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This is a wonderful piece. Amber Tamblyn claims ownership of the right of women to punish men socially for what they’ve done to women, and the right of women to feel no obligation to agree to those men’s redemption. It’s probably normal that for men this will be hard to really grasp: why should genuinely contrite people, some of whose offenses are clearly lesser than others’, face a sort of shunning? Tamblyn, in fact, says pretty explicitly that men’s confusion about this is not surprising, as she describes men fretting in text messages with each other about a loss of “normalcy,” about a need for “comfort and security.” That need is a common thing for women; it is an uncommon thing for men.
But she and the other woman she mentions are right: the price for what these men did is they disappear from their scene and their pop culture careers, for however long women choose. It’s the least that can happen. Some of these actions merit jail time. Some of them cost so many women their jobs, their voices, their sense of self. Disappearing? These men got off soft.
And here’s where I want to throw a curveball. I want to talk about Catholicism, because I think growing up Catholic (and paying attention in school, and thinking about and caring about what I was learning) makes this absolute power over redemption—if and when—easier to grasp for me than it otherwise might be.
The Catholic sacrament of reconciliation emerges from Jesus saying to his apostles that if they forgive sins, so does God. But just as importantly, he says that if they hold sins bound, so does God. In Catholic dogma, this power is passed down from the apostles to the priesthood. A thing a lot of Catholics don't wrestle with is when they walk into a confessional, the priest can tell them to get lost. But it’s right there in what Jesus said to them: they can hold the sins bound.
The necessary, broader implication of this is: the penitent has no control over the forgiveness of their sins. They can't make deals with God. They can't ask extra hard or prove themselves extra reformed. They must show repentance and they must ask. These are necessary but not sufficient acts. But they have no control over what comes next. There are no sufficient acts. Penitents must cede all power over their redemption.
A plea for reconciliation is pure faith that God's grace will be extended to them. But do not skip over the word “faith” there, because that’s important part. It is faith. It is not hope. Hopes can be denied, and when they are, the person whose hope is denied can take their toys and go home. Find new people or places or things. This is not true of faith. When faith is denied, you must continue to live in faith. Otherwise it isn't faith.
And that's where this Catholic dogma becomes most relevant to "what next?" for abusive men. The apologies have been varying degrees of honest and dishonest, good(ish) and bad. But ultimately, there's no good enough apology to merit redemption. That is a thing that doesn't exist. You never, ever merit redemption for your sins. You can want it. You can possibly even need it. But you cannot deserve it.
If the apologies are sincere, if the desire to be forgiven is sincere, the men in question can have no expectation that they will see any benefit from apologizing, reforming, and working proactively to make the world better for women. If they want to be redeemed, and women reject them anyway, then they have two choices. Choice 1: They can turn away, they can lash out, they can become depressed hermits full of self-loathing. If they do this one, then they were never really contrite, and it is good they have not been redeemed. Choice 2: They can continue to work proactively for women, continue to focus on reforming themselves and those around them, continue apologizing when someone asks for one, and never hold it against any woman who does not forgive them. If they do this, the contrition is real. And perhaps, if they are lucky, they will someday be redeemed. That's faith.
Perhaps they will be redeemed. But they can have no demand of it. And the women who say they are not ready for the redemption of these men? Nobody who believes these men are redeemable can hold that against them. To hold it against them is to say that the men have power over their redemption, that the men can do enough to deserve it. But wronging someone is not part of a math problem. There is no bargain or self-abasement that can set the ledger equal.
And even if such a thing existed, for men to premise the ongoing work of improving themselves on satisfaction for their demand to be redeemed is not to improve themselves at all. That is simply doing what they need to do to get what they want, regardless of whether someone else wants to give it to them. Which is, in the broadest sense, exactly what they did wrong in the first place.
This is the one thing that feels wrong in Tamblyn’s column: “Redemption must be preceded by atonement. It is earned, not offered.” Redemption must be preceded by atonement, yes. But I think what comes next is the opposite of what she says. It is offered. It is only offered. It is not, cannot be earned. There is no way to force the offer to come sooner. There are no boxes to check that enable you to get the offer you want. The offer is at the sole discretion of the person who offers. And so, in this case, the offer is women’s to give to men, if and when they choose, up to and including never. These sins are held bound, for exactly as long as women choose to hold them bound. And the rest of us (men, mostly) need to start getting comfortable with that.
“I don’t deserve this, to die like this. I was building a house!”
“Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.”
TRUMP: "Hillary Clinton would rather provide a job to a refugee from overseas than to give that job to unemployed African-American youth."
— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur)
19 Aug 2016
We have a Republican candidate saying—explicitly, which is kind of amazing when you think about it—that black people could get jobs if only someone wasn’t passing them off to this other, less-deserving group.
If you’re a middle-aged black person, this will not sound alien to you at all. It’s not because anyone ever said it to you, though. It’s because they said it about you.
As has been well documented, the South’s low union density (relative to the North’s) is no accident. It was the result of a particular management strategy. For almost a century, any time white workers talked about unionizing, their management threatened to fire them and bring in black workers. They didn’t hide it. They said it openly, and it helped to foster resentment among white workers toward black workers. And with such a high black population in the South, it was a credible threat.
White worker resentment toward black workers, of course, kept them from being resentful toward their white bosses. Their pay sucked, their benefits sucked, and the reason it sucked? Because there was even poorer, cheaper labor available to replace them any time they made too much noise. It didn’t make them love their bosses, but it made them hate that poorer, cheaper labor.
Put a pin in that for a second and let’s talk about another point.
Twelve years ago is the first time I remember conservatives insisting that Jews were about to become a Republican voting block. As I understand it, though, that’s a line that’s been around for decades. And yet it still hasn’t happened.
Prior to twelve years ago, Asians were a staunch Republican voting block. That was thoroughly swept away over the course of the next two elections.
What happened? Why are these groups, who by stereotype and by research measure up to some pretty powerful conservative ideals, so overwhelmingly liberal? And why are these groups, whose interests don’t seem to have much to do with each other, insistently following the same path?
All three of these groups—Jews, Asians, African Americans—are reliable liberal voting blocks, and I would submit that they are for, from at least one angle, the exact same reason. They know what it is to be the scapegoat of history. When powerful leaders tell their less powerful followers that a third, even less powerful group is the main threat to their welfare, these demographics know what it is to be that third group. And they don’t forget.
Cultural memory is a strong and important thing. Ironically enough, everything Thomas Frank expressed exasperation about with liberals in What’s the Matter with Kansas?—in which he examined the idea that working class white voters ignored their own self-interest to support politicians who made strong cultural connections with them—is happening to conservatives who don’t understand why they can’t make inroads with these other demographics. Jews and Asians are wealthier than average in this country. Their economic self-interest, at least in its most direct sense, is well-served by low taxes and less regulation. Why don’t they vote for Republicans?
Maybe it’s that when you are part of a former out-group, your solidarity with the current out-group is strong. Don’t tell a black person that someone else is the threat to take their jobs and expect it to carry the day. Don’t tell a Jew that some other group is the demon hell-bent on undermining the nation. Don’t tell an Asian that immigrants from somewhere else are threatening their safety. They’ve heard those lines before. They remember, and their parents told them. And they’re not going to forget just because it might keep their tax rate down.
If you want to know why there’s a limit to racist demagoguery, there it is. Sooner or later, too many groups have ticked off the same box: “Those white men hate us.” They’re no longer interested in what you’re selling. And so the circle winds tighter and tighter. Good luck with that.
People silently struggle from all kinds of terrible things. They suffer from depression, ambition, substance abuse, and pretension. They suffer from family tragedy, Ivy-League educations, and self-loathing. They suffer from failing marriages, physical pain, and publishing. The good thing about politeness is that you can treat these people exactly the same. And then wait to see what happens. You don’t have to have an opinion. You don’t need to make a judgment.
A brief review of a show I haven’t even finished yet
I’m halfway through the first (only?) season of the Norwegian TV show Occupied. I have Several Thoughts About It! Short version: watch it, don’t get impatient, and insist on seeing the characters rather than the nations as the dramatis personae.
Most media reviews I’ve seen of the show focus on fear of Putin as a motivator for its creation, and on the real-life Russian ambassador's angry response to the show. And, like, if that was my job, I'd probably be mad, too. But focusing on that totally misses what makes the show brilliant. Russia is simply the only country that *could* play the part demanded by the show's premise in the present. To see the show as a take on "Russia, malevolent actor in Europe" is to miss the real focus: the people in Norway.
I word it that way—the people in Norway—because it largely doesn't even matter that they're Norwegian. Much of what is noteworthy also affects the behavior of the character of the Russian ambassador (what a funny thing, that the real person occupying that position is so angry while they fictional character is so eminently reasonable, given the charge in front of her). What matters, rather, is that they are an occupied people (and then there are the Russians, whose Russianness is unimportant but whose place as occupiers is extraordinarily important). The prime minster, the reporter, the security professional, the restaurateur: they are all people reacting to the reality of being occupied by a foreign power.
What is so astonishing about the show is not that it’s a high-budget show with explosions and stunts and fast pacing and huge scope. It’s not that it builds itself on a totally plausible reason for a Green Party taking power. It’s not the EU energy crisis that is sure to be more and more common in the real world. It’s not the real-world implications of a truly energy-independent United States (spoiler: they are likely to be not good for other, smaller western countries). And it’s not the world’s collective, devious reaction to a major energy supplier shifting its focus away from fossil fuels.
What is astonishing is that, faced with an occupation, everyone in the show—the politicians, both Russian and Norwegian; the law enforcement officers, journalists, and other public servants of various kinds; the people just trying to make it day to day—does exactly the reasonable human thing. Think about how rarely that is portrayed. There are no super heroes. There are no politicians who completely abandon their principles, but there also are no politicians who are able to avoid compromising in the face of enormous curveballs. There are no saints and there are no monsters in law enforcement. Nobody is trying to create a Great Man Theory-compliant storyline. They’re simply asking the question “What if?” and letting people act like people, faced with their own personal incentives and backgrounds.
But even that is not the reason to watch it. The reason to watch it is quite simply that people being people in the face of terrifying circumstances is a terrifying proposition. People do things you think are wrong. People you like do unlikable things. Yet when you consider the alternative—what they would have done that would have made them more heroic, for instance—you quickly realize they or their loved ones would be dead. Their agendas would be undermined. They would fail their own goals. They make the choices they make because making it to tomorrow is sometimes the most important human thing, whether for yourself or for a grand idea.
And that is why the show is great: because it turns out most large, difficult, interconnected systems turn on their own momentum. Our actions within such systems are limited. We do the best we can. And we just fucking hope that’s good enough. Occupied gets that, and it doesn’t shy away from the implications. It ain’t a happy place, but it is the best realpolitik fictional show because realpolitik ain’t a happy place, either.
We were at a party when we heard. The space was one of those places with no name on the door, just a bouncer outside. We walked inside and the place was mostly empty. There were vintage pinball machines and arcade video games, air hockey and skee ball. We got drinks and played the games for a bit. The party filled up, dozens of people shouting and playing and drinking. Raised voices bounced off the concrete walls, and we had to continually repeat ourselves as every word was first claimed by the high ceiling. A glum DJ stood behind a laptop but his music was buried by the noise. A couple guys swam up to us through the crowd; one of them told us what happened and the other corroborated it with his phone. We all looked at each other, stunned. One of us, just the night before, had opened the show with a cover of “Life On Mars,” and we’d talked about what an amazing song it is, still. We couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe it. I was surprised at how much it was affecting me. We all agreed we had to get out of there. We took two separate cars back to the hotel, making plans via text on the way. A couple of us remembered a karaoke place we’d been to in years past, right by where we were staying, in Japantown. We wanted to sing the songs. We walked in and were the only people there. We asked the bartender if there was a book of songs to choose from; she told us no, we were to write down the artist and song title on a little whiteboard. There was a song playing already, for no one, the words highlighting themselves in front of the indecipherable drama of the video. One of us wrote down the names of half a dozen tracks, then was told the bar’s library didn’t have any of those songs. How could that be? How was that even possible? We left, demoralized. One of us, the one who’d played “Life On Mars” the night before, had his guitar with him. He took it out of the case and there, in the deserted Japantown street, by a dormant fountain, its ornate tiers filled with standing water, he began playing “Five Years.” I don’t know if, like me, no one else knew all the words, or if it just seemed right to let him sing it alone, but none of us joined in. A few people passed by. No one looked at us. He finished the song and we thanked him. He put his guitar back in the case and we walked back to the hotel.
Small, alone, in the middle of a powerful city that would just as soon go on without you, doing your own thing, finding your own crowd who will say thank you for what you are doing, performing what you came to perform, entertaining to get by, to be doing anything at all that feels positive.
The conversation is a comfort, because underneath it all they know that at least they occupy a place, the older and the younger, a place they each fill as closely and completely as Isolde's body fills the ancient cat-worn dip in the old armchair by the wall. Underneath it all they know that it is more a thing of necessary equilibrium than any sort of failed facsimile. Each sister claims not a mirror copy but a rough-edged ill-formed twisted half of their parents' attention and command.
There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.
Li-Young Lee, from “From Blossoms” in Rose (via the-final-sentence)
The illuminating power of talking to a brick wall about guns
Earlier today I had a weird Twitter conversation with some people. It was both illuminating and not. The not will be obvious from the next two paragraphs.
I pointed to a Vox article that carried some straightforward statistics about the clear, strong correlation between gun prevalence and gun deaths. The replies were two-fold. 1) Vox is not a real news source (ouch, sorry Vox). This was weird, as while the article may have been from Vox, the stats in question were compiled by researchers elsewhere, as clearly credited by Vox.
But the longer follow-on point was 2) the stats included suicides, which the respondents said was dishonest. I suggested that talking about gun deaths should include all gun deaths, and they then accused me of being ghoulish and twisting mental health issues to fit an anti-gun narrative. I replied that both guns and lack of mental health care access might contribute to gun suicides, and also that large public health problems like gun deaths may have more than one contributing factor. I said that something could be both a gun access problem and a mental health treatment access problem. This just led to more acrimony about my ghoulishness. I allowed as to how I didn't intend to disgust anyone and so I would depart the conversation. They claimed victory, something about being unable to admit the data didn’t back me up. At no point did any data they inserted into the conversation suggest anything contra what I had said about guns and gun deaths, but c’est la vie. I wasn't going to convince them anyway; no point in haggling over a “winner” in an abbreviated Twitter argument.
Yeah, not obviously illuminating in any way. And yet...
Here’s why I thought it was illuminating: the terms of that debate were bizarre. Like, I talked about the relationship between gun prevalence and gun deaths, and they pushed it to whether I was trivializing the despair of the suicidal. There are two different things happening here: first, derailing—a common tactic of pulling the debate off to a side issue to avoid having it—and second, caring about things in entirely different ways.
The derailing I can't do anything about; people who participate regularly on the pro-gun side of gun arguments are usually experts at it, and they'd probably say similar about those on my side. My hunch is that both sides think they're being intellectually honest and the other side is full of mendacious pawns in someone else’s game, and that our own argumentative choices reflect what we see as honesty. Most rhetorical tricks we learn tend to slip into our conception of good argument after a while, and while I am absolutely certain my arguments were in good faith and theirs were not, I am at least gracious enough to acknowledge that should they feel the same about theirs, there’d be no proving it to each other.
But what I can say is this: if they really think they were being honest, then they've gotten themselves in a place where talking about the method of doing anything is off limits. (Yes, anything, not just suicide; more on that in a second.) The reason that's illuminating is that it means the conversation cannot happen productively. Ever. Never ever ever. If it's not okay to talk about how guns contribute to more violence (up to and including suicide) when there are also separate non-gun root issues underlying why people commit the violence, then explaining how much more rapid and deadly the violence is with guns is a total non-argument to them. They flat out don’t care. For them, the violence itself is less important than identifying the evil or troubled or misguided—depending on the violent incident in question—people who commit the violence. It's about stopping the people who kill, not about stopping the killing.
And that, in turn, means that people who kill to stop someone else from killing are never to be questioned, because they are not killers, as such; they are simply the proverbial good guys with the guns. Rightly or wrongly, what I am getting at is that this way of thinking allows you to divide the world between the people who must be stopped and everyone else, and focus more on being on the right side of that coin, rather than on reducing the number of people who die from guns, when such preventative actions are entirely possible.
I would submit that this is a broader worldview issue than just guns. I have had conversations with charitable but anti-social safety net people who talk about wanting to make their own choices about charitable giving. They're largely indifferent to the reality that government can scale to ever-larger problems while private charities are inherently limited. They want the choice! They place great value in the moral agency of the giver. They will talk about the efficiency of private charity—and it’s true that they are more efficient than government, but they are never as good at handling problems at truly massive scale. But what they want, far more than efficiency, is the freedom to choose which social ills they will put their money into.
As for me, I am not very concerned with that; I want to stop the social ill, regardless of what intermediary does it or how they go about it (within reason). I am willing to accept that the government may not be as efficient as some charities, secure in the knowledge that if it declares by law that it will take an action in response to an incident of a problem, it will take that action, and it won’t make judgments on the people it is helping or on the people contributing to the help. If it means I don't get any moral credit for helping to solve that ill, that's okay with me.
So consider this broadly: if one side of these arguments is interested in stopping bad things from happening, and the other is interested in being on the right side of support-the-good and defeat-the-bad, then why bother arguing with them? Even if everyone argues in good faith, it won’t matter! I can talk about reducing deaths or poverty or malnutrition or pain or marginalization or fraud or crime or educational failure. They’ll respond by saying it’s the people who kill or the people who don’t work hard or the people who eat badly or the people who don’t fight for their rights or the people who commit crimes or the people who are truant.
What kind of arguments will these even be? If they won’t accept the mechanism or outcome of an issue as a measure of how society is handling the issue, and I won’t accept how disturbed bad actors are (or how virtuous good actors are) as a measure of how society is handing an issue, what are we even arguing about?
I guess my point is this: trying to convince an ideologically opposed person you are right is nearly always ineffective. Trying to reach common ground probably is, too; the reason Congress did so well for so long was backdoor dealmaking that involved a lot of petty favors, not meetings of great minds. No, you’re not going to bring them around. You basically just have to beat them. And you have to keep beating them over and over. Because we don’t just disagree. We live on worlds with entirely different topographies.
It’s not a new point, but it’s one worth making explicitly.
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