This week's Christian reflection is not really a palinode, or an apology, or an expression of penitence or even regret, for last week's poem. I felt surprised, at the time, by how much I wanted to post it. I don't feel bad about having posted it. I do think it may need some unpicking, because some people commented that they weren't sure they "got" it.
Here's what there is to "get": I believe in objective reality. I believe none of us completely knows or understands what exists in objective reality, but we do understand enough to be able to agree to use words in ways that have meanings for everyone who agrees to use the same language.
I believe it can be fashionable to use certain words in ways that conflict with their meanings, and we need to be careful about that.
For instance, the word "forgiveness." This is a Christian word, and it's important to preserve its meaning in relation to what it is primarily about: God's willingness to forgive our sins.
So, "forgiveness" is not an appropriate word for Buddhist-style "acceptance" or for psychological "release." Those words reflect very different ideas about what happens to evildoers.
The three words can be used accurately in some of the same contexts. For instance, a hypertensive teacher, who is a Christian, might invest more emotional energy than is really helpful in getting the students to pass the test. Obsessed with a felt need to pound standard subject-verb agreement into their heads, she turns into an old-school drill sergeant, listening to conversations that weren't even meant to include her, pouncing on the students and screeching: "Not 'we was', but 'we were'! Say it: 'We were'..." At home, in prayer, she realizes that she's starting to feel real anger about the fact that the students speak a nonstandard dialect of English. She wants to release that anger for the sake of her health, to accept that the students don't talk exactly the same way she does, to forgive and seek reconciliation with the students she's been scolding and punishing, and even to repent of inappropriately interrupting their conversations with shows of disrespect for their private relationships, and so on.
I think that example needs to be in this post. In insisting that we need to preserve an understanding of "forgiveness" as a key part of Christian religious beliefs, I'm not insisting that people can't choose to use the word in some other way. People do give the names of spiritual concepts to dogs; people do use words as slang and inside jokes, often with conscious irony, an intention to use words to refer to things different from their standard meanings. In some family, or social group, or online forum there may well be an agreement that "forgiveness" shall mean "a batch of ten buttons."
But forgiveness properly means a process that begins with the person who is forgiven recognizing something that person did as wrong, stating a firm intention not to do that again, making amends for whatever effects can be amended, and with the person who is forgiving agreeing that amends have been made, renouncing all further anger about what the person who is forgiven did, and being reconciled into the former relationship they had before the person who is forgiven did wrong.
Forgiveness is not automatic. It is not spread out like a blanket over everything and everybody. It is offered to the dying thief who called Jesus Lord, but not to the one who mocked and scorned. It is what you or I, as Christians, might be obliged to offer to the reckless driver who left us wheelchair-bound, but are not in a position to offer the poor soul who believes that three fives are thirteen.
We don't necessarily want to "accept" the poor soul's belief that three fives are thirteen, either. That belief can only cause further unhappiness; it is out of line with objective reality. (The objective reality of the history of Buddhist countries is that trying to "accept" immoral behavior, to see God in the child molester and the molested child impartially, led to abuses that provided the excuse for the colonization of those countries. "Acceptance" out of its place can be a very harmful idea.)
We do want to "release" the emotions we may have attached to things that are not moral issues at all, even if it's our child who thinks three fives are thirteen. There is no useful reason to feel angry about the fact that children are born not knowing things. There is a useful reason to feel angry about other things, like long-ago moral issues, the fact that Great-Great-Grandfather hired a false witness to tell lies about Great-Great-Grandmother merely to get a divorce, but there are also useful reasons to release that anger. And so on.
What psychologists usually do tell people who complain of "emotional problems," today, is that they need to "forgive" the whole array of people who "hurt their feelings" in so many ways, so long ago, that they don't even remember all of them. This is wrong.
In order to overcome, say, a fear of finishing and publishing his poems, a poet might need to release the emotional energy he may have attached to the whole fourth grade class who laughed when he read his poem. He does not need to forgive all of them--some of them undoubtedly didn't even hear the poem, but laughed because other people were laughing, and have nothing to seek forgiveness for. Nor can he forgive all of them--some of them may have grown up to be mean-spirited adults who habitually sneer at whatever other people have to say, and aren't sorry, and don't intend to change, and feel that as nobody likes them anyway they are at least getting some benefit from being dreaded and avoided. Nor does he need to "accept" that our society allows adults to bully children into reading their poems aloud to classes in which other children laugh at them; that's not a good thing we want to pick up and claim as ours, it's more of a bad thing we want to change. All he needs to do is release the emotions he has attached to having been laughed at in grade four.
He might do that through any number of psychological techniques. He might reason with himself, as a grown-up man, that most adults try to behave politely in public and aren't likely to laugh when serious poetry is being read. He might reason with himself that since more people enjoy laughing than enjoy reading serious poetry, he should try publishing some comic poetry. It's not as specifically Christian as some Christians imagine that he will probably think that, considering how much he resented having his poem laughed at, it would behoove him to set a good example of how he thinks people should read and listen to other people's poems.
Which brings us to my poem about "small victories."
"Victory" is another word that can be used to refer to a lot of different things, but needs to be used with some reference to the meaning it has in objective reality. Victory originally meant beating someone else in a fight. Its implications included kicking or stamping on the person to confirm how thoroughly defeated he was, taking home as much of his worldly goods as you wanted to carry, and parading through the streets having people applaud. The meaning of this word has broadened to include many quieter, more subjective ways of overcoming obstacles to accomplish something. Students used to speak of victory over the multiplication table when they had absorbed the fact that three fives are fifteen; patients now speak of victory over diseases when they have gone some length of time without symptoms.
Still, in order to be described as a victory, the victor must have accomplished what person set out to accomplish. People were satisfied with a book about Victory Over Arthritis that described how people were reporting less pain and tissue damage. People would not have been so satisfied if Victory Over Arthritis had described how someone was completely disabled by arthritis and then, possibly as a result of some unsuccessful treatment, died of heart failure.
Our self-serving bias can lead us to try to misrepresent some defeats as victories. This is a well known trope in comic fiction. Some trace it back to Aesop, who had a fox trying to jump up and grab a bunch of grapes in its mouth, failing, and eventually walking away saying "Those grapes were sour anyway." That kind of story can appeal to readers, but it still disappoints the expectations set up when a story is supposed to be about a victory.
The appeal of a "lost, but thought of a way to count it as a win" story is to the part of us that likes to laugh at serious poems. "Here is a person who has never learned to laugh at perself. We will laugh at this person."
Well, last week a lot of e-friends were posting things I read as confessions of defeat. Not the tragedies of right-minded people confronting big greedy corporations, or formerly healthy medical students defeated by contaminated vaccines taken under stress. People were being defeated by thought patterns I've been holding up to ridicule for years.
At one site a writer who's been admired for forty years for her logical, teacherly prose caved to those who think the TJ writing style isn't "feminine" enough: "I'm not a woman." She listed some other manifestations of what Carl Jung would have called a strong animus, the "masculine," logical, linear, cold-eyed part of the brain we all possess. As Daniel Goleman later observed, that ability to route information straight through the left brain, bypassing the amygdala, is something we all have to develop. Males in our culture, not in all human cultures, are expected to develop this skill earlier and use it more often than females. Women may face social penalties both for failing to develop it and for using it "too" easily. Many of us have had things we wrote rejected or down-graded for being too sentimental or, worse, too sensational--but what kind of poems and songs by women get all the attention? If we want to be listened to by men, we'd better go the Ariana Grande route, wailing that we are body parts, the unmentionable ones, that's what we are. I don't remember taking a formal vow, but at some time early in life I became aware that part of my mission as a writer is to celebrate being a logical, rational woman with well-developed left frontal lobes. More women should only be telling young girls that taking rational control of our sexual choices has no effect on our ability to wallow in the emotions we choose to wallow in. I might have hoped this writer would affirm, "Ain't I a woman?" Well, no, she wimped out, maybe she's not. Such a disappointment.
Then a writer who's ten if not fifteen years older than I am, but who has clung to the political idealism of our youth in a way that sometimes makes me feel as if she were about forty years younger, had to weigh in on another Prozac Dementia story with another whine about gun bans.
Once long ago I thought gun bans might reduce the murder rate. Then I lived in a city that enacted gun bans, and the murder rate skyrocketed. I do try not to blame people who didn't have that experience. Washington is a city of discrete neighborhoods; it was possible for young Washingtonians to assure our parents that the murders were all taking place (daily) in residential neighborhoods where we didn't reside, and yes, most of the young men were involved in the illegal drug trade, And still, the day would come: "That was one of my students. That was my client's grandson. That was the intern in the office downstairs." So many young men, boys really, some only fourteen years old. I learned: gun bans are never going to be universal, so they are always going to amount to licenses to kill some people, and they are an evil idea.
But every time one of these homicide-suicide maniacs happens to find a gun, the pharmaceutical industry wants people to ignore the common features between gun and non-gun homicide-suicides, more of which involve prescription medications than street drugs, and just have another round of bickering about the guns. Can't we all agree to blame and ban a particular kind of gun? We can, we've tried that, and what happens is that people shoot each other with whatever is available. Or, when they don't shoot each other, they saw each other up in pieces and hide the bodies in unsuspecting relatives' storage barns. Or drown each other in the bathtub. Or run over each other with cars. There was a troubled teen in Washington who got out of her car, while stuck in traffic on a suburban highway, dragged a young woman out of her car, and stomped the victim to death. Guns are actually more humane than some of the alternatives that appeal to homicide-suicides. At least nobody counts the transfer of interest, in a homicide-suicide case, to the firearms as a victory...except the firearms dealers. Every time someone wants to reopen "the firearms debate," somebody like my late lamented sponsor at the gun store scores a victory over some obstacle between himself and wealth. But this writer was still thinking that such an egregious "own goal" as a gun ban would be a victory.
Then a writer who self-identified as an introvert (yay!) posted about an extrovert friend steamrollering over her and another friend, again, and in some terribly cute way tried to present that as a victory. (This was the only one of the three who was linking to the blog challenge.)
Well, obviously none of these dear people had learned anything from this web site. I felt defeated.
Partly, I observed, I felt disappointed as a reader by the framing of a defeat as a victory. Maybe, in a fictional future society that had tilted in the opposite direction from ours, where an Extrovert Control Warden cruised the streets in a specially fitted van, ready at the first complaint to remove all extroverts to Rehabilitative Care Units where they'd be kept at solitary labor, you could have an introvert character stating as a goal "To take Tracy out for lunch and not call the warden," and the story could be about how Tracy behaved like an extrovert and the main character managed not to call the warden. That might pass for a story about a victory. In today's society, no. The extrovert bossed and bullied and misrepresented and annoyed her two friends, and they just put up with it, again. Letting the extrovert go on thinking, no doubt, that she was doing them a great favor by treating them as friends, meaning people she could boss and bully. Extroverts can be trained to be at least the sort of friends they want to be, and have, if people would only stop ruining them with overindulgence. The indulgence of an extrovert is a defeat for humankind.
To observe that that sort of thing disappoints readers is a valid literary criticism.
To direct literary criticism to friends' personal confidences, like the ways they try to reframe defeats as victories, ia conduct unbefitting a human being.
What about the confidences that friends have been ignoring our views on the relevant topics, though, and have been defeated for that reason?
So, a poem was rhyming itself in my mind.
"Stop it," I said sternly to the poem. "The short I sound at the ends of words like 'victory' and the long E sound at the ends of words like 'see' are not considered to rhyme."
"But they do," the poem insisted, proceeding to rhyme those sounds throughout.
I put it up where youall could see it.
How bad my poems are, I don't know, but I think they're easy to understand. Apparently that one wasn't; or readers have been too thoroughly indoctrinated in the philosophical fads of the moment to understand it. "Victory is in the eye of the beholder," someone commented. Some words' meaning really is that subjective. "Victory" is not one. Individuals can work toward different objectives. What looks like a defeat can sometimes be shown to be a victory: a child might try to get a parent involved in a game, lose the game, but succeed in distracting the parent from an unwelcome conversation. But a story is about victory if the main character accomplishes per stated purposes, about defeat if the main character does not.
Psychologist David Meyer cut through a lot of then-fashionable malarkey by calling attention back to the self-serving bias and ego defenses that have a way of showing in first-person narratives. The average college student, he reported, will say on an anonymous survey that person is more attractive than the average person, and also that person is not as attractive as person wants or needs to be. How conceited are these students, he asked, and how attractive do they think they ought to be? Because the average college student is younger and healthier than the general population and also is not the perceived as the most attractive of the young healthy people at per school, I think this example of the ego at work is less shocking than Meyer seemed to think it was. I agree with Meyer that we all do need to check our thinking for unhelpful ego defenses. Usually I try to be pitiless toward my own ego defenses, but address other people's ego defenses only if those include put-down dominance displays.
So, maybe I felt "put down" by e-friends' expressions of distress that they felt because they have not absorbed the wisdom I've been sharing with the world all these going-on-seventeen years. Maybe that moment of ego attachment was a symptom of an acute reaction to chemical spray poisoning, which I was certainly having that day.
But also, y'know, y'know...only in the old joke about how ego defenses work does the little boy who can't throw a ball up in the air and catch it get to think that that makes him a great pitcher.
I don't repent of saying that. I don't ask anyone to forgive me. I regret that saying it may have loosened the scab of an ego defense before it was due to flake off. I regret that bumping people's ego defenses is usually merely rude rather than helpful. I can say that as a general policy I do try to avoid, both having friends who are often attached to ego defenses, and bumping the ego defenses my friends do occasionally have. I will continue to try to avoid those things. Still, pampering ego defenses is merely nice, where stripping them away, though it needs to be done by the owner of the ego, is good. I can't say I repent, generally, of any trespass against anyone's ego defenses.
May all readers achieve enough personal victories, this week, that none of us needs to cling to any ego-defending reports of losses as wins.
No comments:
Post a Comment