Prithee then: what is the punishment?
What are you allowed to think in America? Of that, what are you then allowed to express?
“Well, don’t be ridiculous,” you say, “this is America! We have freedom of speech. These concerns are for other places, backwards ones. For poor wretches living under authoritarian regimes, driven by fear and reprisal. We’re better than that.”
The New Religion
I have written before about modeling the Trumpian conservative movement as a new religion, one whose beliefs are based upon a certain cross-section of conservative interests. They might not all hold significance to every adherent, but some surely apply, and adherence — faith — is the overriding concern.
Faith has many purposes, and we are not so foolhardy as to attempt some complete deconstruction thereof today. But two points can likely be claimed without risking much controversy: that faith is a kind of trust, and that (as a result, it could be argued), faith is often cyclical, tautological.
What makes faith unique as a species of trust is that, in most cases, it cannot be verified. Faith demands blind trust — that is the price of admission. In return, the rewards are plentiful: one buys some measure of freedom from the tricky, arresting issues of metaphysics, morality, and in many cases of death — and one gains membership to a community of fellow faithful: like-minded companions with which to journey the highs and lows of life.
Often, the deeper one’s faith — the greater the trust one is willing to give over blindly — the greater these rewards. It is, of course, a personal choice, and how the contemporary faithful each come to their own terms with the increasingly troubling or contradictory elements of their (sometimes) immutable historical texts is a testament to the beauty of faith. But now there are other humans in the equation, at every scale of life, and this is an introduction that scarcely goes well; after all, now faith can be questioned, and it can then be exploited.
We have reached the furthest limits of our scope here, but the bottom line is that when faith is perverted, weaponized, when it is recontextualized in a hostile environment, it is often turned into a game of orthodoxy, and of performance. Overt adherence becomes a measuring stick which when failed calls into question one’s devotion, one’s goodness: based on little more than the presumption of internal thoughts and beliefs, one’s belonging can be called into question. At some point, to some degree, it becomes necessary to believe, or more pressingly to display belief, in order to belong.
These are among the powerful fundamental forces underlying Trumpian conservatism — notice how no matter how numerous or how serious our President’s transgressions blossom, his approval rating never seems to fall below 35%, an absolute floor. Here, then, in statistical form, are the adherents, the faithful. Those willing to put up with every extreme ideal, every harebrained scheme, every discriminatory policy statement by reason of faith true or false, of faith by trust or by fear, because the cost otherwise is membership.
And here, then, dearest liberal crusader, is the face of your enemy. It’s two out of every five people in America. What would you have of them, how would you suggest they be dealt with in the urgent construction of your liberal utopia?
Liberal Utopia
It felt so close, didn’t it? We went from Bush to Obama, we made waves in LGBTQ rights and acceptance, lookee here we’re gonna have our first female President! Finally that moral arc of history is closing in on something after-all. But then ring sour notes from nowhere, trouble in paradise just fwoop one day it’s here, what’s going on in Ferguson? oh what’s that my enlightened self isn’t so aware as I — we elected who now?
The promised land crumbled at our fingertips’ wild reach. Right? Maybe if we just went back, reworked a thing here or there, we could set things right, close that last little gap, pull those troublesome final weeds.
Reality interjects. Ferguson was new only in white consciousness, it is a tale as old and as pervasive as America itself. The final few weeds are not final at all; they are, on a good day, forty percent or more of our fellow Americans. Not too long ago, I sat in the midst of a conversation between folk who were legitimately surprised that there were neofascists here in beautiful liberal Western Washington. I pressed: that’s surprising? Yes, came the response — consider just where we’re talking about now, those people can’t exist here. More than once, I have listened to entire lines of reasoning predicated on the presumption that virtually everyone at a company like Google must be liberal.
But even well-received this reality can’t erase that tangible feeling, that sensation of rushing headlong at the penumbra of utopia, it was right! there! and so extreme measures are enacted. Surely things can be set right again. We won’t put up with it anymore, justice needs to arrive, it must be immediate and it must be absolute, we’ll do whatever it takes to make it happen. Rhetoric intensifies, sides entrench, friends and family are defriended, there is castigation and belittlement and righteousness hurled in every direction.
Cleansing movements are rarely well-disciplined, as it turns out. Nearly as many words are exchanged within ranks as without, because the truth is that not one of us understands every facet of injustice. To do so is simply impossible, even for the longest-suffering, the best listeners, and the most empathetic of us — there is too much of it, too many incarnations and disparate faces. And so those knives are brandished in every direction, any transgression against any party by any individual is publicly punished, becomes immediately a denial of their goodness, of their belonging to utopia.
Prophylaxis: “oh no, perhaps it’s true, perhaps we aren’t good people after all, but we know we’re good people, we’ll figure it out — for now, we’ll just have to try really hard, make sure we belong.” And so goodness is performed, and performed repeatedly, so that others can see that yes, the right things are being said, called out, the correct daggers are being thrown, that a place in utopia is deserved, reserved.
I saw a heavily-shared meme image float about Facebook the other day. From memory, it went something like this: “democracy is a potluck, yes, and everyone brings a dish, and we all share, and not everybody will like everything. But if somebody brings a plate of shit and puts it on the table, we don’t smile and accept it, we ask them to take that plate of shit and to leave.”
Okay. Fine, then. So where do they go instead?
The Decentralization of the In-group
It used to be that misfits, outcasts, and pariahs simply disappeared — either into the great unknown, never to be heard from again, or into themselves, their own otherness buried as deep as they could manage, outwardly or in. But as the ubiquity of media broadened and its costs declined, such folk began to find their voices, to reach more of their own and discover kinship. Punk rock and hip-hop, gay and lesbian communities, these and many more countercultures are all gifts we reaped from this process. Many, many years and movements later otherness inverted, became a feeling so many related to that it became celebrated, exalted.
And then the Internet. What a rush! A beautiful promised land! Instant, universal connection for next to no cost. Look at those early Usenet communities, see how wonderfully those people found others who loved what they did, felt as they did, how this incredible new medium enabled these people to help each other, to form communities, genuine human connection.
And as the medium improved and the tools became more accessible, that effect only intensified — yet more-marginalized people, interests, and ideas becoming the nuclei of yet smaller, more specialized communities. There is a small but doggedly active subreddit for everything under the sun. Nowadays that connection is always with us, right there in our pockets; those communities are always engaged, an increasingly dominant slice of each of our hours.
And then a funny thing happens. That heartwarming story, the one of human connection, of the marginalized finding their kin, begins to encompass ideas and people we hadn’t imagined in that rosy picture. Nothing is too nerdy, too obscure, too discriminated against to find a voice, a community on the web, but then too nothing is too reprehensible, too vile. Persecution feels the same regardless of objective morality (whatever that might be), after all, and so we flee the knives being hurled and oh — here they feel as I do, aah now I can relax, here are my people.
Humans have a natural in-group/out-group mentality baked into our psychology. This isn’t fancy new behavioural science, it’s not speculative — it’s a well-known and extensively studied phenomenon. And it’s not a passive effect, either — we have a strong need to find our in-group, to belong. But this mechanism, like so many aspects of human psychology, evolved in and adapted for conditions nothing like the world we live in today; our in-group was supposed to be our family, our tribe, those few in physical proximity. And so it takes a remarkably small number of people to trigger this effect, typically fewer than a hundred.
And then (and this is important): all humans are fundamentally good-hearted, decent folk — at least towards their in-group. That’s part of the point of the in-group/out-group effect, to ensure the mutual survival of small social groups. And so all the shit-bringers, the castigated, excoriated, those fleeing the hurled abrasions of the righteous, they congregate in these like-minded closed communities, and they feel not just the kinship of shared idealism, they associate that idealism, that community, with the warm touch of human care and compassion, with human goodness. These are good people that I hang out with, they are kind to me, they are decent folk where nobody else is.
That, then, is where they go. Elsewhere, but only virtually. To more of their own, to find community, compassion, and at the end of the process to confirm their own beliefs yet more strongly. Nothing is accomplished by the absolutist potluck party host besides the performance of activism — indeed, it is worse than nothing, it is the hypersegregation of belief, the driving of wedges into ideological fissures until they grow into unnavigable gulfs.
And concentrated like-minded groups, miniature echo chambers, rarely lead to enlightened thought. Humans condition themselves into all sorts of strange behaviours and beliefs from the smallest seeds. Just as eugenics spur the onset of genetic defects and disease, so too does groupthink, does hivethought, does the forced cloistering and pruning of rhetorical breadth. Beliefs and ideas need to be challenged, those challenges need to be continually recognized and understood in order not to lose their foundation, to not drift elsewhere. Consider, for instance, how we’ve managed to twist American freedom into the spectre of unamericanism, into you-must-stand-for-the-anthem-you-ungratef —
In fact, let’s set aside entirely the proof-by-extremism we have just undertaken, neglect even to properly induct that hundred-large lemma up to the full forty percent of America, and let us instead consider an entire half of the population.
Toxic Masculinity
To a casual observer, perhaps the most astonishing thing about typical male behaviour is just how much of it is rooted in the need not to appear feminine. It’s always there, often lurking subconsciously in the shadows, but sometimes it’s a headline thought, a blaring concern to be considered and heeded. It’s there in the things men choose as interests and to enjoy, but more importantly what they allergically shun. It’s there in what they wear, but more importantly in what they won’t. It’s there when they avoid any appearance of emotionality, when they attempt physical contact, when they stand as hilariously stoic and aloof as they can at the (amazing omg) Haim concert their girlfriend dragged them to.
It is again outside our scope here to argue out the whole of this phenomenon. But it is relevant to consider, in juxtaposition with our points previously-made, the narrative arc and its eventual destination. It’s a simple cause-and-effect in the earliest years, the way our culture separates the sexes, teaches them different things, teaches both “ick boys!” and “gross girls!” and lets the playground games run their course. But we let them, because it’s innocent fun, so we think, and anyway it’ll keep them out of trouble if they stay away from each other.
But unlike tag, this game never ends. It grows. Reinforced by popular media and older generations, boys keep playing this game as they become teenagers, then young adults. They circle each other’s orbits, sometimes explicitly goading each other when they aren’t being manly enough, but more often accidentally, as in the usage of common idioms (“be a man,” “grow a pair,” “that takes balls”), always upholding this culture of performative masculinity, one seated in the insecurity and fear of being seen as feminine, and ergo as not being a man. Of not belonging.
Because of all of society’s stark definitions, the dichotomy of female and male, of masculine and feminine, may be the sharpest and most universal of all. To this day, there is no socially acceptable space between the two polar extremes, at least in mainstream Western society — and certainly not in America. To be cast out of the male in-group is not to then be received by the female one, it is to be alien to both. It is to have no kinship at all. And so even for those who don’t gravitate naturally toward the poles, the safer path is to play along, blend in with the other sheep, particularly when in their company, disregard the damage caused as societal.
But then it keeps growing, and disfiguring, it’s just too prevalent, given too much mental time conscious, and sub-, and un-, until it becomes a fixture, an immutable, unchallenged, unthinking framework governing the whole of one’s behaviour. It grows violent, it catalyses natural human emotions with a nasty bent, in ways unforeseen at that innocent playground seeding.
And then when that unconscious behavior is actually challenged, it can no longer be self-assessed accurately, in its whole, too much of it has become invisible, and so defense mechanisms and flimsy self-justifications kick in. And besides, the rest of their male in-group, the good people they spend so much time with, they all do the same things, you can’t possibly claim that all of them are problematic too?
Bending the Arc
First, qualifications. No, these lines of reasonings do not describe the whole of any of these scenarios. Faith and religion are incredibly complex topics, with many factors at play, so large are their influences on lives and societies. Urban concentration had a huge impact on the early development of marginalized communities. Power dynamics, the imbalance of consequence, play a large part in male behaviour.
But hopefully it is also possible to see the through-line, to understand how our reliance on performance to ascribe goodness and morality lead us easily astray. How exercising repeatedly our reflexive righteousness blinds us over time to the reasoning and the people that underly our topical beliefs, and how we use that superiority as a substitute for the difficult work of reconciling our own behaviour and effects upon others. How the tone, tenor, and technique of that performance does nothing, either, to improve the behaviour of others, how instead they flee to like-minded communities and form happenstantial notions of who the good people are. Everybody loses.
In all of this, in the walls we build, it is our self-consciousness, our mindfulness, our ability to assess honestly that drifts away. This is critically important for three reasons:
The first is to remember that the notion behind free speech is to produce a contest of ideas, and that the only genuine way to disprove a bad idea is with a better one. Shaming and shunning and silencing people whose ideas we don’t agree with does not lead to a healthy, civil society, nor does it lead to the enlightenment of future generations. I’ve seen that movie, I’ve read that book — it does not start or end well. If we are having difficulty persuading others that we are right, we need to strengthen the content of those ideas and improve the efficacy of our delivery. These improvements can only be had through listening. Through understanding the universe in the heads of others, and adapting our own teachings and understandings to those realities.
They can also only be had through positive, inclusive discussion. We humans have taken far too long to learn this in every aspect of our nurturing: in the care of our children, in the conditioning of our pet dogs, in the management of our employees, in every kind of relationship we gravitate toward strength and anger and punishment, thinking these are the best tools for achieving success, until years or decades or centuries later we learn that positive engagement and reinforcement, while more challenging, are also far more effective in the long run — indeed, are the only effective techniques in the long run. And when we thereafter look back at the old mentality, the wrathful ways, our forebears look to us like barbarians.
Which leads us to the second critical reason: there is not the slightest chance that we today understand the totality of morality, the whole of injustice. Every people in every age have imagined themselves to be just, to be the models of proper civilization. Relatedly, there is incredible arrogance in any supposition that born a hundred, a thousand years ago, any of us would be as just and as understanding as we have the privilege to be today. Perhaps obviously, most people belong to the majority, and social injustice festers and persists because the social majority ignore and suppress the cries of the minority. Time is not a factor in that equation.
Counterculture will always develop. Contrary thought is not only an inevitability of thinking beings, it is an important part of the evolution of our collective moral understanding. Some of these ideas will be regressive, but others will be revolutionary. I suspect, for instance, that long from now, people will look back at our unthinking quantization — our bisection of gender, trisection of sexuality — and wonder how we could have been so blind. But if we are busy proclaiming loudly what we already believe absolute morality to be, if we spend our time shouting down contrarian opinions, if we lose touch with the philosophy deep beneath our bumper sticker callings-out, we abandon entirely our ability to listen to those ideas and consider them honestly.
And our failure already to listen is the third reason, the most critical one. This, all of this, literally everything I have just written, is substantially immaterial to the actual work of bending the arc. If we were to actually listen, we would understand that these kinds of individual failings, these performative declarations, these interpersonal squabbles, are not what significantly generate or ameliorate the suffering of the oppressed. In the grand scheme, these are useless gestures. Intolerance and injustice are systemic, they are built into the fabric of our government, our laws, our economy, our schools, and especially and ironically our justice system.
The maniacal focus on calling out individual behaviour posits that racism is an individual problem, and our near-exclusive expenditure of our moral energy in that direction exhausts our ability to address the deeper and far more challenging problems in systemic inequality. It fills the room with noise, drains our collective dialogue of what actually matters if we are to make people’s lives better. And if that’s not our goal, what is?
“I used to wonder if there was something I could do to try to change the world, before I understood: such thoughts were unskilled. Trying to change the world only leads to suffering. All we can change is ourselves.”
And so. Worry less about the judgements of others. Waste not your time proving through performance. Avoid righteousness and cynicism. Focus instead on being the change. Engage with positivity and compassion even when it appears at first useless. Listen with an eye toward understanding, because understanding is the path to enlightenment, and nothing is unworthy of it. Acknowledge how you benefit from the suffering of others. Assess honestly your efforts toward solving those real problems.
And, forgive. Because none of us are perfect.
