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.

You move from everything to everything, flashing across expanses of nothing.

Landing, standing on firm ground of particularity, blindness clings to your heels. The shadow you cast is perfect: nothing is there, and nothing is missing.

Then you leave, sealing time behind you. Wherever you have gone, once you leave, you were there all along. Only moving through your moments can preserve the befores and afters of your comings and goings. Travel, movement, comparison: this is your common sense.

As I travel, face me forward. Help me slip through the blinds and skim above or even beneath the churning chrome, turning neither toward lightness, nor toward darkness, nor around toward the entangling, dappled shade behind us.

Lead me to where doubt fails.

When someone tells me about how they’ve made peace with someone who hurt them by understanding them in a new and different way, and finding a place of forgiveness and compassion, and maybe even gratitude or love, etc. I cannot perceive it as wise or benevolent. I perceive delusion and violence.

It is impossible for me to trust a person capable of mistaking this kind of feeling for anything akin to love.

Perhaps the trauma damaged them and distorted their sense of what love is. But if that person conceived of love this way prior to their traumatic relationship, I will automatically suspect that they were the cause of the conflict. It is a serious thing to reduce another human being to how you experience and interpret them, and refusing to allow a person to be more than that to you is profoundly offensive and highly likely to bring out the very worst in a person.

*

Attempting to reconcile with an estranged friend or loved one without that person’s active participation cannot succeed. The attempt will either fail to bring any sense of closure, or it will succeed in bringing closure through the opposite of reconciliation — alienation.

Reconciliation is something that happens between two people who each want the other person to exist to them in a way that transcends interpretation, as an independent, respected other.

*

This does not mean that I think we must work with anyone who hurts us and reconcile with them. All I am saying is finding a place of peace toward someone who hurts us without involving them is amputating the relationship not healing it. Whatever feeling that remains behind in your heart is a phantom limb.

This year I am going to try to do a better job of communicating my communication needs.

I do not know why I am this way, but I have a painful sensitivity to communication obstructions. I do not think the sensitivity per se is unusual. The intensity of the pain probably is.

I am beginning to think it is partly caused by being an adult child of an autistic parent. It also did not help that I was transplanted at age 7 and grew up in an alien culture, and had very little parental help in figuring out how to navigate the sea of otherness into which I was dropped without flotation devices. And the condition has been intensified by the effort I have applied to learning from the best minds of history and acquiring many different ways of understanding the world. All this work has yielded what I believe are crucially important insights. It is depressing when people I consider friends treat what I have worked so hard to understand as insignificant.

Here are some examples of what I experience as painful obstructions:

• When attempts at communication — emails, messages, calls — are left unanswered.
• When I’m repeatedly interrupted when I am trying to get a complex point across.
• When someone is distracted or inattentive or changes the subject when I’m trying to discuss something important.
• In issues of differing worldview, when the other person refuses to cooperate dialogically to establish mutual understanding prior to debating individual points of fact.
• When the other person uses ad hominem arguments to invalidate my perspectives on the basis of how they’ve decided to categorize me. This includes the category “privileged”.
• When conversations I’ve indicated are important to me are repeatedly postponed, dropped or forgotten.
• When I am not given the benefit of the doubt that what I am trying to convey is at least partially-new and worth learning, and instead approaching the material as probably already known or not worth knowing.
• When others make gestures intended to deflate my over-inflated sense of self-importance or undermine my faith in the importance of the kinds of knowledge I pursue. This especially includes delivering destructive cynicism in the guise of humor.

These behaviors are not in themselves unacceptable or immoral. From acquantances or strangers, they are normal and should be expected.

But friendship requires more than normality. Friendship means caring about the meaning and impact of one’s behavior from the point of view of the friend, even — or especially — if the significance or impact is different for you.

It is precisely in honoring the peculiar differences that respect in its truest form occurs. “Re- back; “-spect” look. A friend is someone who believes that his friend looks back at him and sees something, knows something and feels something different and important from what he sees.

It is precisely when a friend seems to make little or no sense that a person’s faithfulness to friendship activates. Where you can appeal to this faith, there is friendship. Where the appeal cannot be made, the limits of friendship have been crossed.

To be a friend is to be able to make an appeal on any of these points knowing that the appeal will be taken seriously. This does no mean the appeal is automatically accepted at face value and obeyed. This would be destructive. It only means the appeal is treated as valid and important and deserving serious attention. Such appeals cannot be ignored, dismissed, explained away or deferred indefinitely.

*

This year I am going to do a combination of several things to try to get some peace in the area of communication:

1. Set the context for any especially non-casual conversations, to increase the odds that it will be productive.
2. Try to explain myself and my communication needs to people I consider actual or potential friends, to see how far the appeal to friendship is effective with them. Sharing this article might be a start.
3. Getting realistic about who can and will be a friend, and who ought to be regarded more as a friendly acquaintance, or as an adversary. I need this clarity.

And, of course, I will continue to monitor myself and try to do these things I’ve listed to others as little as possible and to catch myself as quickly as possible when I do do them. If I do any of them to you, and you are my friend, you can make an appeal, and I will make every effort to change.

And even more importantly, if I am your friend and I do things that bother you — especially things that make no sense to me — help me understand and adjust.

Or failing that, let’s accept non-friendship. Isn’t that better than falseness?