The Faint-hearted Fabian
Well, that was interesting.
It's not often I get to talk to people (as in "talk to", as opposed to "talk at" [my students] or "talk past" [colleagues, etc]), so of course I jumped at the chance, once it turned out that, miraculously, one of my meandering comments on YT had actually been replied to by a real human. My interlocutor was a feminist, and the topic was (once again) "toxic masculinity", but you can't have everything. It could be worse: I could have been talking to a Canadian about hockey, or someone from Missouri about the boil on his bum.
The conversation chuntered along nicely, with clarifications on both sides, until this appeared onscreen (quoting from memory, I hope accurately):
""Men view themselves a certain way and this needs to be undone."
You know that sinking feeling when you've been chatting to an apparently perfectly ordinary person in the pub and suddenly they casually make some outrageous racist remark as if it were the most normal thing in the world, and you realize that from now on it's either (a) cautiously humour him/her, steering the conversation away to safe topics, until the saving phone call and excuse to leave comes through, (b) summon up some adrenalin and wade into the quagmire of mulish prejudice, cudgels a-whirling, or (c) pull a sickly face, spit out some dyspeptic expletive and abruptly leave, risking a small scene? Well, that feeling. And the older you get, the more (a) you slip into. Anything else seems like just too much effort.
But blogging is about making that bit of extra effort, so here goes.
First off: yes, I know it cuts both ways. Quite possibly my interlocutor would be able to trace some "oh, no, not this" moment in the conversation when she suddenly realized I was profoundly weird. I very possibly am weird. I sometimes think there's an awful lot of self-awareness I quite clearly lack. For example, several people, at different times, have told me that I am quite obviously very "depressed", despite my not having said so and not having ever entertained the slightest suspicion that I might be. Is it possible to be "depressed" without knowing it? I tend to identify depression as "that terrifying thing that happened to me for a year when I was 17-18 and fortunately recurred only briefly and fitfully thereafter", which seems to settle the question, but maybe that wasn't depression at all but something else for which I never learned the name. I call it Black Dog, and am thankful for having kept pretty much out of its way. I hope you, Gentle Reader, never get Black Dog. You certainly don't deserve to. No one does.
There's also the fact that when I think I am being at my most optimistic and life-affirming, I am accused of "pessimism" and a "jaded tone". Apparently I am some sort of walking area of low pressure. Please adjust your barometers accordingly.
In short, I don't know how weird I am. All I can say is one of us has to be. Either I am weird for thinking that wanting to 'undo" the view men have of themselves is not a reasonable or generous aspiration, or she is weird for having such an aspiration in the first place. We can't both be plumb-centre sane.
Here is a picture of how I imagined my interlocutor at this point in the conversation:
Brits will identify this instantly as the famous window of the infamous Fabian Society, about which more anon. My interlocutor, of course, is the person in red, holding aloft a hammer with which s/he proposes to smash the world into smithereens, in order to (as the legend explains) "remould it nearer to the heart's desire". Many have seen in this window the quintessence of evil (destroying the planet, even with the laudable aim of moulding it into a nicer shape, perhaps adding a handle and a spout for Mrs Webb to pour her tea from, isn't a nice thing to do really); I wouldn't go quite so far, because I generally think the people who do evil things are not evil themselves, just not quite awake. But once you've seen this haunting picture it never quite goes away, I find, like say Picasso's Guernica. It epitomizes the revolutionary impulse to destroy in order to re-create. And it's even more disturbing when you realize that it was not intended as satire, or as warning or denunciation, but as a bald statement of purpose.
"This needs to be undone". A remark that would seem to apply casually to an ill-knotted hair ribbon, used instead to refer to the innermost self-awareness of half of humanity. I don't really feel up to the task, right now, of speculating what kind of mind would feel threatened by how others "view themselves", or what sort of arrogance is required to suppose that one has any true idea of what this "view" might consist of, beyond those crude external manifestations which were supposed to be the subject of discussion: all I can say is look at the picture, and imagine all the tiny inhabitants of that planet that our nattily-attired Fabians propose to smash to rubble, and find your own words for the precise degree of concern or of understanding that our brave revolutionaries show towards the plight of their intended victims. (It's surely no accident that the Window in question was re-inaugurated by one Tony Blair, perhaps the most notorious extant example of what happens when a vacuum of empathy is ushered into a seat of power.)
As I say, given the choice I tend to go with assuming a lack of understanding rather than actual evil intention, leaving open the possibility that the mistake may turn out to be my own. To determine whose mistake it actually is, here is a list of the things I think need to be understood, on the grounds that if one does understand them, one is thereafter cured of the desire to "remould" a planet inhabited by 7.2 billion people. You may beg to differ:
1. All of us, that is, all of the 7.2 million humans plus that incalculable number of other living creatures whose applications to be admitted to the category of sentient beings worthy of consideration are currently under bureaucratic review, all of us inhabit the same world, the same reality.
2. However, none of us has the same vision of that reality. It is not given to anyone to understand it completely or in all its complexity. Inevitably, our vision of the world is mediated by rudimentary models and cartoon narratives. Part of that collection of mediating filters is provided for us by our genetic config, part by the culture in which we grow up: the rest is what we do with both (and in this we have a degree of freedom unmatched by any other sentient creature, as far as we know).
3. Given that we are not even very good at mapping the material world with close attention to detail, and given that we come pre-configured with a whole set of atavistic reflexes variously triggered by the appearance and behaviour of others, it is no surprise that we are crap at reading other people, and tend to impose tribalistic categories on our perception. However, we are also, as rational beings, granted the ability to know that we are crap at reading other people, and to make allowances for this wide margin of error.
4. Making allowances for this wide margin of error when it comes to other people tends to manifest itself in an attitude of tolerance and what Buddhists call "loving kindness"(metta). Such an attitude, of proven social value, is incompatible with wishing to conduct extensive rewiring of the mental circuitry of half of the human species. Or so it seems to me.
If I am wrong in any of the particular above, or if the logic is faulty, no doubt the enlightened reader will be able to point out the location and nature of the defective reasoning (i.e. why I am weird). I promise, for my part, to listen.
It's not often I get to talk to people (as in "talk to", as opposed to "talk at" [my students] or "talk past" [colleagues, etc]), so of course I jumped at the chance, once it turned out that, miraculously, one of my meandering comments on YT had actually been replied to by a real human. My interlocutor was a feminist, and the topic was (once again) "toxic masculinity", but you can't have everything. It could be worse: I could have been talking to a Canadian about hockey, or someone from Missouri about the boil on his bum.
The conversation chuntered along nicely, with clarifications on both sides, until this appeared onscreen (quoting from memory, I hope accurately):
""Men view themselves a certain way and this needs to be undone."
You know that sinking feeling when you've been chatting to an apparently perfectly ordinary person in the pub and suddenly they casually make some outrageous racist remark as if it were the most normal thing in the world, and you realize that from now on it's either (a) cautiously humour him/her, steering the conversation away to safe topics, until the saving phone call and excuse to leave comes through, (b) summon up some adrenalin and wade into the quagmire of mulish prejudice, cudgels a-whirling, or (c) pull a sickly face, spit out some dyspeptic expletive and abruptly leave, risking a small scene? Well, that feeling. And the older you get, the more (a) you slip into. Anything else seems like just too much effort.
But blogging is about making that bit of extra effort, so here goes.
First off: yes, I know it cuts both ways. Quite possibly my interlocutor would be able to trace some "oh, no, not this" moment in the conversation when she suddenly realized I was profoundly weird. I very possibly am weird. I sometimes think there's an awful lot of self-awareness I quite clearly lack. For example, several people, at different times, have told me that I am quite obviously very "depressed", despite my not having said so and not having ever entertained the slightest suspicion that I might be. Is it possible to be "depressed" without knowing it? I tend to identify depression as "that terrifying thing that happened to me for a year when I was 17-18 and fortunately recurred only briefly and fitfully thereafter", which seems to settle the question, but maybe that wasn't depression at all but something else for which I never learned the name. I call it Black Dog, and am thankful for having kept pretty much out of its way. I hope you, Gentle Reader, never get Black Dog. You certainly don't deserve to. No one does.
There's also the fact that when I think I am being at my most optimistic and life-affirming, I am accused of "pessimism" and a "jaded tone". Apparently I am some sort of walking area of low pressure. Please adjust your barometers accordingly.
In short, I don't know how weird I am. All I can say is one of us has to be. Either I am weird for thinking that wanting to 'undo" the view men have of themselves is not a reasonable or generous aspiration, or she is weird for having such an aspiration in the first place. We can't both be plumb-centre sane.
Here is a picture of how I imagined my interlocutor at this point in the conversation:
Brits will identify this instantly as the famous window of the infamous Fabian Society, about which more anon. My interlocutor, of course, is the person in red, holding aloft a hammer with which s/he proposes to smash the world into smithereens, in order to (as the legend explains) "remould it nearer to the heart's desire". Many have seen in this window the quintessence of evil (destroying the planet, even with the laudable aim of moulding it into a nicer shape, perhaps adding a handle and a spout for Mrs Webb to pour her tea from, isn't a nice thing to do really); I wouldn't go quite so far, because I generally think the people who do evil things are not evil themselves, just not quite awake. But once you've seen this haunting picture it never quite goes away, I find, like say Picasso's Guernica. It epitomizes the revolutionary impulse to destroy in order to re-create. And it's even more disturbing when you realize that it was not intended as satire, or as warning or denunciation, but as a bald statement of purpose.
"This needs to be undone". A remark that would seem to apply casually to an ill-knotted hair ribbon, used instead to refer to the innermost self-awareness of half of humanity. I don't really feel up to the task, right now, of speculating what kind of mind would feel threatened by how others "view themselves", or what sort of arrogance is required to suppose that one has any true idea of what this "view" might consist of, beyond those crude external manifestations which were supposed to be the subject of discussion: all I can say is look at the picture, and imagine all the tiny inhabitants of that planet that our nattily-attired Fabians propose to smash to rubble, and find your own words for the precise degree of concern or of understanding that our brave revolutionaries show towards the plight of their intended victims. (It's surely no accident that the Window in question was re-inaugurated by one Tony Blair, perhaps the most notorious extant example of what happens when a vacuum of empathy is ushered into a seat of power.)
As I say, given the choice I tend to go with assuming a lack of understanding rather than actual evil intention, leaving open the possibility that the mistake may turn out to be my own. To determine whose mistake it actually is, here is a list of the things I think need to be understood, on the grounds that if one does understand them, one is thereafter cured of the desire to "remould" a planet inhabited by 7.2 billion people. You may beg to differ:
1. All of us, that is, all of the 7.2 million humans plus that incalculable number of other living creatures whose applications to be admitted to the category of sentient beings worthy of consideration are currently under bureaucratic review, all of us inhabit the same world, the same reality.
2. However, none of us has the same vision of that reality. It is not given to anyone to understand it completely or in all its complexity. Inevitably, our vision of the world is mediated by rudimentary models and cartoon narratives. Part of that collection of mediating filters is provided for us by our genetic config, part by the culture in which we grow up: the rest is what we do with both (and in this we have a degree of freedom unmatched by any other sentient creature, as far as we know).
3. Given that we are not even very good at mapping the material world with close attention to detail, and given that we come pre-configured with a whole set of atavistic reflexes variously triggered by the appearance and behaviour of others, it is no surprise that we are crap at reading other people, and tend to impose tribalistic categories on our perception. However, we are also, as rational beings, granted the ability to know that we are crap at reading other people, and to make allowances for this wide margin of error.
4. Making allowances for this wide margin of error when it comes to other people tends to manifest itself in an attitude of tolerance and what Buddhists call "loving kindness"(metta). Such an attitude, of proven social value, is incompatible with wishing to conduct extensive rewiring of the mental circuitry of half of the human species. Or so it seems to me.
If I am wrong in any of the particular above, or if the logic is faulty, no doubt the enlightened reader will be able to point out the location and nature of the defective reasoning (i.e. why I am weird). I promise, for my part, to listen.
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