place, saw the dog as just another thing in his life that had to be dealt with. The dog loved both of them in that unreserved way dogs do, but she developed a deep respect for and trust in the man that she never had for the woman. That this was so was unmistakeable; the dog's behaviour was very different when the man was not around.

I put it to you that this true story can also serve as a parable about why we fail or succeed in living values and, therefore, whether we pass them along or not.

The quote in the subject heading of this post is something my mother said to me when I was in my early twenties. I was quite taken aback by it for two reasons: 1) she was very upset by it (she was crying when she said it) and 2) because it seemed to me to be patently false. If you had asked me which parent had most influenced me up until the moment my mother tearfully challenged me, I would have unhesitatingly said my mother because, as was typical of my generation, she was the one who spent the most time with me as a child. I was raised by parents who came from a  generation that took it as absolutely normal that the mother raised the children and the father, at most, was an occasional authority figure. But she was absolutely right. I had mostly rejected her values without even realizing that I had.

Oddly enough, that conversation only served to further that rejection. I'd never really thought about it before then. I loved my mother and I didn't like to think about things that made for differences between us. When I was alone, I tried very hard to come up with a list of values that I shared with her but all I could come up with were values that are nearly universal, such as, for instance, the belief that cruelty is wrong. Although my mother obviously played a huge role in my life, for which I am very grateful, her remark was right on the money: I don't share her values.

Where do my values come from then? A good portion came from my father. My Godfather, Clifford Warner, was a huge influence. My first girlfriend, Ellen Broadhead, had an influence you probably couldn't over-state. Two fathers of  later girlfriends—Art Mantell and Ian Webster—were very important in making me who I am (one of the ironies of my life is that both are far more important to me, when seen in retrospect, than their daughters are). Four professors—John Minhinnick. Andrew Lugg and Hilliard Aronovitch, who taught me philosophy, and Linda Sanborn who taught me Romantic poetry—shaped a lot of my values. Add to this some people I never met but whose works I've read obsessively over the years: John Dos Passos, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Joseph Conrad, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Evelyn Waugh and Benedict XVI.

When I look at that list, the thing that really strikes me is that most people on it had little or no interest in passing their values on to me. Ellen didn't pass on hers so much as she forced me to become responsible for myself in a way that no one else in my life had done. (She was the Joey Potter to my Pacey Witter.) Others either never knew me or didn't think about me as someone to pass anything along to. Most of them rarely, if ever, talked about their values. Benedict XVI, for example, has a lot to say about values but he is actually spectacularly reticent about his own values. He never tells you what they are. He doesn't even set out to show you what they are. You have to dig hard to find them (He is very different from the current pope in this regard.) He passes them along without meaning to. That was true of everyone on that list.

The first rule of values is, you do not talk about your values

The second rule is, you DO NOT talk about your values. The third rules of values is, they are not YOUR values for you cannot own values. (If you try to own your values, they end up owning you.) The fourth rule of values is that values are ways of doing things and NOT ways of becoming a certain kind of person. (Values aren't virtues.)

The last of those is counter-intuitive because it seems to be indisputably true that our values make us. A man's character is his destiny. That seems to open up a direct route. I think I could become the person I want to be (or the person that others would love) by adopting certain values. Someone might also think that raising their children properly is a matter of getting them to accept a set of values and, therefore, spend a lot of time discussing their values with them. As near as I can tell, that is almost universally the strategy that most "good liberal" parents now take. It was certainly a big part of my mother's approach to parenting.

A child who can repeat back value statements about tolerance, love and forgiveness has learned something. But have they learned very much? Is being able to talk this way useful? (In my early twenties, I could describe the values my mother wanted me to have perfectly and, up until she challenged me, I believed that I "had" those values. The reason she challenged me was that she had noticed that I increasingly did not live those values.)

Here's a question that might appear on a psychological test:

"I think it is important to be a tolerant and forgiving person." 

1. strongly agree 
2. somewhat agree 
3. neither agree nor disagree 
4. somewhat disagree 
5. strongly disagree

I put it to you that the most important words in that statement are "to be". I'd further put it that once you recognize that "to be" are the most important words, "neither agree nor disagree" is the only rational choice. Anything else is narcissism.

All of the people who strongly influenced my values were like the man in the dog story I started with. They didn't have passing along their values as a goal. It mattered to me, and mattered a lot, that I agreed with their values but they never asked me to. They didn't tell me or try to show me what their values were. They just lived them. The amount of time I spent with them mattered relatively little. I didn't need to be with them at all for the impact of their values could be felt at second hand (most of what I learned from the fathers of my girlfriends came that way). What mattered was that those values were embodied in their behaviour in ways that led me to respect and trust them.

Transgression

... we’ve come a long way since the days when Marilyn Manson and Andres Serrano (the artist behind Piss Christ) could make careers out of transgression for transgression’s sake. Breaking taboos for shock value is relativism; breaking taboos as a means rather than an end is not, which gives Lady Gaga and Seth MacFarlane an alibi. 

That's from an essay published 4 years ago. The larger point of the essay was that the era of relativism was over. Leaving that issue aside for a moment, I'd like to focus on the more immediate issue of transgression. I think there's a false dichotomy in the argument  Helen Rittelmeyer gives us here. I don't think that anyone, anywhere ever transgressed for transgression's sake.

A few years ago, a friend of mine something that looked very much like transgression for transgression's sake. One day, when his inlaws were visiting, his mother-in-law, asked what music was playing. Upon being told by her daughter it was Respighi's Ancient Airs and Dances, she remarked that she thought it was beautiful. At just that moment, my friend got up, abruptly stopped the music and replaced it with Jimi Hendrix and, with that move, ruined everyone's day, including his own.

Did he have a reason for doing this? I don't think he could have given you one if you'd asked him. Both CDs—the Respighi and the Hendrix—were his and I know that he liked the Respighi more than the Hendrix. He didn't dislike his mother-in-law. Not yet. A few years more of such shenanigans and his wife left him and he now feels bitter feelings towards everyone.

The person he didn't like was himself.  He hated himself for what he'd become. He hadn't meant to be. He'd just wanted to live with this woman. He agreed to marriage because that was what she wanted. And then he agreed to lots of other things—a car, a house, children. He'd accustomed himself to the car and the house and he loved his children and, if it had been up to him alone, he'd still be married today. But he hated what he'd become.

He'd wanted to be something else. Somewhere along the line, he'd lost control of that. He still isn't the guy he wanted to be. The divorce didn't give him the freedom to become what he'd wanted to be. It was probably too late. For all he knew, it may never have been possible—the whole thing may have been a crazy dream.

When a man walks into a room, he brings his whole life with him. He has a million reasons for being anywhere. Just ask him. If you listen, he'll tell you how he got there. How he forgot where he was going. And then he woke up. If you listen he'll tell you about the time he thought he was an angel and dreamt of being perfect. and then he'll smile with wisdom, content that he realized the world isn't perfect. We're flawed because we want so much more.

That's Don Draper in an episode of Mad Men called "The Summer Man". But it could be any man or woman because my friend's story is really everyone's story and thus the brilliance of Don Draper. My friend, however, was not content; he did not smile with wisdom. Instead, he transgressed. He did something stupid that he knew was stupid. And it produced results he did not like.

I suspect that, in the unlikely case we were willing to be honest with ourselves, we'd all admit that we sometimes do what my friend did. Most of us have the good sense not to do it in front of people who will be offended. We go along with being the person we didn't want to become with the people who rely on us to keep being that person. But we make jokes or express opinions when they're not around that we know would hurt their feelings if they only knew. We "act out" our transgression in ways that are safe. We may even do it by proxy, watching Mad Men and joining others in criticizing Don Draper while secretly wishing we had the nerve to do what he does sometimes.

Relativism has nothing to do with it. When you're angry, your anger is as real as the clothes you wear, as real as the car you drive and as real as the ground you walk on. Alright you say, but the standards governing what you do about that anger are objective. Are they really? What objective standard says that Greg is justified in leaving his girlfriend for cheating on him? Tyler forgave his girlfriend for the same thing and they're still happy together ten years later!

You emotions are real. You really have them and you really have to deal with them. A big part of what you do about them will depend on whether you feel they are justified. Greg may decide that the one thing that his girlfriend has done is so big that it alone justifies dumping her.  Tyler didn't look so much at the particular instance that spurred his anger as they will look at the bigger picture and he saw a single, out-of-character failure. Which is more justified?

But, either way, it's not about relativism. It's really about emotivism. That's the view that moral views express emotional attitudes. You may think that amounts to relativism and you'd be in good company. Most philosophy professors would agree with you. And that would matter except that very little moral thinking takes place in philosophy classes. Most moral argument takes place in the real world and the person who bases their moral decisions on what they are feeling is basing it on something very real. They would even say, they base them on something authentic. They're almost certainly wrong about this but the Marianne Dashwoods of the world don't know this. They go on day after day resenting that they cannot say or do what they feel is right. Sometimes this resentment spills out in acts of transgression that can appear pointless to an outsider but they always have a point.

Helen Rittelmeyer's mistake was to think that because some (most?) transgression is more about what it's against than what it is for, that the transgression was an end in itself. It isn't. Even stupid transgression that couldn't cause anything but pointless destruction is undertaken for a reason.

"This is what the truth feels like"

There is a new album out by that name. Says Wikipedia,

Inspired by the end of her marriage and the roller coaster of emotions she experienced during the time, which also included a new romantic relationship, Stefani returned to feel inspired and started writing new and meaningful songs.

You can get the picture. Her marriage broke up, she felt hurt and now she has started a new relationship and she wants to feel vindicated. Well, who hasn't felt that.

I was feeling that myself today. Someone who once caused me pain caused other people pain this morning. When I found out about it, I felt good. It's odd that when you believe that someone is a nasty little shit, they can actually make you feel better by confirming your belief. But would anyone say that feeling is "what truth feels like"?

Only if you thought vindication and truth were identical.

There is no particular feeling that goes with truth.

It says something, and nothing good, about our culture that truth and feeling have become linked.