Liberal purity

Accusing liberals of being the thing they rail against is an old conservative trick. Some examples:

"Nobody is more intolerant than the so-called agents of tolerance."

"People who believe in a universe with no God criticize those who have faith, but doesn't believing something comes from nothing take the most faith of all?"

Lately, I've been seeing different versions of comparing some current in liberal political circles, like anti-racism, to religion.  

I'm hesitant to even appear to join in this kind of criticism, but to some extent, I find the comparisons between the sociology of religion and the sociology of political groups to be inevitable. My first committed ideology in life was evangelicalism, and even though I left it for good over twenty years ago, my experiences as an evangelical have shaped how I view all ideological communities since. Sometimes, when encountering some kind of interaction at the intersection of sociology and ideology, there's really no way to avoid the rather obvious feeling of deja vu. 

To compare liberal political ideas and the behavior of the groups who hold those ideas to evangelicals or even to cults isn't entirely pejorative. To think it is demonstrates the kind of hardline resistance to facts liberals sometimes show, a resistance that makes them vulnerable to "liberals are hypocrites" kinds of attacks. (I say "them" about liberals, but I could say "we." I identify with liberal ideas more than I don't.) Of course groups founded on belief systems will show similar sociological and socio-psychological traits, even if some are founded on relatively more empirically defensible positions than others. To think that a community of humanists won't end up acting in many ways like a community of theists is similar to the kind of anthropocentric thinking that makes some people reject comparisons between humans and other animals. We don't want to accept that we're essentially of the same genus as other things, because we think it makes us less special. 

Just because groups built around a shared liberal ideology might act in some ways similar to groups built around religious beliefs is not to say they're both the same in all ways, or that they're all equally invalid. Even if there is a large-sized overlap in sociological phenomena in the two types of groups, the differences can still be (and in my view, are) significant enough to make belonging to one group relatively more desirable than to another. But that doesn't mean we can just overlook the similarities, or realize that our group has many of the same problems internally that other kinds of groups do. 

Since realizing I was a secular humanist and a political liberal in my twenties, I've certainly felt similarities between groups that share my beliefs and groups I used to belong to that shared my old beliefs. Here's an example. I saw this meme shared on the social media pages of two people, one a writer I follow on Twitter and one a liberal friend on Facebook:

In evangelical circles, there is a tendency to reject the idea that Christian belief (i.e. "the truth") shares much with ideas outside itself. That's a heresy, one that gives into the need to be accepted by the secular world. In reality, evangelicals believe, the truth and the world are so different that they will hardly agree on anything.

It's hard to know what issue the author of this meme had in mind. Had she been arguing with someone who really believed racial equality was impossible because some races were inherently better than others? What is the uncrossable line that was crossed here? I don't deny those lines exist, but I would deny that those lines are crossed all that often. Acting like those outside our group are nearly always outside the bounds of "human decency," however, tends to make our group's ideas stand out. It makes being a part of our group seem more urgent. It makes separation from the other group less a matter of intolerance and more a natural outgrowth of belief. 

This "they're so wrong there's no way to find common ground" way of thinking manifests in other ways. Within Christian circles, there is always a debate between those who think it's worthless to try to "argue someone into the Kingdom of Heaven," those who feel that if a skeptic doesn't agree with you, it's best to walk away rather than cast your pearls before swine, and those who believe they have a responsibility to "give an answer for the hope that is in them." (That is, those who willingly will argue with skeptics and those who will not.) 

In Christianity, for the most part, the apologists are winning that internal cultural war. I'm not saying your average Christian argues terribly well, but your average American Christian has at least memorized an opening argument on a number of objections a skeptic might raise to Christian beliefs. It feels to me, though, as though the "come out and be separate" crowd is winning in many political groups on the left. The idea that it's not worth engaging with conservatives is becoming more and more ubiquitous, with the basic rationale being that we shouldn't try to engage with someone who has "odious" beliefs.   

What are these odious beliefs?

Not so long ago, the Republican Party in America was still the ideological descendant of the Reagan/Bush era. It was trying to figure out what "compassionate conservatism" meant. It wanted a kinder, gentler America. It gave us presidents who wanted an immigration policy most liberals agree with. It gave us a president who originally wanted to make education his top priority before 9/11 happened and changed the course of his presidency. It wasn't really a progressive party, but it was a party in dialogue with itself about whether conservativism and progressivism had some goals in common that conservativism could adopt for itself. 

I'm not saying I agree with those presidents, but it's hard to see how the general drift of this kind of Republican's beliefs are "odious." I do not find the editorial stance of, say, The Economist to be odious. I don't find it beyond the bounds of human decency.

The general bounds of Reagan-era conservativism are still where a lot of conservatives are. That was more or less where Romney and McCain were. We as liberals had a right to object to much of the discourse: we might have disliked the jingoism, the willingness to reject spending on social programs but never to reject increases in military spending, the views on abortion meant to placate the religious base. We certainly were right to reject post 9-11 American adventurism (although most Democrats in Congress did not when it mattered). But that kind of Republican isn't odious. We were wrong to smear Romney and McCain with accusations of being racists. We realized, I hope, how wrong we were when a real racist came along and Romney and McCain were among the few Republicans willing to stand up to him. 

Trump's rise took nearly everyone by surprise, including Republicans. There were different reactions among Republicans about how to deal with it. Some outright rejected Trump. Some wanted to try to guide Trumpism to better goals more in line with the last thirty years of Republican goals. Others jumped in all the way with the new wave, even when it wasn't clear what Trump stood for. Not all of these people, who might be the sorts of folks to disagree with you on social media, are odious.

We can't recognize heterodoxy in others because we don't recognize it in ourselves

It's hard for us to accept the plurality of voices opposing us, because we don't really accept the plurality of voices within our own community. Here's another evangelical sociological conundrum: should we define membership in our community in a narrow way, in order to ensure purity, or define it broadly, in order to bring more in? I don't think one side of that argument ever won in American evangelicalism as a whole, although one camp or another certainly won in some churches. (The church I went to as a teenager was a "Christianity, narrowly defined" kind of church.) But I do think that American evangelicalism realized that it couldn't grow by becoming so diffuse that it was nothing. There had to be barriers to entry in terms of professed belief. These barriers, ironically, probably led to growth, because the difficulty of getting in made people more motivated to stay once they had invested the effort to pass the barriers. Having somewhat tough requirements for belonging made members appreciate belonging more.

There is no church for political liberals. I mean, there are churches out there that largely share a politically liberal viewpoint, like the Unitarian Church, but nobody is required to be part of a church in order to be part of the ingroup of the politically liberal-minded. Nonetheless, liberals seem to have adopted some of the tougher barriers to entry evangelicals did, perhaps because liberals have seen the advantages this approach gave their political adversaries.

Liberals might, in fact, be drifting toward being even stricter than evangelicals. Maybe it's the lack of human connection a church gives that pushes us in this direction. In a church, you might think Robby drinks too much to be a good Christian, but you know the guy, and you played on the softball team with him, so you're willing to forgive him. That's not true of online liberal communities. 

I generally tend to agree with liberal political ideas, but that doesn't mean I agree with every liberal orthodoxy of the moment. When I was an evangelical, I didn't agree with everything I was supposed to believe in order to be a member of most churches. My choices were to keep my mouth shut and stay a member or to say what I really believed and lose membership, even though at one point I still shared many of the group's core beliefs. It's not easy to stay part of the community as an uneasy, partly orthodox practitioner. At some point, it makes much more sense to just leave.

That's how I feel now as a liberal. There are some issues where I don't quite agree with what I feel like I'm supposed to agree with. It feels like too much of a risk, though, to say that I only agree with seventy percent of what I'm supposed to agree with, and here are my reservations about the rest. That feels like a one-way ticket to excommunication. 

I'm not here to tell any liberal how to act online. I don't know the conservatives you interact with. Maybe the ones you know really are the odious kind. It's of course up to you and your own conscience how to interact online. This isn't meant to be a manifesto on what sort of philosophy liberals should adopt when it comes to questions of evangelism and fellowship. It's the feelings of one liberal, which I suspect are also the feelings of a lot of others. What I feel is that liberal discourse leaves me without a path to membership. The most I'll ever be is a protest vote for Democrats, because as not-at-home as I feel among liberals, I'm even less at home among conservatives. I don't think that's enough for a solid future for an ideology. There is always a balancing act between being open enough to allow people in and being strict enough that membership means something. Right now, I feel the balance is tipping in favor of purity in a way that makes me think I'm fine not being an active member.  

A new unity is possible in America, but only if we realize how difficult unity is

Mrs. Heretic posted a link to an article on her Facebook timeline yesterday about a speech George W. Bush recently gave. Her posting of this article seemed to approve of what Bush said. Later in the day, she said something to me about being nostalgic for Bush. If I had been able in 2004 to look ahead into the future long enough to hear her say that, I'd have probably refused to live in that timeline, because I'd have assumed someone had hijacked her brain.

In 2004, we moved from Chicago, where we had just finished grad school, to the D.C. area, where I had just landed a new job. I showed up in March, but Mrs. Heretic, who still needed to stay in Chicago until the end of the spring semester to finish up her MA in women's studies, didn't come until the end of April. When she showed up, she came with about ten of her classmates from the women's studies program, who joined her at the March for Women's Lives. They made t-shirts that they all wore, which said, if I recall correctly, something like "Boobs Against Bush."

A sign from the 2004 March for Women's Lives

I wasn't a fan of Bush, either, especially his decision to get America involved in military adventurism in Iraq to achieve nebulous political goals, but to Mrs. Heretic and many other liberals, he was the devil. Or at least, he was a sheep surrounded by devils. The rhetoric from the left about Bush painted him as the dumbest and worst president in history, and often cast him as extremist.

Now that we really do have the dumbest and worst president in American history--one who, if not an extremist himself, certainly plays with the fire of extremism, and only escapes being an extremist because that would involve the commitment to a single idea of which he is incapable--Bush no longer seems like such an enemy to liberals. When we listen to him now, we remember a time when the Republican Party at least pretended to try to represent all Americans, when they really thought they had a chance to win over Latinos, so there was a large faction of them fighting for reasonable immigration reform. We remember the term "compassionate conservatism," and recall a time when presidents at least could somewhat lull us to sleep on their policies we didn't like by drowning out the bad parts with tons of rhetoric everyone agreed with.

I mentioned earlier the idea of going forward in time from 2004 to 2020, but what if we could go back in time from 2020 to 2004? What would our rallies back then look like? Would we still burn Bush in effigy at every rally? Or would we try to build a consensus where we could in order to accomplish some worthy goals, while expressing our firm opposition to the policies we disagreed with, but without demonizing him or his supporters personally?

The problem with civil politics is that the politics of confrontation has seemed to work so well for so long. Politicians have used it as a strategy because their strategy experts told them to. But confrontation isn't really a strategy; it's a tactic, one that should only be used for a limited time for limited purposes with very specific aims. Continuing to use it long-term might win you some battles, but you'll lose the war, not because your enemy vanquished you, but because the whole battlefield will turn to poison that kills you along with your enemy. That's where we are now.

There's a paradox in politics that the larger your coalition, the stronger you are relative to those outside your coalition, but the more internal stresses you face. The more groups you bring in, the more you can defend yourselves from outside forces, but every new person brings new opinions and wishes, and balancing those becomes more difficult with every new member of your coalition. This explains some of the perennial disorganization within the Democratic Party, which is more heterogeneous than the Republican Party.

The best way to manage the competing interests is to reduce the number of things everyone has to agree on in order to maintain the union. You don't have to actually believe other races are equal; you just have to believe they're equal before the law. You don't have to believe homosexuality is moral; you just have to believe it deserves protection under the law.

Hillary Clinton used the slogan "stronger together" in her 2016 run. I don't disagree with the principle, only the smugness and certainty with which it was used. Being together might make us stronger, but only if we realize how much work it is to keep everyone together. We're not going to sprinkle slogans over differences and wake up to unity. Unity involves minimizing the space we need to agree on to keep the union working, which means not fighting over things that don't matter. It involves realizing how deeply other people hold some beliefs and how hard it will be be to get them to bend. It involves realizing how fragile a democracy is. It means cooperating with some people who hold beliefs you personally find abominable, because there is no other choice. And maybe it involves realizing that the compromise with others is only a temporary one, meant to achieve nothing more than comfort and peace in this life. You might even use the word "secular" to describe it. We can be in the world and work with others but not be of the world by agreeing with them.

James Mattis, in his critique of Trump this week, went beyond just criticizing the President to a hope for union. He called what demonstrators are seeking a "wholesome and unifying demand." Nearly everyone in the union can understand the core desire of the demonstrators: to not feel fear of the police. Sticking to that desire as the central aim will likely continue to garner sympathy. Attacking police as thugs or state-sponsored terrorists will not. I'm not speaking about emotional truths here, but practical ones. That kind of talk won't keep the union together, which means a failure to achieve goals.

Moreover, in attacking anyone who doesn't immediately fall into ideological lockstep with whatever saucy Tweet someone just blasted out means you're going to be attacking people you might later find could have been someone you could have worked with. For how long did we call Bush, McCain, and Romney racists? Do we regret now any of the things we said about them? Do we see now how demonizing someone slightly to our right can end up bringing us someone far to our right? (Or whatever political space Trump is occupying on a particular day, depending on what news he watched that morning.)

Mattis also hoped the people could find unity in spite of Trump:

Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership. We can unite without him, drawing on the strengths inherent in our civil society. This will not be easy, as the past few days have shown, but we owe it to our fellow citizens; to past generations that bled to defend our promise; and to our children.

Wouldn't it be something if the most polarizing president in history ended up making us somehow more united, if he helped us to turn back some of the increasing polarization that has built up since the first troops from World War II started arriving back home? To do that, the first step is to realize it won't be easy. It means people who deeply disagree about issues on which they will never change each others' minds will have to get along. It means people who fundamentally dislike each other will have to get along. It means realizing unity isn't a fuzzy liberal's dream, it's a necessity we can't live without. 

The tricky "what good will this do" question

The most surprising thing to me every time there's a crisis isn't the panoply of opinions I see expressed, it's the certainty with which people hold those opinions. I don't claim to be the smartest or the most informed about any issue out there, but I've certainly put in more work than a lot of the people I see posting opinions that start with "What you need to understand..." or words to that effect. Everyone's a guru.

I suppose I can understand the impulse toward certainty; nobody wants to be caught idling during an important moment, and uncertainty is the enemy of action. Nobody can ever be fully certain of anything, but there are times when the need is so urgent, we simply must act based on the best information available.

Fair enough, although I believe "action" for many people begins and ends with social media slacktivism. Those who are doing more, who are out there on the front lines, are welcome to accuse me of dithering. It's in my nature to be too willing to keep thinking after the time for action is at hand. For both good and evil, I'm indecisive by nature. I will accept the criticism that comes with that.

But it's also true that even in a war, there is a time after the first bullets start flying to take a step back and evaluate how the attack is going. Based on watching the media for the last week, both news and social, I think one can broadly categorize the reactions to the anti-police-brutality demonstrations (APBD) and the looting that has followed in its wake as follows:

1. This is good and long overdue, without qualifications. We don't need no water, let the motherfucker burn.
2. There are valid concerns here that have gone unaddressed for too long. Destroying property of innocent people, especially in the communities of those most affected by police brutality, is of course a bad thing, but just like police supporters feel a few bad cops shouldn't tar all police, APBD supporters say we should listen to the valid concerns and not be distracted by the few vandals.
3. Often quoting Dr. King, some point out that even the vandalism is the "cry of the unheard," and therefore should be understood, if not condoned. 

Conservative responses are somewhat mirrors of the first three

1A. Black lives have been improving, if you get past the media always whipping everyone up into a froth over isolated incidents. Life for black Americans is not as bad as the media wants us to believe. (And here there is a possible branch of this argument saying that the people taking advantage of this are operatives or outsiders with their own political objectives.)
2A. Just like there are some bad apples among the demonstrators, there are some bad apples among cops. Being a cop is hard, and there will always be some people who don't do it well.
3A. Perceived injustices should be taken care of within the system. Whatever your complaint, you cannot seek redress from a system you are actively undoing through contempt for basic property rights. And more importantly, this won't solve anything, it will only make things worse.


(And then there's a stand-alone reaction, one that worries about the possible effect of these demonstrations on the spread of coronavirus.)

I wonder if anyone has ever coined the malaphor "Fiddler on the Roof is on Fire," because that would be Donald Trump to a tee right now. 

Saying "they all have a point" isn't the same as saying they're all equally valid

I'm already indecisive, so when I say things like, "Well, there's some truth in all of these things," I fear I'm opening myself up to the double-whammy of being both indecisive and conciliatory. But saying there is some truth in them all doesn't mean there's equal truth. Generally, the APBD supporters are in the right. But conservatives, as they are wont to do, do come equipped with some annoying truths. The reconciliation of these disparate viewpoints seems to me to run something like the following.

Of course, policing is unfairly carried out on communities of color, and this unfair policing is taking place within the context of a thousand other injustices, all of which were viscerally on display when an officer kept his knee on the neck of a man who didn't seem to be resisting. These unfairnesses are the direct result of history and policy. As Ta-Nehisi Coates keeps pointing out, if aliens came to Earth, and they studied American history and then looked at the current situation of black Americans, they would not be confused about why black Americans are in the situation they are in. Given this historical injustice and its link to the present, a present which just got a very palpable illustration, the peaceful demonstrations are completely valid, and even some of the violence is understandable.

But I'd like to look at the end of argument 3A: "it won't do any good." Supporters of APBD will say that's not the point, that this is the natural expression of trauma, and the point isn't to "do good," but to express what cannot be bottled up any longer. Okay, I can understand that. But how long does the exemption from results last?

The fact is that violence can be an extremely useful political tool, although it's a difficult one to wield. As Coates has pointed out, those who laud the approach of a Dr. King over Malcolm X forget that King's camp was happy to use Malcolm X to get concessions out of LBJ. King would ask for something, and if he didn't get it, he would say, "Well, you can always try to deal with Malcolm X," at which point LBJ would give in. We can praise King's non-violence, and we should, but his non-violence was partly effective because it was better than the other option for a government that had a war in Vietnam to worry about.

Of course the vandalism--some of which is probably coming from outsiders with their own agendas-- can be understood to a large degree as the spontaneous outcry of anguish, but what if the violence stopped being random targets that happened to be in the way, and took on a more strategic flavor? What if it changed from mob violence to political violence?

Why is spontaneous violence tolerated more than planned violence? 

This whole "you have to understand this violence as the inescapable outcry of the injured" response, when continued in perpetuity, is in danger of becoming irresponsible. We've been having these kinds of demonstrations for a long time now, every time some emblem of what people of color feel to be their every day reality is goes viral. Why has there not been a more effective planned and political response, one that persists over time? Could it be that the very effort on behalf of some well-meaning people to just understand the anger and not pass judgment upon some manifestations of it is part of the problem? I'm seeing a lot of white people anxious to signal their own sympathies with the protesters talk coddlingly of the traumatized, as though they were children unable to control their own rage. It's a non-threatening kind of sympathy, because spontaneous violence doesn't lead to change. It doesn't "do any good," as the conservatives would say, but for a particular breed of social media liberal who only wants to demonstrate that their feelings are on the right side, that's just fine. "Doing good" isn't the point. We're here to pat people of color on the head and tell them we understand their feelings.

But what if spontaneous violence became planned violence? At present, one of the weaknesses of APBD is that there is no central leadership. This is also true of Black Lives Matter. There are many local chapters, but no centralized hierarchy. This means the protesters have no list of demands to be met. There's no agenda for the government to respond to. Much like the government now has a power vacuum because the president is largely absent or ineffective during the protests, the protesters themselves present no figure with whom the government could negotiate even if they wanted to. Those attending the protests have no unified platform. There is no organized political movement taking place, at least not one of any consequence.

Say that changed, and a central organization with a centralized leadership formed, and that leadership decided to hit certain, strategic targets, minimizing loss of human life but maximizing economic and political impact? Say this group kept this up for a while, then pulled back and offered talks. Even if the government refused, because it doesn't negotiate with terrorists, it would still offer a lot of strength to other groups outside of the one committing the violence. If a credible threat presented itself, it could change the complexion of politics, and it could actually "do good" to the group with the grievance.

Naturally, the local nature of police force is one of the reasons it's hard to create a national movement. There are a lot of issues no president could solve, because they involve working with governors or mayors or city councils. But an organized national movement could effectively mobilize to make change in one location at a time, as happened during the Civil Rights Movement. The Democratic Party could be part of this, but its leaders seem happy to just say the right sentiments during times of crisis. When we say that questions of utility miss the point, we absolve political forces on the left from the responsibility to organize effectively. Our attitudes about violence are a symbol of this absolution.

For some reason, we seem as a society far more tolerant of ineffective and temporary shows of violence than considered and long-term ones. We call the former "the cry of the unheard" and the latter terrorism. It's an extension of the criminal distinction between crimes of passion and pre-meditated murder, as though it's less awful to murder someone when you've found out they're leaving you than it is to murder them for the insurance money.

I'm too indecisive to actually be recommending violence. I'm asking a question

I'm not talking about the utility of violence to recommend violence, I'm talking about it because there is so little talk generally about what kinds of actions might be useful, which says a lot about why we continue this cycle of incidents and disorganized responses. The outright assumptions we make about violence without even discussing those assumptions reveals a lack of seriousness about attaining the desired ends.

Why are so many liberals at the moment willing to brush aside the question of whether the violence will "do any good"? Whence this liberal pessimism about our ability to change the political course of the country? And what does our over-confident assurance that the question isn't what's important say about the lack of actual political goals on the left? Why are we willing to tolerate sporadic acts of violence with no end in mind but we completely shut off the idea of violence as a potential tool in organized political activity? Is it because we are so shocked by intentionally using violence to achieve an end, or because disorganized violence mirrors our own disorganized political approach?

Myself, I'm not going to pretend I'm excited to go storming buildings to see change. Generally, I think the change that needs to happen will take time and concerted, slow effort. It will take people being useful day-to-day. My political action isn't radical or violent; it's to try to do little things. We vote for change. We support black businesses. Mrs. Heretic has taught for a decade in some of the populations that are affected by injustice. We try to help those kids when we can. One of the ways we help them is with the money I make in my day job, a job that is, without a doubt, the opposite of anything radical. I've adapted to the world as it is in order to try to make living in the world as it is a little easier for a few people.

That leaves me stumped about how to respond to a crisis like this. Do more little things? I'd like there to be an identifiable political or activist movement with goals I mostly agreed with to join, but there isn't. There have been multiple instances of anger boiling up into spontaneous action in the last decade, but no lasting political movements with an agenda to capitalize on that anger.

For those still willing to dream big, I don't know why we think asking about the effectiveness of the tactics being used to bring about the world of tomorrow isn't a valid question. What does that say about us if we brush aside questions of utility because we don't even think the oppressed are capable of effectively organizing a political resistance to the oppression?

Violence is an incredibly difficult tool to wield well. No matter how focused you try to make the violence, there will be collateral damage, as the government finds out every time it tries to surgically strike terrorist leaders. I'd be happy if nobody needed to go down that path, if we were able to find a peaceful way to greater equality. 

But absent that, we should stop insisting the efficacy of the protests is a moot question. If we shouldn't be asking "what good will it do?" of random acts of violence, then we certainly have a responsibility to be asking, "What will do good?" I'd like an efficient political left. I've been making do with a disorganized, chaotic Democratic Party since I changed sides in my twenties. I'd love something with more focus, something I could even see myself being an active part of instead of just a default voter for.

All of this concern for sadness among liberal well-wishers, both our own and the sadness of the oppressed as we imagine it, seems to me misplaced. It's an abstract "won't someone please think of the children" kind of concern. The question isn't about caring enough or feeling the right thing. It's about what we want to accomplish and how to do it. Taking the protests and the issues that are behind them seriously seems to me to include questions of efficacy, namely why the left seems to find it so hard to muster any. 

The trough of understanding

I grew up in a town that was nearly all-white. As you'd expect, we had plenty of racism, a fact I was never clearer about than when my family adopted two children from Hong Kong. I saw enough small-minded cruelty directed at my siblings that I hope it won't sound like nostalgic white-washing of the past if I say most people, even in North Canton in the 1980s, were not viciously racist. 1987 was not 1957 and certainly not 1857. If people had not yet begun to understand racism on a deeper level yet--we didn't know what a microaggression was, much less how to distinguish between systemic racism on a macro level and individual bigotry on a person-to-person level--at least most people understood that you should not target another person for cruelty based on how that person looked on the outside. I think most people even understood that the chief reason why you shouldn't wasn't that you would get in trouble for it, but because the person receiving the cruelty was also a human with feelings that needed to be considered.

But if we escaped being an openly dangerous place for minorities, we still developed our own peculiar beliefs about race. We really thought we had it figured out. Racial turmoil didn't exist in North Canton, and we somehow thought that was because we were better at the whole race thing than places where racial conflict existed. It never occurred to us that with twenty black people and a dozen Asians in a city of 15,000, we lacked the quorum necessary for actual conflict between groups with differing interests.

One of the chestnuts I often heard in my hometown about racism was this: "The only people who are racists are those who have never met anyone of another race. Once you get out in the world and meet other people, you see that they're just like you and the hatred goes away." I think this was really just a back-handed way for people to humble-brag that THEY were high-minded enough to talk to one of the few minorities on hand. THEY could at least name a person of color they knew personally, and that was why they were so not racist.

It was a problematic way of thinking, to say the least. We really were a town that used token minorities to prove how not racist we were. There was something of a class component to this--"racism" was what they had in nearby Louisville, where it was rumored the Klan still existed. We weren't those trashy hicks, by God. We really were not able to see that an appropriate level of surface non-racism was something we used like automobiles or houses to set ourselves apart socially from poorer places.

North Canton, Ohio thinks of the dogwood as its official tree. We didn't have an official flower that I knew about, but this might have been it if we did. 

But beyond that, the idea that racism stems from lack of familiarity is just not something I've ever seen hold true in the wide world since I left North Canton. I wouldn't quite be so glib as to say the opposite is true; I'm a misanthrope, but not to that extent. What is true is that when most people come into contact with a culture that is outside their own there is something of a parabola of learning and adaptation.

At first, after making the decision to jump into another culture, it's surprising how easy it is to learn about and accept other cultures. The other person might look different from you, but he's still a person, and you can still relate to one another on many levels without too much trouble, even if you don't speak the same language. You congratulate yourself for how adventurous you are, how cosmopolitan. It feels like getting the hang of understanding this other culture is going to be a breeze. But the whole time you think you're sailing along, you've actually been fooled into thinking it would all be easy because you've been headed downhill.

That's when you realize that people who are different from you are actually...different. Truly and significantly different. At times annoyingly different.

DLI

I'm one of the tens of thousands of people who attended the military's foreign language school, Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California. DLI's students are mostly on the young side. They've been to their service's basic training or boot camp, maybe one other short stop (for Marines, like I was, it was four weeks of basic infantry training), and then on to DLI. Over 90% of the population is under 25, and a good number of that is probably under 20, like I was when I started.

Clearly, I was a lot more mature in the Marine Corps than most of the people I was in with. As you can see, they all appreciated my maturity. 

Boot camp had already offered me a bit of a different world, racially, from the one I grew up in. Nearly half the people in my platoon at boot camp were black, as well as three of my four drill instructors. But boot camp is all non-stop action. There's really not enough time to develop racial tension. In fact, because we were all facing a common enemy in the drill instructors and because we were all just trying to make it through a tough twelve weeks, if anything, there was probably more racial harmony in our squad bay than there is in most mixed-race environments in America. It was tempting at that point to judge that my hometown had it right: all you needed to do in order to get along with others was come into contact with them, and it would all work itself out on its own.

Then came DLI. You'd think DLI would be a place where racism would be less of a problem than it was in most of the rest of the military. We had a population selected for its intelligence. While many of us were young, some had been to college or even graduated. We should have been the group that knew better. And for the first few weeks of class, that was true.

For a while, we all thought Mr. Pak was cool, we all tolerated Mrs. Go even though she was kind of old and weird, and we thought Mr. Lee was smart. When it was time for class to start, we greeted the teacher and gave him our attention, because that's what we were told students in Korea did for their instructors. We wanted to show our instructors as much respect as they would receive in Korea, because we readily accepted the whole notion of jumping into another culture. We thought a good attitude was really all it would take.

But six months into the course, everything had changed. We were sullen about what seemed to us to be the instructors' authoritarian wishes to be honored all the time. There were grumblings about how they smelled like garlic, how they were weird and un-American and how Confucian philosophy had set them back a thousand years. I heard some of the terms for Asian people nobody should ever say. And it wasn't just the Korean students. Back at the Marine barracks, I heard occasional epithets from Marines in the Arabic class about those sand n***ers or towel heads. (I hasten to add that I doubt you'd hear these things today. In the early 90s, the Marines had come a long way to eliminating that kind of ugly bias, but it wasn't gone.)

The worst part about this kind of racial antagonism is that students who had been through the better portion of the basic course at DLI had reason to believe they knew what they were talking about. Nobody could tell them their dislike for another group was rooted in ignorance. They could say: "We've learned about them! We've learned a lot about them, actually, including how to speak their language to some extent. This isn't ignorance; it's the opposite."

It was the classic little bit of learning that Alexander Pope warned could be a dangerous thing. We had drunk deep enough from the well of another culture to realize we'd been lied to when we'd been told people were basically the same. But we hadn't kept drinking long enough to come out the other end and realize that there was a far more profound, mysterious, and even dangerous unifying thread running through humanity than we'd ever dreamed. Unfortunately, a good number of students never got that far. They graduated from DLI, did as little language work in the military as they could get away with, and never studied it again, secure in the knowledge that theirs wasn't just an ignorant bigotry, it was an educated dislike.

I saw this repeated again when I lived in Korea for a few years. A lot of the military-related American community there really liked Korean people, but also grew, over their time there, to strongly dislike parts of Korean culture that were profoundly different. A lot of Americans spoke patronizingly of the "K-factor" whenever we got an answer from a Korean we worked with that didn't make sense and the Korean person was unable to explain the logic tof the answer.

It's only after sticking with it for a very long time that the logic some answers (or non-answers) begin to make some sense to a foreigner. I wouldn't say I've achieved this level (although the always-kind-about-how-good-my-Korean-is Korean people often tell me how "Koreanized" I've become). But I think I've kept at it long enough and hard enough that I've come through the valley and started up the other side. Phew. Now I only need to do this for the other 5,000 ethnicities on Earth, and I'll be somewhat enlightened about my fellow man.

What's the lesson?

I am tempted to draw a simple lesson from what I've witnessed about the trough of understanding other people. Something like how it helps if we all have a common purpose, like we did in boot camp. That's a cliche that probably is true to some extent, of course--there's a reason many of America's first breakthroughs in racial barriers came in the military and sports. But I think a more important lesson is to not simplify how easy racial issues and the cultural barriers that come with them will be to bridge.

Hillary Clinton, the consummate safe politician, often retreated during the 2016 election into the talking point that "we're stronger together." It sounds good, but anyone who's gone more than a few feet down the trough of understanding knows that talking point is far tidier than reality. American togetherness, the plurality of cultures and races that have come to define us, is, in many ways, more difficult than homogeneity. Korea doesn't have racial issues like we do, because it's more than 95% made up of Koreans.

We all know that the reality of dealing with difference is tougher than a slogan like "better together." For people who come from profoundly different places, being better together is an iffy proposition. It requires a lot of work on our part for us to really be better with one another. That's why Trump was able to drive holes through that narrative with a counter-narrative: Look at what all this cultural awareness and plurality has gotten us. We see riots in American cities, because citizens think the police are targeting them. We are losing our "American culture," and people who've lived here their whole lives are seeing the country they knew become unrecognizable. America's focus on racial awareness hasn't improved our racial problems; it's made it worse by keeping them ever at the forefront of our minds.

It's a mesmerizing message for an America that is descending into the trough. Every decision we've made to try to undo our original sin of allowing slavery, along with the many other sins that followed, has resulted in making life a little more problematic, at least for white people. These kinds of decisions make us question truths we thought we knew and ask hard questions, like what fairness really means and how we take the right steps to get there without making it worse. That's actually a sign that we're headed in the right direction. If it feels easy, then you're in the lie on top of the hill in front of the valley. The fact that life has gotten harder since we committed to racial equality in all its elusiveness means we're on the long path to truth and, if we're lucky, a deeper reconciliation. If it were easy, it would mean we're not really on the road.

I think the lesson for me is that we can't try to present an image that fighting for understanding in such a pluralistic society is ever going to be easy or maybe even pleasant. It's a dogfight. It's going to mean people are uncomfortable. All too often, the message seems to be that we can both have our multi-cultural society and still live at ease. We can't. Worse, the message is sometimes that just because it's the right thing to do, it's actually going to make things better in an obvious way. It won't. We commit to it because we believe it is right, even though there are difficulties that come with it.

We already live in a society where everyone is at least occasionally going to feel not at home. We are all in that valley in some sense, all living among at least some people we don't quite understand and aren't sure we're up to getting to understand. The choices are to stay in the valley or push through it. Going back to where we started from sounds nice, but it's just not an option anymore. In a country that feels a little bit foreign to all of us, we can either put in the work and believe it will pay off in some way we cannot yet see, or we can just stay here, angry, wanting to be alone, and missing the way things were. 

Did Derrida and Lacan create post-truth politics?

Carlos Lozada's recent editorial in the Washington Post, in which he both outlined the contours of contemporary post-truth politics and reviewed a number of books on the subject, was the latest in what I take to be a refreshing trend: liberals in a moment of introspection about the role we have played in pushing us to the current political moment. He quotes Lee McIntyre:

McIntyre, whose book is perhaps the most thoughtful of the post-truth set, also urges us to root out untruth before it festers. But he calls for introspection, even humility, in this battle. “One of the most important ways to fight back against post-truth is to fight it within ourselves,” he writes, whatever our particular politics may be. “It is easy to identify a truth that someone else does not want to see. But how many of us are prepared to do this with our own beliefs? To doubt something that we want to believe, even though a little piece of us whispers that we do not have all the facts?”

It’s annoying advice, for sure. It takes the focus off Trump and his acolytes. It casts the gaze inward, toward discomforting self-reflection, at a moment when engagement and argument seem like all that matter.

But that doesn’t make it untrue.

That's good advice, and I wish more people I generally agree with politically followed it. In fact, I'd be more likely to join a political party based on HOW it determines its agenda rather than the agenda itself.

All the theorists I hated in college coming back to haunt me again? 

There's another point Lozada develops in his essay. It has to do with the extent to which post-structuralist, deconstructionist, and post-modern theories that ruled universities from the 70s to the early aughts led to the current difficulty society is having with determining that truth matters. Lozada cites Mike Cernovich, a "pro-Trump troll and conspiracy theorist," the one who put forth the Pizzagate rumors.

“Look, I read postmodernist theory in college,” Cernovich told the New Yorker in 2016. “If everything is a narrative, then we need alternatives to the dominant narrative. I don’t seem like a guy who reads [Jacques] Lacan, do I?”

Many of the books Lozada reviews include a discussion of the influence of theorists like Derrida and Foucault, and whether their out-sized clout among intellectuals for decades helped create the current political scene. I don't think that's completely groundless; in fact, that's a big reason why I disliked these thinkers in college/grad school when they were being pushed on me. In a sense, the whole mess of semiotic deconstructionist thinking left a lot of students wondering why, if Hamlet and Bazooka Joe comics were both culturally dependent narratives, we ought to study one rather than the other. Was our gut feeling that Hamlet was somehow a better, worthier narrative false? I'm sure a lot of students ended up walking away from those thinkers wondering what, if anything, really mattered.

Still, I think the influence of continental, post-modern theorists might be overblown. For one thing, nobody outside of the humanities knew much about them. Their writing was so intentionally abstruse, very few people who weren't in the profession of talking about culture would have picked them up. They resisted the merely curious reader. There was, I think, an intentional use of cognitive dissonance resolution on the part of the post-modernists here. They wanted reading their work to be like college hazing: something so arduous that once you had done it, you'd be much more likely to declare reading the work worth the effort, because you wouldn't want to admit to yourself you'd put all that work into reading something that was stupid.

Secondly, I don't think even most people in the humanities actually "read Lacan."  We read key passages from Lacan and we read explanations of key concepts in Lacan's thought, but hardly anyone actually read full works of Lacan. Foucault was a little more likely to be read, but still, I knew very few people who had actually read an entire book of his. If they had, it was likely Discipline and Punish. Derrida nobody read in full. I don't believe Cernovich really "read Lacan." I think he knows some ideas from Lacan, much like I do, and he is cashing in on those ideas to justify doing what he damn well wants to do.

Those French thinkers were notably slippery when anyone tried to pin them down for criticism that their philosophies led to a nihilism that would be unable to withstand tyranny. They often insisted that they were being humorous and intentionally using hyperbole and that readers who were troubled by their writing misunderstood them. In this, they were not unlike Trump in his Twitter tactics, but the followers of Derrida, although strident in the academy, were less so socially and politically. Partly because understanding what the hell Derrida was even saying was so difficult, deconstructionist students never really became much of a political force.

Finally, I don't think most propagandists need to resort to any French philosophers that are hard to understand. Modern propaganda has changed as technologies do, but the basic techniques of spinning everything to suit your preferences hasn't changed in a very long time. I fell under the sway in the 80s of creation scientists who presented what looked to me then like real science, but was actually just propaganda that aped real science enough to trick the gullible. What they did was really not that different from what a biased news site does now. I doubt any of those creation scientists had read any French philosophy other than Descartes.

The answer to nihilist relativism is not absolute dogmatism 

I'm glad some liberals are taking the time to consider our own role in creating a culture that is cynical about what is true. But because culture seems to list back and forth from side to side wildly like a ship foundering in a storm rather than iron out its wobbles and steady itself, I am afraid that as liberals try to undo the damage we imagine was done by relativist and deconstructionist narratives, we will end up becoming dogmatic about the existence of certain truths. I wrote about something in this vein a couple of months ago, when I worried that the #metoo movement might, while rightly trying to change years of bad male behavior, end up propagating a new sexual puritanism. It would be a puritanism that had room in it for LGBT and non-polar sexual behavior, and it would allow for sex outside of marriage, so it would be better than past versions of sexual puritanism, but it would be puritanism nonetheless.

A Christian friend of mine posted this on Facebook a while back. It's from the Babylon Bee, which is an evangelical satire site in the spirit of the Onion (yes, such a thing exists in the world).

(The actual article is here.)

The point behind the satire is this: once you reject timeless and eternal truths as given and fixed, like God's truths, the slide into a world where nothing is true is inevitable. For the Babylon Bee, the only antidote to post-truth is absolute truth.

It's enticing, but it's entirely wrong. First of all, it is confusing facts with truth. I can assert that the speed of light is known with certainty but the meaning of light is not. I can hold that the Earth is objectively getting warmer but be open to various solutions to what could be done about it.

Secondly, and more to the point, "all truth is relative" is just a dumbed-down version of what many non-absolutists think about truth. For people like me, there is no Platonic beauty, no perfect version of what beauty looks like, and so no version of what beauty is will ever fully express what beauty might encompass. For all that, I still think beauty exists. It exists in a problematic way, but it exists. I don't believe truth is relative. It's just a lot more work to get to than an absolutist would think. It's not a point you arrive it; it's a roughly sketched-out  region on a map with borders that are in dispute. But every argument over where the borders truly lie makes the map clearer and more meaningful, not less so. A willingness to accept a game with difficult and vague rules does not mean I want to stop playing the game altogether.

As rational people--a set which surely includes roughly an equal number of conservatives and liberals-- ponder our role in fixing post-truth politics, we need to keep in mind that our goal is not to re-make a world in which we pretend to be sure of more than we really are. It's to draw a nuanced difference between a world in which meaning is constantly being developed and a world that is meaningless.

Why I sometimes feel like the literary fiction community is full of self-assured, shallow liberals

If anyone were to piece together the occasional political strands of this blog, he might be tempted to conclude that I was a political conservative. After all, I've used a number of posts to complain about liberal rhetoric or liberal culture (here, here, here, here, and here, for starters). But I write these posts because I consider myself to be more liberal than conservative. I'm a mix of some centrist-liberal and some centrist-conservative ideas, but if I had to pick an island to live on and the only two choices were Isla Conservativa and Isla Liberal, I'd go with the liberal one. I write critiquing liberal modes of expression because I don't want the people I share an island with to talk like idiots. We are supposed to be better than that.

Habits of how we talk about complex things should be even less cluttered by bum thinking in the culture surrounding serious literature. Since literature often operates for me as a stand-in for religion, I rely on the people who take that kind of literature to heart to exemplify solid thinking. It ruins my faith in the value of literature when those who are closest to it are lazy thinkers, much as it ruins the faith of a Christian when everyone in the local church is judgmental and selfish.

But the default political views in literary fiction, views that seep into everything, seem to be a very lazy stripe of liberal politics. For example, an essay this past week on the usually excellent and reasonably influential website Lithub committed all the sins I've come to hate from people whose politics I generally agree with. While writing "When Fiction Pulls Back the Curtain on American Conservatism," ostensibly a review of two novels with conservative main characters, Colette Shade first veers to the side to spend more than half the article talking about why American culture is essentially conservative. By "conservative," Shade means "the theoretical voice of animus against the agency of the subordinate classes," a definition she takes from Corey Robin's The Reactionary Mind. Much of her quick analysis of conservatism and the last 50 years of American politics comes from Robin.

In the course of developing her views on conservatism, Shade exemplifies three characteristics of liberal rhetoric I've come to dislike. She dismisses the strengths of conservative arguments, she argues against a straw man version of conservatism, and she is unable to argue effectively for why a liberal philosophy is better, or even what such a philosophy would entail.

Sin number one: dismissing conservatism

But first, an aside

Conservatism and liberalism are two forces that ought to exist in dynamic tension with one another. Consider a poor, black child in Baltimore. She is up against every hurdle in the world. A conservative would say you have to encourage that child to rise up above her circumstances, to believe that with hard work, she can achieve whatever she puts her mind to. The conservative is right. A liberal would say you have to teach the child how the past has conspired against her to put her at a great disadvantage, at no fault of her own. You must make the child understand that if she fails, it is not her fault, because otherwise, the child may grow to think there is something inherently wrong with her instead of the world she was born into. The liberal is also right. For the child to have a chance, she will have to inhabit a space where she both accepts personal responsibility and also understands that there are factors beyond her control. Too much of one and she has no self-esteem. Too much of the other, she has no agency. 

This dynamic tension needs to exist in hundreds of ways. We need personal freedom, but we must also sublimate personal freedoms for the good of the community. We need to try new ideas, but we also need stability. We need peace, but we also need to defend ourselves when peace breaks down. For liberals, conservatism isn't the enemy. It's the balance we need for our ideas to exist. 

And now, what I mean by "dismissing conservatism"

Shade mostly talks of conservatism in neo-Marxist and economic terms, rather than strictly political ones. For her, the conservative world is a world in which "the right of property ownership has superseded even the right to clean air and bodily autonomy for those without means." Conservatives, in her logic, exist only to enrich themselves at the expense of others. Conservatives, in a word, do not care about the good of the world as a whole, they care only for themselves.

There is a reason why conservative ideas got into the world. It wasn't entirely something pushed on the poor by the rich. There were environmental stresses that caused the poor to accept the rule of the rich. The poor continued to accept these rules partly because of political oppression, but also because the poor often judged that rule by the rich was better than the alternative. Pre-historic Central American citizens of large cities chose to continue to live in the town under authoritarian rule rather than flee to the jungle. People made a choice for security over individual freedom. We might deride the choice, but unless we've lived with true environmental stress and scarcity, we really can't judge.

A friend and I were talking recently about the rights of trans-gendered people. He, the more conservative one, made a point I had a hard time arguing with. The fact that our society is able to even talk about these issues is a sign that we are living with abundance. In a time of stressed resources, nobody gives a damn about these kinds of things.

This is what I feel is missing from the Hulu show The Handmaid's Tale. It's easy to root for the oppressed when she's fighting to get the boot of her oppressor off of her neck. But the show takes place in a world that is dying. What would the oppressed do to save that world if they were in charge? We don't know. It's possible that, as in the musical Urinetown, the soft-hearted underdogs would, if put in charge, end up making everything worse.

Shade's essay, though, sees only the boot. It does not see conservatism as a force that keeps community together. There is no dialetic to be achieved through synthesis with its forces; it is only a thing to be annihilated.

The closest Shade comes to offering respect for conservatives is when she calls it a "frighteningly coherent ideology." But she fails to interrogate its coherence. In fact, the internal consistency of some conservative philosophy is what gives it universal and perennial appeal. To be coherent, in philosophy, is difficult to achieve, and not something to be lightly dismissed. Liberals wish they had as much coherence.

This musical ought to be required viewing for anyone about to write a story about a spunky underdog. 

Sin number two: arguing against a straw man version of conservatism 

Shade claims that the novels she is reviewing--The Sport of Kings and Mr. Bridge--provide the reader with "valuable attempts to use fiction to peer behind the facade of American conservatism." She compares reading these books--one about a man who uses his privilege to try to breed Triple Crown-winning horses, the other about a quiet racist--to reading Lolita. She views conservatives on a level with pedophiles in this analogy. She believes we can understand these loathsome beings, but that such understanding should never imply acceptance.

Although assuring the reader that the best fiction "embraces the moral totality of human existence--the range of good and bad actions of which people are capable--and suggests that there is some value in understanding all of it, including the bad," Shade is herself offering only the bad sides of conservative ideals. She has picked two books with awful conservative characters and joined her analysis of them to a one-sided essay about how America is essentially conservative, meaning it always seeks to stomp out the little guy.

Shade briefly alludes to conservative intellectuals who reject Trump, such as the folks at The National Review, but then quickly dismisses such conservatives by claiming they are a small minority and that most Republicans like Trump. She does not interrogate the notion that Trump himself is not, as The National Review would tell us, a conservative, nor does she interrogate whether the Republican Party itself is becoming something other than a conservative party.

She seems to be a breed of liberal who see in conservatives only hypocrisy. There is a kind of liberal who wonders why Christians decry abortion but do not themselves adopt, ignoring the rate at which Christians do, in fact, adopt. There is a kind of liberal who wonders why religious people ignore Jesus's injunctions to help the poor, ignoring that conservatives are either more generous than liberals or at least no less so.

Back when I was a Marine living in Hawaii, my first wife worked for a very conservative oral surgeon. I was just starting, then, to discover a lot of liberal ideology, and I would bring books like A People's History of the United States to the office to read while I waited for my wife to get done working so I could take her home with our one car. The doctor would come out from the back, where Rush Limbaugh was playing on the radio, and criticize the book I had and all such "revisionist history." I would roll my eyes at how little he understood.

But that same doctor routinely provided extensive medical care for young people whose parents, he knew, would never pay their bill. He might grouse about it and criticize parents for having kids they couldn't afford to take care of, but he gave them expert medical care, free of charge. "What am I going to do, let the kids suffer?" he'd say.

Conservative economics basically believes that if people follow their own interests, rather than having those interests directed for them, then economic growth as a whole will be greater. This growth benefits society in a broad sense even while it hurts some individual members of it. Conservative economics does not teach that you cannot donate the money you earn out of your own self-interest to charity. It does not stop the wealthy from forming charitable organizations that carry out large-scale philanthropic projects. And, of course, there a ample examples of rich people doing exactly this kind of thing. Liberals may argue that these are just crumbs to the poor after robbing them of a meal, to which conservatives reply that inequality is better than everyone being equally poor, as has happened in some socialist experiments.

I am not an expert on these things. Most literary writers aren't. We present the world as we see it in great detail. That doesn't make us economists. We can certainly present portraits of the unevenness of capitalism by showing the contradictions within society. We can be the voices of the people who tried for the American Dream and failed for reasons not entirely within their control. We can show the ugliness that exists beneath America's gilded promise. But we ought to be circumspect about conclusions we make with too much certainty. That's not considering "the totality of human existence."

Shade has essentially reviewed two books in which the worst kinds of conservatives are presented, then tried to link these portraits to an argument that conservative ideals are evil and have always threatened to destroy America. If someone else had reviewed two novels with extremist Islamist terrorists, then tied that to a brief history of how Islamist governments violate human rights, readers would have cried foul. But Shade isn't capable of granting that there are good conservatives--and even a good conservatism--with as much liberality as she would grant to Muslims and Islam.

Sin number three: not knowing how to argue for liberal ideology

Right at the outset, Shade acknowledges that she is probably preaching to the choir: "Whether you like it or not (and if you're reading this, the answer is probably "not"), America is a deeply conservative country" (emphasis mine). She is admitting two things by starting this way: that the literary fiction community is deeply liberal, and that she can assume this political viewpoint when addressing the readers of a prominent literary fiction website.

Because Shade is also part of this community, there is a cost to this ideological unity: Shade and others in that community are insular and exhibit a provincial way of thinking. They are so used to assuming a particular political philosophy in those around them, they have lost the ability to even articulate that viewpoint to outsiders. They are like Christians who only associate with other Christians who have lost any ability to "give an answer for the hope within them," to use St. Paul's phrase. If anyone challenges their views, they grow anxious and upset, and rather than engaging in the marketplace of ideas, they insist they do not have to engage with racists and misogynists.

Shade is not, to be sure, without some facts at her disposal. She is able, aided by Robin, to present at least something of a case for how America is fundamentally conservative and why this is bad. She cites several facts of life in America for the poor--many of which I very much agree with as realities that should be at the top of our agenda to address--as examples of the failure of our conservative beliefs.

I’m not referring to policy polls, party registration, or even the fact that Donald Trump is our president. Rather, I am referring to the material realities of daily life in America: the $2 a day on which our poorest citizens live, the for-profit healthcare system and the 45,000 Americans who die because of it every year, the veneration of the U.S. military at sporting events (and even at the putatively liberal Oscars), the fear of a violent black underclass that’s used to justify the imprisonment of millions of mostly poor people, the bipartisan obsession with “competition” and “innovation,” and the corporate exploitation of the natural world that imperils all life on earth.

Again, I agree with a lot of these assertions. However, there is a lack of balance to the picture Shade is presenting here. For example, many countries have a class living in abject poverty. America has the means to at least preserve the lives of most of these people (often through the volunteer efforts at soup kitchens of essentially conservative people). So in some ways, our system is better for our poor than it is elsewhere.

She also fails to acknowledge that there are a lot of conservatives who care about the same things. The libertarian strain of conservative is probably the most ideologically committed to ending mass incarceration. Some conservatives actually take seriously the "conserve" portion of their philosophy. Larry Hogan, the Republican governor of Maryland, just agreed to make Maryland one of the states supporting the Paris accords. Hogan has also asked for Maryland to be exempted from offshore drilling.

Shade is quick to push aside Trump and insist that the problem with conservatives predates him, but the two examples she chooses for novels are exactly the kind of people who put Trump over the top. They are not conservatives in any considered sense.

We have quickly forgotten how much America was not particularly thrilled with either Trump or Clinton. We have ignored the extent to which many people voted for one or the other candidate as a default least-terrible option. We have forgotten that many conservatives voted for Clinton and many liberals thought both candidates so terrible they voted for neither.

But liberals have adopted a siege mindset since the advent of Trump. We have no independent vision of the world, only a rebuttal of all things Trump. We are utterly wrecked. Rather than take this as an opportunity to remake ourselves, we are doubling down on simply opposing what we see as ugly rather than proposing what we view as beautiful.

We could be trying to reach out to conservative intellectuals right now, people who have fled the Republican Party since Trump showed up. We could be remaking a platform that represented a new vision of the sweet spot in the dynamic tension between conservative and liberal ways of looking at the world. Instead, we are constantly focused on cutting up all the bands that tie us together with conservatives in a dynamic tension.

If Trump proves anything, isn't it that America is essentially NOT conservative? That we're willing to blow up the status quo and try new things, even if those new things are really, really stupid?

How this all poisons the world of literary fiction

A lazy, self-assured liberal politics is the default political position in literary fiction. Shade clearly assumes it in her readers. That's the world I'm trying to enter when I submit stories to serious literary journals. That's the assumed view of the world on the minds of many gatekeepers reading those stories, and it's the worldview of the senior editors those stories get passed on to.

It's no accident that the stories I've been able to get published so far are all about people whom capitalism has failed in some sense. I've written a number of stories I think are possibly better than the published ones, but if you don't count my book, I've only had one story about a white, middle-class, American character published. (Joke's on those publishers, though. Nearly all of my downtrodden characters maintain a belief in the American dream, a belief they continue to hold onto at the end of all the stories I had published.)

Literature ought to keep an open mind to the data the universe is giving our senses. That includes data that refutes the deeply-held beliefs of the literary community itself. The literary community ought to be a place full of lively debate of all kinds of beliefs about the world. It should not be a place where one can assume liberal politics when addressing the community. That leads to tepid, boring work. Even when I read something I agree with, I find it dull.

I'm not trying to put myself out like Tim Allen or James Woods do, saying a liberal establishment is against me because of my conservative politics. I am, by and large, politically liberal. If, in the tension between personal freedom and social good, you are not sure what choice to make, I believe you should always err on the side of personal freedom. I'm not asking people to change their political beliefs. I'm begging, with tears in my eyes, for literary people to do what literary people ought to do: consider how what you are saying seems to others who view things differently from you. Consider whether your rhetoric increases understanding and healing or just makes both sides dig the trenches deeper. Consider that your own entrenched beliefs may be part of what brought us Trump, not the antidote to him.

Asking the right kinds of questions of literature

There are two things about my life I've beat to death on this blog: that I used to be a rather devout evangelical Christian, and that when I stopped believing, literature partly filled the gap in my life where Christianity used to be. I ask a lot of literature. So I was intrigued by an essay that appeared on Lithub last week by Rachel Vorona Cote, who confessed to a similar habit. As she put it in her essay ""The Complicated Comforts of Marilynne Robinson,": "I have a nasty habit of asking too much from books."

Her essay is a personal look at her own pain and an attempt to use literature to overcome it. In late 2017, she was discouraged by the first year of Trump's presidency and personally undone by her mother's death. She was in a place where people often turn to religion, but knowing ahead of time from personal experience that heading to church would end up fruitless, she was looking around for something religion-like to fill the void. 

Gilead

She tried Marilynne Robinson's Gilead. It is a very well-regarded novel about an aging Congregationalist minister, John Ames. I read it last year. Almost nothing happens in it in the present. There is some action that takes place in flashback, but much of the action in the novel gets sidetracked by Ames' own theological musings. Still, it's not like being preached to for the length of the novel. Ames, in fact, is a bit too introspective to be a fire-and-brimstone preacher. In one of the few passages I highlighted from the book, he says of himself that "...there is tendency in my thinking, for the opposed sides of a question to cancel each other more or less....If I put my thinking down on paper perhaps I can think more rigorously. Where a resolution is necessary it must also be possible." 

But Ames never really quite succeeds in achieving his resolution. The conflict of the book, if it can even be called that, is that Ames is concerned that the ne'er-do-well son of his lifelong best friend is going to try to move in and marry his much younger wife when Ames dies. But the conflict more or less takes care of itself. 

Cote found comfort in reading the book. She had hoped that Robinson could be her Virgil, "a woman of faith to guide me through her theological web--and who could believe in my stead what I feared couldn't possibly be true. That I would find my mother again. That she had not been obliterated by death. That our shattered country might stumble onto a path of progress, however slow and aching." 

Although Ames asserts that the "purpose of a prophet" is to "find meaning in trouble," you won't find that meaning explicitly stated in Gilead. I found reading it to be akin to looking at a painting for an extended period of time. I was left more with a continuous mood or feeling than with what you might call a discursive kind of impression. 

This was enough for Cote, at least mostly:

 "Gilead could not entirely soothe my despondence: it couldn’t assure me that Mom was peeping into my apartment’s darkened windows, or directing her love-filled gaze at Dad while he slept. It couldn’t even convince me that her soul awaited mine in some obscure afterlife. But John Ames would have believed this to be the case, and somehow, that was enough for me." 

She found that simply vicariously huffing off the faith fumes of someone else was close enough to the experience itself to bring comfort. She read another Robinson novel, Housekeeping, which I have not read. But then, she did something I find telling: she read a book of essays by Robinson. As Cote put it, she was hungering "for a more explicit manifesto." She had been comforted by living in Ames' head for a bit, but she was looking for something that offered a less poetic sense of meaning here in the modern world. 

But Robinson's refusal to be more certain of herself in her non-fiction is a double-edged sword for Cote. Robinson is not an agitator; she is too circumspect about her own conclusions for that. On the one hand, this is the hallmark of a rational thinker, but on the other hand, too much self-circumspection can lead to inaction. 

It's a familiar conundrum for liberals. Cote nicely sums up this conundrum in the concluding paragraphs:

If Robinson’s nonfiction feels insufficient in the face of a political crisis, it’s because certitude seems foolhardy, and a bit smug. The agnosticism that plagues me in mourning strikes me as productive, even necessary in the political sphere. We do not have the luxury of always being sure, especially when we are a solitary voice within a purportedly democratic cacophony. To achieve anything worthwhile we must writhe and grapple like blind animals in a net, stumbling upon deliverance without the satisfaction of knowing it’s within our reach.

          Still, too much fear and doubt becomes unwieldy...

Truth and Comfort

"Too much fear and doubt becomes unwieldy?" Tell me about it. Agnosticism seems to me to be the most intellectually honest position to take, but the thing about agnosticism is that its adherents are, well, agnostic. Which doesn't mean, of course, that they are "indifferent," as many people are now starting to use the word. It means they just don't know what's right. An agnostic can look at the faith of a true believer and be genuinely jealous. Look how that person seems filled with certainty. Look how much she accomplishes. I wish I could believe like she does. 

I don't think it was wrong of Cote to expect a lot from a book. I keep reading because I am constantly hoping I will find something that can help me resolve my honest uncertainty with my desire to be more certain. But I'm not sure Gilead is the right place to look. Musicians and prophets may both have been inspired by the gods, but they bring different things. Musicians--and Gilead is more like music than a sermon--bring comfort. Prophets bring truth that demands action. 

There's nothing wrong with comfort, but even an agnostic like me can see the wisdom in C.S. Lewis's warning: "If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth--only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair." That's the reason Cote found herself wanting to read non-fiction: she wanted truth. 

In fact, I'd say that it's only because Cote was steadfast in wanting truth that she found any comfort in Robinson at all. It wasn't a deep and satisfying comfort, but it was a small comfort. It was enough to keep going on. And maybe that's the most an intellectually honest person will ever get. The most you can hope for is to string together enough moments of hard-won comfort until you reach a point, like John Ames did, where you live long enough "to outlast any sense of grievance you may acquire." 

The Book of Mormon and Donald Trump: How important is it to be right about everything?

A week ago, I put a bet on the Philadelphia Eagles to win the Super Bowl. I don't watch a lot of football anymore. There are a lot of reasons why I've cut back on my football watching over the years, but the main reason is just because I've decided I don't want to spend too much time in my life doing unproductive things. So I only watch the playoffs.

The guy I made the bet with is a pretty big fan. He has a fantasy team in a league with a cash payout, so he pays close attention to the week-to-week goings on in the league. I couldn't have named more than three players on the Eagles, and probably not more than ten on the Patriots. He knew every player who would be involved.

I only made the bet because I like to have something to balance out what I want. That is, whenever I do bet (and it's always a small bet), I bet against the team I hope wins. That way, I get something no matter what happens in the game.

I ended up winning the bet. My lack of a system beat his highly organized system. My lack of knowledge beat his extensive knowledge. Not just his--nearly all the experts picked the Patriots.

Results and expertise

Whenever the experts are wrong about something--like, say, the 2016 presidential election--there's a temptation to make fun of them for their self-imagined expertise. If there's anything the Trump presidency has been about, in fact, it's been a war against the culture of rule by expertise. And why wouldn't it be? Everyone said he had no chance of winning. The "experts" all wrote him off as a joke, but he persevered, energized a base of voters who had never voted before or hadn't voted in a long time, and won.

So when it came time to run the country, when everyone was saying that now that he'd won, he needed to learn to be presidential, he went his own way again. He has kept on tweeting. He hired a cabinet and a staff with a few old pros, but a whole lot more genuine neophytes to politics. (To the extent he has hired anyone--there are still a lot of jobs unfilled.) He doesn't even feel it's important to be informed about the world in any exhaustive sense, as every other president in recent memory has. He gets a hyper-trimmed-down version of the Presidential Daily Brief, and that's on the few days when he actually chooses to get the brief at all.

This tendency to ignore the experts drives me crazy. I may have gotten lucky in the Super Bowl, but that doesn't mean I have some brilliant intuition the experts lack. Most of the time, they'll be correct more often than I am. And even when they're wrong, they'll have a more valuable explanation than I will of why the unexpected happened. Everyone knows the unexpected can happen. As they say, that's why they play the game. That doesn't invalidate expertise.

More than that, the repudiation of expertise is a threat to me. I'm someone who makes a living off my reputation as an expert. If the culture begins to revile expertise and look for simple explanations that tell us what we want to hear, I may be out of a job.

The revulsion of expertise isn't new in America, of course. The earliest great American literature, Washington Irving's Legend of Sleepy Hollow, features the jock Bram Bones getting the better of the nerd Ichabod Crane. The jock picking on the nerd is a well-established trope in America. Even stories that seem to celebrate nerds, like Big Bang Theory, are simultaneously mocking them, making it look like anyone who has worked to achieve mastery in a subject is automatically socially inept and clueless outside of his narrow field of mastery.

The Book of Mormon and when facts might not matter that much

I recently confessed to liking musicals. Here's a lesson from another one. Trey Parker and Matt Stone's 2012 smash "The Book of Mormon" gets plenty of laughs from picking at the dogmas of Mormonism.

But the musical is doing a lot more than just making fun of Mormon beliefs. It seems to be saying two things at once, both "Look, I could never actually believe this stuff," but also "but it obviously does really good things for the people who do believe it, so far be it from me to tell you to stop believing it." Or, as the end of one South Park episode had it:

The truth is that even for us experts, there is a lot we have to admit we don't know. Friends are always asking me, because I've been following Korean issues for a long time, about what I think will happen on the peninsula. The truth is that I don't know anymore than anyone else. I can tell you a lot more details than the average person about the background to the current situation. I can explain why one outcome or another might be possible. But I don't know what's going to happen.

If you were trapped beneath a giant box suspended in the air, and that box was held by a rope to the ceiling, you'd want to know if the rope would hold it. I'm like a physicist trapped next to you. I can tell you what I suspect the tensile strength of the rope might be, and I can estimate how much weight it might be capable of holding given the particular angles of the pulley system. But if I don't know what's in the box, I can only guess what will happen. I can know everything about the physics of falling and nothing about whether this object will fall.

The outcome belongs to God

I'm something of an enthusiast for studying the American Civil War. I didn't mean to become such an enthusiast, but living here in Maryland, within 100 miles of most of the major battle sites of the Eastern theater, it's pretty compelling to go and walk the grounds where the war was fought. I've always been fascinated by Robert E. Lee. He is remembered as a great General, and well he should be. But if you've ever been near a group of officer candidates or military school students at a place like Antietam or Gettysburg, you'll note that the instructor is struggling to not simply say that Lee screwed up at these battles.

In fact, Lee made a lot of decisions that were questionable from a military standpoint. He was often rashly aggressive, although he realized the North could replace lost men and supplies much more easily than he could. He had to avoid attrition. In the Civil War, taking a good defensive position and waiting for the enemy to come to you was usually a winning strategy, but Lee ignored that strategy often.

The amazing thing is that Lee often made his bad choices work out. It's difficult to say why, but I'd guess at least part of the reason was because his men believed in every choice he made. The Confederate States of America had strong lieutenants and a strong belief that God would give them the victory. Lee himself, although he carefully planned his campaigns, also believed in the end that the battle belonged to God. The army didn't know enough to realize it should fail, and so it held off failure for an impressively long time.

There is an old saw in the military that no plan survives first contact with the enemy. Lee, understanding this, realized that although he had a responsibility to plan as best as he could, he also could not be paralyzed by the contradictory advice his experts would offer him. Everyone raised to think in a university learns that all arguments have many sides, many competing arguments, and good academics sometimes learn to balance those sides until they almost argue themselves out of having a viewpoint. That's the point of academics. But outside the academy, where decisions have to be made with imperfect knowledge, decision makers have to compartmentalize what they don't know from what they must do.

Trump has not been without victories

For me, the main Trump approach to governance that flies in the teeth of expertise is his switch from liberal globalism's "win-win" approach to a competitive model. And though the majority of experts decry this change, it has won Trump some victories. The Chinese, for example, seem to be cooperating with enhanced sanctions on North Korea. Trump's blunt, aggravated bluster against North Korea, which many were sure would push the Chinese toward its traditional ally, has, for now, had the opposite effect. Even though sanctions on North Korea had been taking a toll during the Obama administration, everything on Daily NK, the South Korean journal with sources inside North Korea, seems to indicate that sanctions have begun to bite much harder in the last few months.

Does this mean Trump's madman approach is working, even if he is, possibly, literally a madman and not just someone playing a part? (And is madman theory even more effective with an actual madman?) Or is Trump just temporarily on a lucky streak?

Expertise does matter, but experts need to remember humility

General Eisenhower once said that plans are worthless, but planning is everything. Of course expertise matters. Of course leaders have an obligation to understand the landscape of their decisions. But in the end, it is impossible to make a perfect plan. In the end, focusing on all one does not know can prevent someone from doing anything. I'm a big fan of agnosticism, of admitting our ignorance. And I think it's okay to avoid action where we don't know enough to act. But sometimes, situations arise where inaction is simply not acceptable, and in those times, we have to act with imperfect knowledge. 

It is possible that an imperfect plan, carried out resolutely by competent lieutenants, can succeed where a better plan carried out in doubt may fail. 

Of course we who call ourselves experts have a responsibility to share all the relevant knowledge we have with those who must make decisions. We have a responsibility to insist leaders listen. But we also have a responsibility to realize with humility the limits of our expertise, which is, in the grand scheme, quite limited indeed. 

Trey Parker, in commenting on religious beliefs of friends while discussing his musical, had this to say:

I have religious friends, and they're like, 'Well, if you look, it's proven.' And you're like, 'No, it's not proven.' Don't try to tell me that you can prove this stuff. Just say 'I believe it,' and I'm down with you. Don't mix the two together. Because you can't logically say, 'We know that Jews came from Jerusalem and settled in America and turned into Native Americans.' That just doesn't make any sense. But at the same time, if you say, 'I believe this,' I say, 'OK. Cool, man.' Because at the end of the day, we all have certain beliefs and deeply held things that probably don't make a lot of sense to anybody else.

Experts can resist claims that clearly are not factual. If Trump said Kim Jong Un were insane, a Korea expert could offer proof that this isn't true. A Korea expert can offer alternate global strategies based in fact. But nobody has it all right. Nobody has enough of a grasp of reality to offer an iron-clad promise that any particular way forward is the right one. The Eagles might win the Super Bowl. Mormons might be happy, even if they're wrong.