A point comes in a damaged relationship that it becomes a damaging relationship. 

Habits of (mis)perception and (mis)reaction become difficult to break, because they enter from both sides of the relationship. A feedback cycle of injustice leads to unjust emotional response, which leads to escalating mutual injustice, and the dysfunction takes over. Even the possibility of this occurring creates tension and hyperalertness and leads to strained unnatural behavior that arouses suspicion and anxiety.

And each time an attempted reconciliation fails, new evidence of futility accumulates — new symptoms and clues to watch out for if, god forbid, there is a next time. And each time next time is allowed to occur and it all goes wrong again like it always does we are forced to witness our selves as we were five, ten, twenty years ago — worst-selves we have invested years into outgrowing. We have gotten nowhere. It takes days, weeks, months to recover who we have worked to become. The stakes of trying again increase with every failure.

The effort required to overcome the damage is enormous. The emotional self-discipline needed to resist the compulsions of the worst perceptual and reactive habits is much higher than the level needed to function gracefully in healthy relationships. The retraining of trust, of interpretation, of communication is much harder and less pleasant than starting fresh with brand-new relationships. 

Why would anyone make such an effort? The other has become monstrous. The other makes us ugly to ourselves. Why would we do it? 

I can think of two reasons. The first is practical. These relationships, in some strange way, remain inside us as inaccessible wounds. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say parts of ourselves are stranded in the estranged relationship, in a no man’s land beyond the reach of our independence. The only way to regain access is to collaborate on mutual healing. We can divert attention, distract ourselves, try burying the offness in new interests and feelings, but the pain remains there as a pervasive existential ambience. Something urgently needs a hearing but it cannot be said or heard. To stop trying means to accept this ambience as permanent.

The second reason is religious. If the other has us so wrong, isn’t it possible that we have them wrong, too? Something belonging to their own imagination seems to obstruct their understanding of who we really are beyond their image of who we are, but they can’t see it. How could we know if we were doing the same? Why shouldn’t we assume this is the case? What imaginings are we superimposing over the reality of who they are that we can’t see because we have mistaken it for who they really are? What would happen if this image-imposition were arrested and both allowed the reality of other to shine through and be witnessed in its fullest value? Is it possible to not want this?

Isn’t this mutual shining and seeing what forgiveness really is? It is the opposite of the popular new age forgiveness of “working on myself” by deciding to think and feel more positively and charitably about some figure who has been reduced to a figment of memory and fiction and willing our brains into believing that we believe it? This is solipsism — the very thing religion transcends. Rather it is an active inviting of another to surprise us with the truth of who they really are, and why they are worth knowing and loving, despite all flaws? This is transcendence of the self into what lives beyond the self, by way of discovering real, tangibly felt love for one’s enemy, one’s neighbor and one’s self. It is for this reason forgiveness has religious importance.

But until that effort is made from both sides, friendship cannot exist. Not because the status of friendship has been revoked, but because friendship exists as a fact of life and death. If friendship is not mutually given life, it does not live and there is no friendship, no matter how peacefully it lies where it is laid. 

But fortunately, religion differs from biology. In religion death is reversible. All it requires is the self, and realities transcending self — the most important ones being the people around us — to commune and to ask together for life.

* 

At the beginning of writing this, I planned to conclude with a point that sometimes we must recognize that reconciliation will never happen. We must amputate, and lose some of who we are in a stranger who will never know us. From time to time we will notice the aches of a phantom limb, but this is better than hacking off new pieces in the attempt to reconcile with someone who is hardened against it. We need closure. 

I crave closure. I doubt I am allowed to have it. It might be unforgivable.

From John Irving, A Prayer For Owen Meany:

When someone you love dies, and you’re not expecting it, you don’t lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time — the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes — when there’s a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she’s gone, forever — there comes another day, and another specifically missing part.

An ideal tool:

When used, it disappears.

When contemplated, it consecrates.

What has happened to our attitudes toward bigotry? I used to feel like I was a member of a vast alliance of people committed to fighting bigotry. We believed it was possible, and in optimistic moods perhaps even even inevitable, that bigotry would be overcome. In the last three or so years, though, I have felt this alliance evaporate. One by one, then en masse, people have succumbed to a belief that bigotry is innate and ineradicable, and that the belief that we shall overcome it is at best naive, but more likely covert or unconscious bigotry in action.

It seems that anyone who belongs to my category, whether we realize it or not, is bigoted, and is therefore not qualified to contribute to the discourse. To those on the right, my category is Liberal Elite. I have been accused of being prejudiced against the common folk, who by nature, are unavoidably xenophobic. As the majority they have democratic prerogative to preserve their majority. Who am I to say they do not have a right to determine their own cultural climate, by deciding (in racial terms!) who and who does not enter their country? When being attacked from the left I am a member of the Dominant Class — white, male, cis, heterosexual, bourgeois  — who cannot know what it is like to be otherwise, whose fundamental conceptions have been shaped from birth by the experiences of someone who enjoys privileged status. I should know that the best response to understanding my privilege is to “STFU” and allow those who haven’t had their turn to speak to do all the talking. If I want to say anything, it should be to shush others like myself, as determined by the categorizers who have determined what I am.

Both attitudes are dangerously illiberal.

Here is my stance on bigotry, which is a liberal stance, and which ought to be acceptable to any liberal on the left or the right.

—-

First, it does not matter who you are. Any person can be a bigot. Any theory that claims that only some categories of people can be bigoted is bigotry authorizing bigotry.

Bigotry is the human default. If you do not choose to overcome it, it is inevitable that you will be a bigot. And if you try to overcome it and do it wrong-headedly, you will a remain a bigot. No matter who you are, if you have not dug into your own soul and excavated significant amounts of prejudice, you can bet that prejudice is still down there — possibly holding up your elaborate conceits that you, because of who you are, are incapable of bigotry. What could prevent investigation more effectively than the belief that investigation, for you, is unnecessary?

Your theoretical justifications do not matter. What good is rejection of racial essentialism, if you immediately find sociological substitutes that hand you the same results? The one place where bigotry is unbigoted is where it finds its justification: a blessing from scripture, from history, from biology, from psychology, or from political or social science will do the trick equally well. One thing is needful: a prejudgment on who gets to do the judging.

The values you assign do not matter. In times when phobias are forbidden, bigotry shapeshifts into phelias. Categories are despised or adored, and individuals are despised or adored according to the category they exemplify.

If you deputize your gaze to assign political identity to another individual you are a bigot.

But who can blame a bigot? It is much easier to live in a world populated by examples of categories than by unique individuals. When you hand over the world to your own gaze, so much effort is saved, so much energy conserved, so much passionate intensity released, so much conviction mustered that the experience is intoxicating. Bigotry is easy. It feels good. It pumps faith, energy, clarity and conviction into your soul and your world. It especially tempts those with limited resources. Not only those with limited intellectual resources (the stupid), but also limited time resources (the busy), limited energy resources (the tired), limited financial resources (the poor) and most of all, limited social capital resources, (the disprivileged, the marginal!).

Understand, your own sexed gaze, your own racialized gaze, your own cultural gaze, your own orientational gaze, your own theoretical gaze — whether dominant or marginal, will tempt your bigotry. Resisting temptation demands effort, and effort demands resources. Perhaps the belief that this effort is a universal requirement is itself a kind of bigotry of those with the resources to resist bigotry. But does this make the bigotry of the vulnerable any less bigoted?

Understand, the sole advantage marginalization gives a person is more urgent curiosity into what goes on in the complacently aggressive minds of dominant others. If a marginal person forecloses these questions with facile answers, that person has forsaken the only privilege the marginal have: the privilege of sensing questions where others see only The Way Things Are. To believe disprivilege gives you or anyone some sort of epistemological privilege, some natural ability to spontaneously perceive the True Truth, is to succumb to the same ideological idiocy that drives those you judge so harshly.

Understand, bigots are bigots because bigotry has advantages, especially for those with limited resources. Truth consumes resources. It slows you down, tires you out, raises questions when answers are most craved, and complicates everything.

Anyone low on resources, short on conviction, harrassed by complication, overwhelmed by alienation, dogged by patience, and desperate for burst of intense moral passion, will be tempted by the abundant gifts of bigotry.

Don’t do it.

Don’t succumb to the bigotry of the privileged. That is the way of the illiberal right.

Don’t succumb to the bigotry of the disprivileged. That is the way of the illiberal left.

Commit to perpetual struggle against bigotry. Commit to living in the infinitely complex, conflict-ridden, questionable world of autonomous individuals.  That is the way of liberalism.

What stood out to me most after two viewings of Vita Activa: The Spirit of Hannah Arendt is how unprepared the world was to think about the moral phenomenon of Nazism. It simply lacked the conceptual resources to think about what happened.

Whenever we lack conceptual resources to think through a problem, the tendency is to think them out with the conceptual resources we do have, distorting or nullifying ill-fitting data the best we can –gently if possible, aggressively if necessary.

Hannah Arendt, being a persistent and insistent source of ill-fitting data, became an object of offense to those who remained committed to old conceptions of evil.

Aggravating the problem is the subject itself: evil. The question of evil is bound up with our most fundamental understandings of the world: the good self with the good ally and the evil enemy. Hannah Arendt showed how attitudes that many of us celebrate as everyday virtues, under certain circumstances can be complicit in evil of the grandest scale. It seems counter-intuitive, and out of scale — almost a butterfly-effect in morality.

But it might be the invisible corollary of “banality of evil” that really gets under our skin. If evil is at least partly banal, what does this imply about goodness? What is required to be good in a milieu that has gone evil?

And then there is the issue of what “going evil” is. I am convinced that we still do not grasp what that is. I accept Arendt’s view that banal evil is akin to empathic failure — a sort of willful autism — a practical solipsism that wants “the mind to be its own place” and systematically fails to grasp anything of the world that is not a factual arti-fact of their own minds. Evil and ideology are complementary, if not identical.

According to Arendt’s understanding, morality is not a matter of good ideology versus bad ideology — it is a matter of thought versus ideology.

But for many people, and perhaps the majority of people passionately committed to a Good that stands in opposition to Evil, good ideologies are goodness itself. Such people celebrate “faith” of willful and uncompromising adherence to beliefs (and the conceptual repertoire that makes these beliefs intuitive and self-evident), despite evidence and in defiance of counterarguments. Whoever refuses to take sides in these ideological battles is a relativist, an even more insidious enemy of truth than a straightforward liar. And who can tell them other than what they know, and what they know how to know? This requires an inconceivable kind of goodness, the very thing ideologues find most intolerable.

“The varieties of dehumanization. — To strip a person of humanity, either deify or diabolize that person. It does not matter which. Both are equally effective. Nobody owes a god or devil justice.”

The problem with abstraction is not abstractness per se.

The problem is with staleness of abstraction. Staleness increases with each degree of remove from concrete reality, as we make abstractions from abstractions: Abstractions of abstractions of abstractions.  are stale and lifelessly irrelevant.

Stale abstractions feel “abstract”. Fresh abstractions are indistinguishable from reality itself.

Fresh abstractions are drawn from lived experience with concrete realities.

*

When we try to use our imaginations and ingenuity to come up with new ideas about realities we know second-hand at best, our thoughts are bound imperceptibly by what people from the past viewed as relevant, conceptualized for intelligibility and outfitted with communicability. This is why people in different places have the same ideas over and over again. They build their ideas from the same limited set of conceptual blocks.

For new thoughts, abstract from the concrete.

*

Wittgenstein (slightly out of context): “Back to the rough ground!”

Nietzsche (entirely in context): “When a poet is not in love with reality his muse will consequently not be reality, and she will then bear him hollow-eyed and fragile-limbed children.”

Latest diagrams for my art pamphlet The 10,000 Everythings, to be printed later this year.

Scientific evidence can (and often has been) a bludgeon used to beat down dissenters and coerce colleagues to adopt true facts.

But science also can (and ought to be) an olive branch to carry into conversation — a sign of respect, not only for factual truth but for our neighbor, to whom we owe explanations for the whys of our beliefs and a thorough hearing of the whys of theirs.

Science is a practice of strict and thorough respect conducted through the medium of our shared — and, like it or not, very real — material world.

I’ve heard that people who lose their sense of smell experience something like an odor of burning rubber. The scent of nothingness is noxious.

Migraines have taught me that nothingness looks like boiling chrome, not darkness.

The absence of all desire is felt as ennui.

The incapacity to love is felt as depression.

These nothingness experiences are akin to phantom limbs: a seeming something where there is nothing.

Phantom experiences are afterlives summoned by human nature’s abhorrence of vacuums.

*

If it is possible to know nothing about nothingness, these phantom experiences of nothingness suggest that this ignorance is unlikely to be experienced as a lack of knowledge.

Is it possible that something in our common sense knowledge — something we all think we all know — is actually a phantom knowledge — a something standing in for an inconceivable nothing?

*

Let us hope none of these experiences indicate what it is like to become nonexistent.

I’m bad with names, but that’s OK, because I’m great with pronouns.