Normalization & Neighborliness
“I felt I was incomprehensibly in radical opposition to all my friends, that my views of matters were taking me more and more into isolation, although I was and remained in the closest personal relationship with these men – and all that made me anxious, made me uncertain. . . . and I saw no reason why I should see things more correctly, better than so many able and good pastors, to whom I looked up –and so I thought that it was probably time to go into the wilderness for a while.”
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Something has happened to my feelings around politics, which I feel compelled to discuss because I find it worrying – and yet I fear this is another case of writing about a fault in myself in order to air out my moral discomfort with it, without any willingness to actually change. Deflection by articulation, so often rewarded by people who compliment or encourage me based on things I say, which I both believe, but which I feel I know I am saying out of wrong motives. The crux of the problem is the intersection between indignation and arrogance. There is certainly good reason for righteous anger at the burgeoning injustice and simple pointless foolishness of our society, and I think there is perhaps even an obligation, if we are able, to say so. There’s no need to catalogue the reasons for this here; you can probably bring a whole list straight to mind with no prompting, and if you disagree with my fundamental position on the situation, I lack the ability to make such a rehearsal more persuasive than what can be seen with one’s own eyes. So I don’t have much insecurity about the actual views I espouse, other than the normal insecurity of a person with an over-scrupulous and threat-hedging mind that will always be second-guessing in all things.
What I do feel troubled by is the spirit in which I say things, and the motive energy behind that. I do feel guilty that I am being too sharp or mean, even indirectly, to friends and neighbors, and that I am exercising a kind of selective hypocrisy, whereby I chart a Rubicon on the timeline the day Trump came down the escalator, and turn my sincerely shocked and dismissive reaction to that into a litmus test, a kind of Great Sorting, despite the fact that my own views have changed dramatically over time, and despite the fact that people live in markedly different worldviews, both in terms of the information they acquire, the heuristics they use to assess and prioritize it, and the things they value. Of course I realize that the majority of people who support the President-Elect simply do not see the same thing as me when we look at him (though there is a very loud contingent who do, and who like it – and continual engagement on the internet stokes and exaggerates this spectre in my mind as a windmill to tilt against. Except it is no longer just a windmill, because this loudmouth trollish tail is wagging the dog of state, its sails actually sprouting gigantic legs and coming down off the tower to goose-step across La Mancha). So I do think that I have frequent bad motivations – finding a legitimate field in which to cultivate anger, to give vent to snobbishness, to stunt on people who haven’t had time or wherewithal to be more informed (while of course not applying the same lens to myself for all the things I don’t yet know).
The tension is that I want to be open about that, and self-critical, but I also do not want to give any oxygen to the fire that is burning through our political culture. Writing this paragraph there is present at once the feeling that I am engaging in self-deception by continuing to focus on the external political evil I wish to castigate, rather than beginning with the logjam in my own eyes, because I am too proud to give up a position, and also the feeling that I want to be certain that nothing I say is read as a retreat from any position. I’m not certain how to parse out the truth from my own words in my own mind, even if the audience were only myself. That is also part of the issue – a desire to work against the scrupulous second-guessing of all my own feelings or views, to move toward what might be a healthier ability to be direct and honest and take a side or fully commit to a feeling; but of course, that also seems like a way to excuse all manner of sin. These are live, unresolved epistemological problems that befoul everything I think, and at a certain point I have to note them and move on.
Normalization
What I want to defy is the cultural normalization of a kind of illiberal, far-right nationalist/crypto-fascist creep, and the entire apparatus of Trumpism, and the mainstreaming of dangerous unfounded myths that just ten years ago would have been laughed at by both sides of the aisle. I may have wrong motives for exposing myself to anger, and I don’t want to be hurtful to people and relationships, yet at the same time I am angry, and I think that is justified even if my reasons are not all just, and I want people to understand that. Yes, there is a pride issue at work when I exaggerate how obvious certain truths should be, implying a level of education I know isn’t universal, and also assuming I’m right when I may learn new information tomorrow and change my mind (which, after all, is how I ended up where I am in the first place). But I also want to continue to treat what used to be outrageous with outrage, and to decline to certify conspiracy theories by treating them with a respect they do not deserve, not when they may get people killed for no good reason at all. The more society shifts to act as though what just a few years ago they thought was unthinkable is now normal, simply because it has succeeded electorally, the more I will dig in and decline to validate that “new normal”. I don’t want to be the immature, irascible crank at the party who people are quietly embarrassed by, but I am just insisting on what most of us believed five historical minutes ago.
Of course, I know I am infected with hypocrisy; I have used and relied on shifting cultural norms in my arguments from fear about theology, trying to address the real problem of religious anxiety in part by implicitly invoking the norms of the secular culture circa 2015. Of course, I still value what I value and believe what I believe. About theology and the state of my own heart, I harbor plenty of self-doubt and anxiety that my values may be discordant and wrong, even if I still value them; about actual policy, I am much more confident. Even if events do not ultimately progress to a worst-case scenario, the experience of all we have seen and heard over the last ten years ought to leave no room for excuse not to treat the situation as a five-alarm Reichstag fire.
Neighborliness
On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
“What is written in the Law?” he replied. “How do you read it?”
He answered, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”
“You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied. “Do this and you will live.”
But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”
In reply Jesus said: “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he was attacked by robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead. A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii[c] and gave them to the innkeeper. ‘Look after him,’ he said, ‘and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.’
“Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?”
The expert in the law replied, “The one who had mercy on him.”
Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.”
- Luke 10:25-37
I do wonder if I am the Expert in the Law, or the Priest, or the Levite, in this story, and not the Samaritan. Let’s set aside the question of policies and political values – I think the ones I support are beneficial and kinder to the downtrodden, and those of Trump I know to be vengeful and oppressive. Outside of the reality of the actual positions, I wonder if perhaps I am right, in the way that the Expert in the Law was probably more right about theology than the Samaritan, but I am wrong in the more important question of treating others as neighbors. In a sense, it shouldn’t matter if the people I take issue with mistreat their neighbors even to an extreme – that shouldn’t alter the way in which I regard them. But at the same time, there is a place for Jeremiads against injustice.
So I want to affirm that we are all, in the end, neighbors, and that the one thing which we owe to each other is unconditional love. And I don’t want anything I’ve written here to be construed as me implying any sort of high ground – difficult, because I am frankly admitting I suspect myself of all sorts of pride as a motive in everything I say and do, even down to self-criticism, so it is hard to see how that isn’t just another attempt to assume a position of superiority. If it helps, I’ve done plenty of bad things I am not going to get into here, and I don’t expect anyone who disagrees with my politics to think well of me or see me as anything but an obnoxious scold. I just want to talk openly about the conflicts at the core of even strongly held positions, and the dangers involved, and acknowledge the ultimate reality that we are all neighbors, even as I continue to affirm that our present political situation is not normal, that the sides are not equivalent, and that some now-common positions are unacceptable, evil, and foolish. Somehow these things all have to coexist. Lincoln was able to welcome back the South “with charity toward all, with malice toward none,” after an actual civil war in which the army had taken to singing moral hymns about the crusading righteousness of their cause. But I feel like Lincoln was actually humble and generous; I don’t know how to engage with that without it becoming a prideful way of claiming the high ground, which I don’t deserve to have.
I want to continue to treat what has happened to the country as what it is: abnormal, irrational, and evil. I want people to feel the extent to which what they have done is harming others, and to be pointedly aware of how others see their worldviews. I also want to be honest and open about my own sinful motives in doing so, the distortions in my own heart. And I want to remind us all, as someone who fails to live like it, that we are all, in the end, neighbors.
