We have to endure the discordance between imagination and fact. It is better to say ‘I am suffering’ than ‘this landscape is ugly’.
—Simone Weil
Let me start by saying that I am pissed off quite often. I appreciate a good amount of anger and I am not above some quality venting. I’m a practitioner of keep’n-it-real-ism, as well as stick-it-to-the-man-eosis. At times, to quote a line from American History X, “I believe in death, destruction, chaos, filth, and greeeed!”
I am also sorry for all of these things, justified or not.
Everyone knows Walt Whitman‘s line about contradicting ourselves: “Very well, I contradict myself. (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” But I prefer a lyric from Joe Pugg: “I have come here to say exactly what I mean — and I mean so many things.”
The funny thing about the short “venting” rant I linked to above is that I originally wrote it toward the end of a post where I was trying to do the exact opposite, to resist what every bone in my body wants to do — namely, to rail against “all the sons of bitches who still block up their ears and close their eyes” (to borrow a phrase from one of the greatest women of the 20th century.) I was trying to defend the role of sympathy. Naturally, I thought that flatly calling everyone stupid undermined the point, so I took it out. But it also didn’t feel right pretending I don’t feel it and didn’t write it — and of course, it felt good venting it. So I posted it by itself.
I am a multitude, and I mean so many things.
So yes, whenever Nick Catoggio says — specifically or in any of a thousand other ways — that Republican voters are “the supreme political villains of this era,” I say to myself, Preach on, brother.
But like any person with an interest in the character and destiny of souls — my own not least of all — I am also capable of being shamed for the excesses of my contempt. I need to hear a blessèd peacemaker once in a while. And my very safe bet is that, like it or not, you do too.
Here’s Jonah Goldberg, writing in the pages of the same online magazine as Catoggio:
Assuming that all Americans share precisely your understanding of Trump—or any candidate—and voted for him anyway is just wrong, factually and, I would say, morally. Saying that a Latino mechanic in Philly who voted for Trump magically became a fascist the moment he filled the oval for someone you think is a fascist is magical thinking. And if you’re a Democrat who wants to win back that mechanic in 2028, calling him a fascist isn’t going to get you very far. Persuading him that he was wrong is a much more fruitful avenue.
Jonah Goldberg is not my favorite journalist. (Though he may be my favorite pundit podcaster.) But I’ve printed out that newsletter (in booklet/bulletin form) to pass around the house, and I’m tempted to print a hundred more and walk down the street passing them out like a Jehovah’s Witness. A piece like this gets pretty intense reactions, especially this close to the election-that-didn’t-go-well, because it doesn’t sufficiently meet our anger. (NB: If it means anything to you, by any measure that’s being used in American culture, Jesus didn’t sufficiently meet our anger either.) But I think that it’s exactly what people need to hear.
Most thoughtful people I know or read have been right, I think, to point out that the excesses of contempt for the political left are a driving force, if not the main driving force, on the political right. So how do we answer it? Do we borrow the playbook and join them? Trump says that the real problem America faces is the radical left, the “enemy within.” Am I supposed to believe that barely closeted “enemy within” talk directed back at his supporters is better?
Nope. Join the inferno if you like. But I don’t want to — no matter how much I feel like I want to.
I admit, Goldberg’s suggestion that we choose patient persuasion over belittling dismissal may seem quaint, even simple-minded at this point. I honestly don’t know anybody, Left or Right, who I would call even a little bit persuadable — if by “persuadable” we mean “open to the Socratic method of dialogue.” That clearly doesn’t work, at least not where we think it does, no matter how much people want to believe in the shining brightness of their rationality. As I quoted from Norman Wirzba this week:
People find it hard to live honestly with themselves. They prefer to repeat to themselves and to others stories about the past that cast them in a good or at least acceptable light. The impulse reverberates in the cultural liturgies that perpetuate myths of a community’s or nation’s innocent and glorious past. But the impulse also resounds in individuals, as Jacqueline Rose observes: “Our minds are endlessly engaged in the business of tidying up the landscape of the heart so that… we can feel better about ourselves.”
Our … human … minds are endlessly engaged in this self-defensive activity. And breaking free of it, to whatever degree we can, involves enough luck and miracle to make humility not just a good disposition, but a moral obligation.
Fifteen years ago if you had told Republicans that they were just a short time away from overwhelmingly supporting one of the lowest con men on the planet for president and offering pathetic excuses for Putin as the defender of conservative values, they would have called you crazy. But it’s also true that if, at the same time, you told Democrats that they would be vying for the expansion of NATO and the miltibillion-dollar sale of weapons to Ukraine, they also would have called you crazy. I chose to vote for the Democratic ticket this time around, and I strongly believe I was right to do so. But in a room full of clocks without batteries, I’m hesitant to claim too much moral superiority for choosing the one that happens to be telling the right time at that moment.
This isn’t about leveling any fields or bothsidesing the political moment. I’m not even trying to say that we all need to “see the good” in everyone. In fact, what I really want to do is take Goldberg’s point and put a decisively negative spin on it. As I’ve said before, “It’s nice to think about the world being divided into smart people and stupid people. But the truth is that anybody — anybody — no matter how intelligent, can be as dumb as a rock.”
My main self-assessing takeaway from the Braver Angels workshop last month, as you can probably see, is that my “centrism” — ideally an opportunity to hear people on both sides — is often experienced as little more than equal-opportunity disdain: You know what I’m good at? Mocking everyone in any political direction who I think is a moron or a hypocrite. It’s fun, and more people should join me in the middle. But does that make me better than them?
Of course it doesn’t. Being in the middle is meaningless, unless you can define it as being among.
There are no rose-colored glasses within a hundred miles of this post. I’m not closing my eyes or blocking up my ears. When David Frum says of the election, and the electorate, “Don’t underestimate how bad this is,” I’m taking note and you should too. But what I’m also saying is that every single one of us needs to pull back the rage-blinders and see the desperate need for mercy in every corner of this country, no matter how anyone votes or why we assume they voted the way they did.
“Voting is not a window into the soul,” Goldberg emphasizes. And I believe he is correct. More importantly, I believe that to move on from this election we must assume that this correct, we must live and talk as if it is. The alternative is only anger, self-righteousness, and further separation.
People may not be persuadable by reason, and we don’t need to assume that they are. But we do have to live as if people are persuadable by love, mercy, and the life you are willing to live with them. This is, after all, the most meaningful form the truth ever takes.
Love, mercy, and a life lived well right along side them. If you are not physically using these to persuade others, then you are not really trying to persuade anyone.
There is a story that Stanley Hauerwas has recounted about returning to Texas from college and receiving a restored deer hunting rifle from his dad. The young Hauerwas looked the gun over, handed it back and said “That’s beautiful work, Daddy, but you know someday somebody is going to have to take these goddamn things away from you people.”
Hauerwas doesn’t have only one point to make with that story, but he has a main one and it might not be what you think. Hauerwas has spent a lifetime denouncing violence, especially the violence of Americans. He hates guns and believes he spoke truthfully to his father. But he also knows that he was at that time becoming something of an “east coast shithead,” returning to Texas from a world at Yale that his father probably couldn’t even imagine. Moreover, he knows that he failed to see and appreciate his father’s world, and he failed to communicate the love his father put into the gift. He knows that he should have told the truth as he understood it in a way that also gestured an appreciation for the love that was given as his father understood it. “But I didn’t really know how to do that,” he says.
I will continue to rant, to mourn the loss of the world I thought existed but that was always wholly mistaken. And when I drive up to central Maine on Monday for 5-a.m. coffee with my Dad and my uncles, the loggers and the farmers — all but one of whom have supported Trump — I probably won’t resist the urge to call someone stupid. But I will do it to their face while laughing at their jokes and listening to their stories, their grievances, and their personal insights.
Do you have a better idea?
These are my multitudes, the many, many things I mean. And the only way to work them out is face to face. “We are not enemies,” as the ending of American History X so wrenchingly puts it. If Lincoln could say it, and mean it, then so can I. So can you.
