Yesterday I was talking with an Egyptian I know, who happens also to be an expert on the French language and culture. Apparently when he was young, the Catholic schools once set up by the French government there were still very active. Education was in both French and Arabic, with the result that he was able to attend a university in France, and then eventually become an academic himself.
A scholar of that sort naturally thinks of the current revolutionary changes in Egypt in the light of the French Revolution. At least the current revolutionaries have something they consider sacred, which provides a stability not found in France. There the desire was to overturn every heritage, to sweep away every sacred or traditional thing.
He told a story of a man who came to Paris in 1793. The guard demanded he introduce himself.
Je suis le monsieur le Marquis de Saint-Janvier.
The guard said this was impossible, as there was no such thing as a "monsieur" anymore -- the word means literally 'my lord,' and the revolution had eliminated the class of gentlemen. Everyone is now a 'citoyen.' So, what is your name?
Je suis le Marquis de Saint-Janvier.
Impossible! There are no longer marquis. The revolution has eliminated nobility. Who are you?
Je suis a citoyen de Saint-Janvier.
Impossible! The revolution has eliminated religion. There are no longer saints. Who are you?
Je suis Janvier.
As it turns out, that too was impossible, because the revolution had eliminated the months of the year.
Sometimes it seems like our current society is bent on the same thing, except in slow motion so everyone has a chance to get used to it.
42 comments:
Who am I? I am a unit of the state.
The state still exists. No one's planning to sweep it aside. These other things are being swept aside because they were competing for the units' personal attention and loyalty.
There's big difference between people deciding for themselves to break out of a role that others tried to brick them into, and society pretending that the role doesn't exist at all any more. The latter is no different from the traditional practice of pretending the role didn't exist for disqualified people.
A pot slowly brought to a boil so the frog inside it cannot tell the difference.
Everything could be attributed to foolishness, incompetence, stupidity, or political bipartisan self interest.
Until at the very very end, when people couldn't do it any more. And then it was too late.
Who owns us? Are we owned by the State? This seems to be the direction intended by the State. Parents arriving at a school in OK were apparently forbidden to pick up their kids and leave for home and shelter. Whole cities are "locked down" by the State. Example abound of the attacks on personal liberty and initiative.
Virtually everything is now the business of the State-except aberrant sexual behavior. What was long abhorred is now admired. And how strange that in this age of porn everywhere we look, and sexual innuendo and crude discourse, we find ourselves so very concerned with any perceived violation of our aura of "sexual rights". It is a national incarnation of the stereotypical preacher railing against sin while having a porn fascination.
Zerocare is another way to administer to the livestock we are becoming. We will get the care we need to be productive, as long as we produce what they want when they want it. Too young, too old, to contrary, too bad. Soon there will be laws to prevent private medical transactions- it is the insanely logical thing to do, just as the French made it a capital crime to insist on payment with specie in the midst of a hyperinflation.
At this point I long for C.S.Lewis's "robber barons..."
Tex,
The latter is no different from the traditional practice of pretending the role didn't exist for disqualified people.
That cannot be correct. The French Revolution came up with the following description of liberty:
1. Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good.
2. The aim of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression....
4. Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights.
So you are free to do whatever doesn't injure anyone else, and the whole purpose of the government is to ensure this (and the other natural rights).
But I have a big problem with the idea that destroying these categories doesn't represent an injury. That includes redefining who may be members of those categories.
It turns out that there are many sorts of freedom that cannot exist without unfreedom. I can only be free to be a husband if I am unfree to sleep with lots of women. I can only be free to be the officer of a corporation if I am unfree to appropriate its money for personal use. I can only be free to be a priest if there is a priesthood, and if I am willing to accept the boundaries that it places upon me. For some people (such as the atheist), this will mean that they aren't free to be priests at all -- but that must necessarily be so if anyone is to be free to be a priest.
To say that it must be the case that anyone be allowed to be a priest if he or she wishes to be is to destroy the institution of the priesthood, even though you might have more people titled "priest." It denies the right to be a priest to the old priests, who can no longer belong to an order structured as the one they inherited from their forefathers in the faith; it denies the existence of priests of the old kind to the people, for many of whom they were an important feature of the world.
There's a very great deal of harm done, which ought (by principle 4) to disallow the pursuit of redefinition of categories. Clearly this set of principles failed to do that at all, as it failed to protect life and property and other natural rights.
But, more, I think there's an internal tension that makes the principles of the French Revolution untenable even as theoretical principles. Limiting social distinctions to "the general good" means that you aren't actually free to do many things that aren't harmful; and you are very nearly obligated to cause a great deal of harm to very many people.
Anonymous:
Does the state own you? Socrates thought so. I wrote about that once, in a post called The Limits of Duty to Country.
Would you mind to sign your posts somehow? A pen name is fine, but otherwise I can't keep straight all the anonymous people who drop by to talk. :)
As always, I agree that there's no such thing as perfect freedom, or the abolition of duty. I was trying to make a different point, about where the authority resides to restrict freedom and impose duty.
The state has no business telling an individual that social categories or roles have been abolished; at most, the state can stop acknowledging them, as, for instance, in the context of enforcing the law differently against an individual depending on whether he occupies a privileged category.
But likewise, the state has no business forcing an adult individual into social categories or roles on the basis of its own assumptions about some pigeonhole it has decided he or she belongs to. These are social and individual constructs. The less the state has to do with them, the better. What's more, the less a bunch of strangers have to do with any individual's choice about them, the better.
Texan99...categories.
Rose Wilder Lane:
"Nobody can plan the actions of even a thousand living persons, separately. Anyone attempting to control millions must divide them into classes, and make a plan applying to these classes. But these classes do not exist. No two persons are alike. No two are in the same circumstances; no two have the same abilities; beyond getting the barest necessities of life, no two have the same desires.Therefore the men who try to enforce, in real life, a planned economy that is their theory, come up against the infinite diversity of human beings. The most slavish multitude of men that was ever called “demos” or “labor” or “capital” or”agriculture” or “the masses,” actually are men; they are not sheep. Naturally, by their human nature, they escape in all directions from regulations applying to non-existent classes. It is necessary to increase the number of men who supervise their actions. Then (for officials are human, too) it is necessary that more men supervise the supervisors."''
http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/35432.html
Exactly. Thinking of people in categories is a convenience when we're too rushed, or they're too distant, to permit seeing them as individuals. But the constructs should collapse when confronted with a real human individual, about whom we're able to get accurate information. The construct was a vapor; it should be dispelled by experience.
I assume, with good reason, that the next guest in my home won't be nine feet tall. Experience allows me to develop rules of thumbs. But what kind of host would I be if I did get a nine-foot-tall guest and insisted that the seven-foot bed was big enough, because my model tells me that it's the right size for all people? We should look at what's in front of us, not what's lodged in our heads.
That's well put, but it won't do for a general principle because we have in front of us a clear counterexample: the priesthood. We can't say, "Well, I normally expect priests to believe in God, but since you have shown up for the priesthood as an atheist, I shall have to accept my duty to make room for you."
The distinction is between the natural and the artifact. It is not that the categories are not real, but rather, it is a question of who has authority over what pertains to them. If a man comes to us who is nine feet tall, we can't say he isn't a man, because we didn't make men. We can't say he isn't a man not because he is really not a man but an individual, but precisely because "man" is a real category and his natural kind. We simply must accept that God made this man particularly tall.
We have more authority in the categories we subcreate. Not perfect authority, of course: we cannot subcreate the priesthood so that it is made up only of atheists, for example; nor can we (without grave consequences) subcreate marriage as an institution that forbids the begetting of children. We must remember that, as subcreators, we may do much -- but the original material out of which we create is bound by laws that are not under our authority.
I'm not claiming that what people are, or what they believe, doesn't matter to the jobs they can do. What you are and what you may believe may qualify or disqualify you from all kinds of roles. What I object to is deciding what someone else is or believes (or can do) by reference to a preconception in one's own head, rather than by finding out what's really the case with that other person.
People are what they are, not what they'd be if they conformed to some notion we have of a perfect example of their "type."
Let us examine that for a moment.
Let's say there is a man, whom we'll call Father Paul, and he is a priest as well as an Irishman. Now we might be disappointed to learn that he had brown hair and not red hair, because a perfect example of the Irish type ought to have red hair (at least in our highly prejudiced mind). Nevertheless, on learning that Father Paul has brown hair, we do not insist on dismissing him from the category of Irishman.
On the other hand let us say that it comes out that Father Paul is an atheist, and has been hiding the fact behind false pretenses of believing in God. Now I think we would be fully justified -- and certainly the Church would be fully justified -- in dismissing him from the category of "priest." Even before the formal process of defrocking has occurred, we might justly speak of him as a "false priest."
So again, I think your point holds for categories of a certain kind. But there are other categories for which it cannot hold. I posit that these are subcreations, whose truth depends only in part on things over which we have no authority -- but in part on things in which we have genuine authority. And the 'we' is different: the Church has authority over the priesthood in a way that, say, the president of UCLA does not.
The problem with the French Revolution, and with the Enlightenment movements generally, was exactly that it lost sight of this. It was wrong in the first place because it made Protagoras' old error of assuming that 'Man is the Measure of All Things,' and thus arrogated to itself authorities over nature it could not have. That is your point. But there is also another point: it arrogated to itself authorities over subcreated categories that did not properly belong to it.
Our own government frequently makes both mistakes as well.
I don't understand the point of your example. If we find out that an individual priest is an atheist, then of course we know he's not qualified to be a priest. I don't have any problem with that, or with defrocking him.
On the other hand, if we decided that a particular priest must not believe in God because he likes apples and we have predetermined in our heads that priests who like apples are all atheists, then we let our preconceptions blind us to the facts, which is what I object to.
Of course individuals, by their actual attributes, can be disqualified from some roles. We don't disagree on that point. Nor am I trying to say that anything someone happens to be is just fine. I'm only saying that people are what they are, not what we project onto them. What they are may be wonderful or horrible; it may make them perfectly fit for a job or miserably unfit. But that will be a question of what they really are, not what they should be or we guessed ahead of time they probably would be.
I'm sorry if I haven't been clear about my purpose. I am rejecting as a general principle this otherwise reasonably well-constructed statement: "But these classes do not exist."
Or, as you put it,
Thinking of people in categories is a convenience when we're too rushed, or they're too distant, to permit seeing them as individuals. But the constructs should collapse when confronted with a real human individual...
That's not quite right. Jobs or roles are also categories -- they're categories, usually, of the subcreated type. We had a hand in making them what they are, and we have some authority over these categories. These categories are constructs that shouldn't collapse in the face of the individual.
But it's more than that. These categories aren't always just jobs or roles, they're really kinds of people. To become a priest is to shape yourself into something very different from a married man. To become a married man, if you take it with the seriousness it deserves, is also to shape yourself into a kind of person.
You can only be free to be that kind of person if the restrictions exist. Otherwise there would be no difference between a priest or a married man; you could move between the roles as easily as we (in happier days when the economy was better) used to move between jobs.
Is that desirable? It is not! For these roles are ways of shaping ourselves that are very liberating and powerful. They are exactly as liberating as they are binding: they free you to be something you couldn't be otherwise, because it is in forcing yourself into that shape that you become the thing. Loose the bonds, and you lose the thing.
So the restrictions are important, and it is important that they be real and binding. They must not be allowed to fall away in the face of the individual: the individual must change shape to fit, or -- if he cannot or will not -- keep out. Neither the state nor those who lack proper authority over the thing ought to take it on themselves to alter the shape of the bonds. Certainly we cannot accept a general principle that would obligate us to think the categories are false, or unreal, or in need of falling away in the face of the individual.
As so often happens, we're talking past each other.
I have no problem with people changing themselves to fit into a role.
My only problem is with failing to see the people before us because all we see is the "type" we assume they belong to. If they actually are a true example of that type, we'll find out soon enough. If they're on their way to changing into it, fine. The point is to see what's before our eyes, not what we're dreamed is there.
I don't mean to be talking past you. I'm trying to get you to rethink your categories of understanding, as I often do. You say you have no problem with 'people changing themselves to fit a role' as long as we see them instead of a 'type'; about seeing what is there, not what we want to see.
What I'm asking you to think about is not specifically about a person of a given sort changing themselves, although I am talking about that in passing. What I really mean to be talking about what it means to be a person at all. A rabbit is what he is, and we would be poor scientists of rabbits if we refused to accept an exception to our usual findings. But that is not what it means to be a person.
Then I'm still not following you. Whatever it means to be a person, it's still what it is, not what we expected to see.
What I'm suggesting is that it has something to do with the act of subcreation. There's a way in which knowing a man is no different from knowing a rabbit: and that's your sense of categories. Here, if we insist on the category instead of the facts of an individual, we're doing something wrong -- bad science, bad epistemology, something like that.
Your usual point about this is that it's even an affront to the dignity of the person to insist they live by some standard normally pertaining to the category, or the 'type.' And for this kind of category, it might be true.
But there are other categories that pertain especially to people, that we don't share with rabbits. I'm suggesting that what it means to be a person is to have the capacity to engage in this kind of subcreation: to create something like a religious order, as St. Francis did, or to bind yourself to joining it, as many priests have done.
These kinds of categories deserve a special respect, then, because they aren't an affront to the dignity of the person. They originally arise from someone's personhood; and they shape the person who is bound in this way. Holding you to the standards of this kind of category is thus never an affront to your dignity, because it is your capacity to create or to engage in this kind of creation that is the source of your dignity.
That's what I think the revolutionaries missed in France, leveling good and bad alike. It's what I think we often get wrong as well.
I think I may see where we're talking past each other. I've made you think I believe it's wrong to hold people to a standard of behavior that doesn't come naturally to them. I don't believe that at all.
You've made me think you believe it's right to insist people are a certain way without checking first to see if it's true. You may not believe that; I may get that impression because you don't always seem to distinguish carefully between what a person actually is and what he should be trying to be.
As long as someone can see me for what and who I am, we needn't quarrel too much over his ideas for what I should be trying to become. I may not agree, and I'll still decide for myself, but I'll listen. As soon as I get a whiff, though, of someone's being so blinded by his preconceptions that he can't see the person actually standing in front of him, I stop listening. He's not having a conversation with me; he's having a conversation with a phantom in his head.
So although I'm not sure what you're getting at with your "subcreation," I'm probably in great sympathy with it in one way and not at all in another. A subcreation that's an ideal of what we should become is a terrific thing. (We probably differ in how comfortable we are with the idea of one person imposing such an ideal on another, rather than bringing him on board by persuasion.)
But a subcreation that's a mental image that obscures truthful contact with an independent soul: not so great.
...because you don't always seem to distinguish carefully between what a person actually is and what he should be trying to be.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. What are some examples of cases in which I seem not to make this distinction?
But a subcreation that's a mental image that obscures truthful contact with an independent soul: not so great.
You could say, "The founder of the KKK has created an organization that obscures (or even makes impossible) contact with souls that happen to be in black bodies," and that might be right. However, the dignity of the founder lies in the fact that he was given free will, including the power to choose, and to shape aspects of creation. Part of that dignity lies in being responsible for his choices, and part of the righteous claims of his dignity lies in being accepted for who he has chosen to be.
The upshot of that is that I think even in this case we ought to take him for who he is, and accept what he has done for the act of subcreation that it is. What we often do instead is make excuses: "He only did this because he didn't have a good education," or something like that. Instead we should say, "This is who he has chosen to be. We should ensure he gets treated like the kind of man he has decided to become." It's no insult to the dignity of a pirate to hang him like a pirate, but it would be an insult to make excuses for him.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. What are some examples of cases in which I seem not to make this distinction?
I drew that tentative conclusion because I keep talking about seeing people for what they are, rather than for what is projected onto them, and you answer with something about roles and what a good idea it is to strive to fulfill them and hold people to account. To me, those are two totally separate concepts, but I get the impression that they run together for you in some way. It's not that you're saying so, but that I can't account for how many times in this thread the conversation has derailed in that fashion.
I'm not saying that everyone should be accepted for what he is; I thought I had made that clear. It is sometimes necessary to reject utterly what someone is. I only think it is important to see what he is, to acknowledge it, rather than to obscure it with the projected image of what we expected to see.
In other words, for me, "seeing" is one thing and "accepting" is another. If someone rejects who I am, I'll mostly likely try to work through whether he's justified or not. If he persuades me, I may change. If he doesn't persuade me, we probably won't wish to maintain contact. That's what rejection means.
But if someone can't see me to begin with, if all he sees is what he imagines I should be like on the basis of his notions of what categories I fit into, there's no basis for further effort. He's talking to a hologram of his own creation. I'm not involved.
I drew that tentative conclusion because I keep talking about seeing people for what they are, rather than for what is projected onto them, and you answer with something about roles and what a good idea it is to strive to fulfill them and hold people to account. To me, those are two totally separate concepts, but I get the impression that they run together for you in some way.
I was actually trying to draw a distinction between categories that are natural and categories that are artificial. However, the artificial ones are the ones I think it's most important to treat with respect. The natural categories -- rabbits, men -- are where we may be in danger of trying to impose on an individual a view that properly is an abstraction. The artificial categories -- priest, husband -- are places where the abstract ideal is exactly what we should be trying to impose.
When we're dealing with natural categories, there's a danger of talking to phantoms (as you put it). It would be wrong to treat the category as having priority over the individual here.
But when we are dealing with the artificial categories, we're talking about ideals that are meant to shape individuals. Here we can give the category priority because it exists precisely for the purpose of shaping reality. (It is made by us as an exercise of our divinely-granted function to act with free will as sub-creators).
We therefore aren't making an error in prioritizing the category -- priest, husband -- but, rather, would be making a mistake in prioritizing the individual.
The reason I'm talking about this isn't to run these kinds of things together, but to propose a method for understanding exactly where the distinction lies. You seem to agree, actually, that these are two kinds of things that should be handled as separate; I'm just trying to explain just why and how I think they are separate.
But when we are dealing with the artificial categories, we're talking about ideals that are meant to shape individuals. Here we can give the category priority because it exists precisely for the purpose of shaping reality. (It is made by us as an exercise of our divinely-granted function to act with free will as sub-creators).
Still not getting you. What do you think it means to "give a category priority"? If you mean that the demands of the category should sometimes take precedence over the wishes of the individual in forming his character and controlling his actions, I agree. If you mean that we should see what the category predicts as an ideal, rather than what's before our eyes as evidence in the real world, I disagree.
I'm not sure why this distinction between what we see, and what we want to change/approve/reject about what we see, is giving us so much trouble, and I apologize if I've not managed to be clear. In this context, I don't see what natural-vs.-artificial has to do with it, and the fact that you find the distinction important makes me think neither has any idea what the other is talking about.
What do you think it means to "give a category priority"? If you mean that the demands of the category should sometimes take precedence over the wishes of the individual in forming his character and controlling his actions, I agree. If you mean that we should see what the category predicts as an ideal, rather than what's before our eyes as evidence in the real world, I disagree.
In return, I'll have to ask what you mean by "see what the category predicts as ideal." I gather you're objecting, in some abstract way, to the idea someone might meet a priest and think of him only as 'a priest,' and not as "Father Paul, whom I see is in his priestly vestments, and he has brown hair, and his mother is a nice lady I met last week, and I hear he plays the piano (though badly)," etc. Someone engaging Father Paul as if he were some abstract ideal of a priest is not really engaging with the man in front of him at all, you're saying.
Now I understand that. What I mean is that we would be wrong to say that Father Paul ought to have red hair if he is an Irishman; but we're right to say that he ought to believe in God if he is a priest. The priority I'm talking about is just this. In natural categories, the man has priority over Man: whatever Man is, Father Paul is one, and so whatever qualities he has are qualities of a man (even if they are not the ideal, or common, qualities of A Man). The individuals have priority over these categories because the individuals come first ("are prior"), and the category is defined by them.
But there are qualities of artificial categories like Priest that a man must adhere to, or he is rightly dismissed from the category. The category has priority because it comes first, and if you want to be defined by it you must adhere to it.
That is not to say that we don't need to 'look at' Father Paul as he really is to know if he is a priest. It is only to say that we can know for certain what it means to be a priest before we look. That's yet another way of saying that the category is prior: prior to looking to see if it is the case that Father Paul is a priest, we know what a priest will look like.
We don't have the same priority with natural kinds. We can talk about what's best in a natural kind category, but the category itself follows from ('is posterior to') its members. We can say "to be of show quality, a Flemish Giant rabbit must weigh at least thirteen pounds," but we can't say "a Flemish Giant rabbit will always weigh 13 pounds as an adult," because of course that isn't true: some don't reach showing size. We can say "a good man will be courageous," but not that "a man is courageous." Some aren't, as we discover by looking.
I gather you're objecting, in some abstract way, to the idea someone might meet a priest and think of him only as 'a priest,' and not as "Father Paul, whom I see is in his priestly vestments, and he has brown hair, and his mother is a nice lady I met last week, and I hear he plays the piano (though badly)," etc. Someone engaging Father Paul as if he were some abstract ideal of a priest is not really engaging with the man in front of him at all, you're saying.
That's not what I had in mind at all, but I'm glad you mentioned it, because it helps me understand where your responses were coming from.
I was thinking of something more like the fellow whose friends have gotten the idea that he must like teddy bears because they've heard that people from his school like them, as a reminder of the school's mascot. So even if he never cared for teddy bears at all and has often tried to say so, his friends persist in seeing "that guy who really likes teddy bears." He gets them for Christmas every year, all of his "friends" in blissful ignorance of who he really is. They see their image of him and can't be budged by facts.
Or the black guy: "You like jazz, right? All you people like jazz." "No, never been very fond of it." "No, that can't be right. I'm sure you love jazz; maybe you just don't realize how much you love it. Here are some tickets to a jazz performance. Aren't you grateful?"
I'm talking about failing to see someone's true qualities and seeing instead what we expected to find. It has nothing whatever to do with focusing on a person's assumed role instead of his personal quirks, which is something I have no objection to at all. I don't need to know whether my priest likes chocolate ice cream or French movies in order to interact with him as a priest. But if I'm close enough to his as an ordinary companion to notice these things, I should notice the real characteristics, not ones I made up in advance.
What I'm trying to object to is more like saying, "But you're Irish; you must be a priest." "No, really not a priest." "But you must be. Here, listen to my confession." "Open your ears. NOT A PRIEST." "But I prefer to deal with you as if you were, because that's the image in my head."
You must know some difficult people. :)
But you're also running against my instincts on this one. I try always to present the people with whom I interact with an appearance that (a) they can easily understand how to interact with, and yet (b) will leave them completely mistaken about my true nature. This is a good thing, I think, because insofar as they treat me according to (a), I know how to deal with them; but I can reserve the secrets of (b) for true intimates I want to know better.
So, generally, if you met me without knowing who I was, you'd find me in blue jeans and biker leathers, with a motorcycle and a knife. This is a very easy kind of person to understand, and since I am of course always courteous and polite, any transactions I have with the public are generally quick and easy and pleasing to everyone. They know how to interact with the icon, and as I make it easy for them, we conduct our business without trouble.
Very few people need to know that I have an interest in metaphysics, or medieval literature, or poetry, or the level of my education, or what my politics are, or any of that. In fact, almost all of the time, I'd prefer they don't know these things. I don't want to talk about my inner life while buying beer or gasoline, I just want the beer or the gas.
The people I do let in are worth it. The rest are happier where they are, and I'm happier too. Helping them deal with me as an icon rather than an individual is good for both of us.
That's not to say, in case it needs to be said, that the iconic appearance is a deception. I'm really the kind of guy I appear to be, in a way. But I am happy to help people draw a lot of conclusions that will lead them away from other aspects of my character, which I prefer to save for those I find worthy companions.
Voluntarily projecting an image that's at odds with your own true nature, for the purpose of guarding your privacy or some other purpose, is your prerogative. It's not the prerogative of someone else to project his own image onto you. (In fact, one has very little to do with the other.)
Do I know especially trying people? I don't have to go far to find people who let projections blind them to facts. Everyone who elevates rigid categories and traditional roles over the concrete experience of individuals does it at least to some degree. My examples were extreme, of course, because after about ten exchanges I clearly hadn't managed to get across the mental habit I was trying to describe! You seemed to think I was talking about almost everything imaginable except this rather commonplace habit.
It's not the prerogative of someone else to project his own image onto you. (In fact, one has very little to do with the other.)
No, I disagree. I think they're two sides of the same coin. What I'm doing depends upon the fact that I can know they will do their part.
You're treating this as a kind of affront by them, but it's usually not that at all. It's an outgrowth of the kind of society in which we live. In the kind of small town where I grew up, everybody knew you and your family. It'd be a genuine affront for them to insist that you be what they want you to be and not what you are, because of course they know who you are (or ought to know).
Now we spend 90% of our time with strangers. Our regular encounters amount to people we see every day but only for a few minutes, and still don't really know at all. We move from place to place; rarely do I know anyone well for more than a few years. Society has grown larger, so that it passes our human ability to know who someone is and who their family is like we used to do.
What people are doing by projecting mental categories is grabbing on what they can see, and trying to work out from that how they relate to you. It's all they've got to go on. Making it easy for them -- as I am doing -- is a gift to them. You could just as easily go the other way with it: you could dress in one fashion and insist on being treated in another, or you could dress in a nondescript fashion and then object loudly to the fact that they don't know how to treat you, and settle on a guess that you don't like. But they have no choice but to guess.
This is just a kind of exchange. I offer an easy to understand mode, with the implicit understanding that I'll accept being treated as I appear. That helps them understand how they relate to me just sight alone. It's not even a false impression, it's just infinitely far from complete: but at a glance, they can know enough to avoid offending me, and I in turn have made it easy for them to treat me in a way I find acceptable.
More than this we can only ask of those few we have time, and decide, to introduce to our inner mysteries. In this current moment, I think this is the best we can do.
Can't agree. I think you're again confusing holding people to a standard, which is fine, with seeing what you want to see instead of what's there, which is decidedly not. It's the same error that leads people to insist on global warming in spite of the evidence, because the models call for it: they talk themselves into ignoring the facts in favor of the theory. It also leads to shallow, dull human relations between stick figures.
It does, but that's exactly the kind of relations we need most of the time. Market economies depend on frequent interactions with a variety of people, whom you don't have time to get to know. That is, if it's a problem it's a problem for our way of life, and our economic system. It's not a problem in and of itself.
This is the concept Tolkien was working with in his first presentation of Aragorn, as Strider. He's offering the world what he needs it to have to get on with. It's not a false picture: he really is a rugged, dangerous man whose clothes are weather-stained. He's also one of the ancient Men of the West, a defender of ancient wisdom, 'gold that does not glitter.'
Most of the people he deals with never need to know that. They wouldn't want to hear it. They're simple people going about their own honest business, and to them, Men of the West and ancient wisdom are scary things that have nothing to do with their day to day lives. So they treat him as he appears to be, and he accepts it. The gold remains hidden.
But it is there, for those few who know how to look.
You're saying something like my usual argument why the free market rules work fine for strangers.
We don't disagree that dealing with strangers on the basis of uninformed preconceptions is often a reasonable shortcut. If we don't get any true individual information in the first place, no harm, no foul; there's no relationship to ruin by turning a deaf ear.
But it doesn't work when you try to talk to someone on a more human level. Anyone can tell when the person he's supposedly talking to is really talking to himself, which is what insistent, inaccurate, uncorrectable projections amount to. Why stick around? If he can pretend we're someone else, he can pretend we're still interacting.
And we don't disagree here either. A good part of what I am saying is that this tendency of people offers us a kind of defense against the irritating sorts who are too involved with themselves to do anything deeper.
So that's half of what I mean to say about the value of these forms. But the other half is at least as important, and it may have been lost in the concern over this issue. It has to do with freedom to become a kind of person, or to create a new kind of person to be.
To say something almost tautologically true, before St. Francis one could not be a Franciscan. What he did in creating that role is subcreation of the best sort. Still today you meet men, if you look, who wear brown robes and follow the tenets of the Order he created.
Before he lived, that was a kind of person you were not free to be. It is precisely the bonds of the order that make the kind of man that becomes a priest of the Order of St. Francis of Assisi. It is a way of ordering your thoughts, your words, your deeds, so that you can become a kind of man you might have reason to think valuable, or that you might think a particularly beautiful expression of manhood.
These forms -- these traditional roles, as you say -- are thus immensely valuable things. They free us to be things we couldn't be if they did not exist. It is a liberation we gain by taking on bondage, though: it is only by assuming the bonds that we can find the power, the freedom, to assume the form.
They are treasures of human liberty, which we ought to defend with great care. Often we haven't done that. But if we are not happy with the traditional roles available to us, we are only just in the position of St. Francis himself: he also wanted something new. Making it was a great gift to the world. We can do that. What we too often do instead is tear open one of these treasures; and often thereby we lose it.
When have I ever suggested that people shouldn't create and assume roles for themselves? Used that way, roles can be great. But that doesn't mean it's a good idea to impose an ill-fitting role on an unwilling person. It's not our place. And that's what it means to project a mask onto someone, then ignore his real face even if he tries to show it.
If a role is good, we can trust people to choose it. If a role dies out once we lose the power to force it on anyone, well, maybe it was time for a change. A role that people have to be forced to assume isn't a liberation: the word can't be stretched that far.
I don't think we disagree about much at all. I'm just spelling out the distinction. There are categories of people that are different from other categories of people.
I think this natural/artificial divide is just where and why they are different. That entails protecting traditional roles from interference by those who lack authority to interfere with them; what those people need to do who don't like the structures available is to build something new of their own.
That's helpful, I think, in avoiding in the next revolution the problems of the last ones. Our society, like the French Revolution, is too ready to tear down what it doesn't like of the past. If people will simply stop choosing things that aren't right for them (as you say they will), there's no need for us to ban bad choices in a free society.
A practical example: the French Revolution banned the Order of Saint Francis, as well as the possibility of Francis having been a Saint. That's a terrible mistake, because it destroys an important institution of freedom -- a treasure that lets us be a kind of person who doesn't otherwise exist.
If you don't like the way the Order is structured, start your own order if the Pope will admit you as another Pope did Francis. If he won't, and you can't stand it, go start your own religion. Perhaps people will join it; perhaps not.
What we've done instead, over and over (and like the French Revolutionaries) is to tear down the old institutions of freedom. "You may not," we say, "have on campus a free association of people who believe X," where X is one of the many beliefs that transgress against the holdings of the cultural Left.
And so we are left less free.
"I don't think we disagree about much at all."
That's odd, because I'd say we are fundamentally at odds on this subject.
I didn't say we didn't disagree about anything. :)
Just the entire thrust of this long thread.
I think maybe just a first principle somewhere in the way we approach the world. You're not really saying anything I don't agree with as an ideal for how close friends should interact; I just don't agree that people have an obligation to treat us the way you'd like to be treated. I don't think they owe it to me in any sense to see me for who I really am. A very few of the best ones may want to do so; others even of the very best ones won't really have time.
To me that's OK, and in fact their approach offers me a helpful opportunity. I can help them get what they want, while also smoothing my own interactions with them. I don't find it offensive or upsetting at all, just a fact about civilization that one must accept like the need to stand in line at the store sometimes. Lines are no fun at all, but they're better than the alternative.
In this case we're talking about something better even than lines, though, because you do get to make a choice about how people receive you. You can present yourself however you want, and ordinarily expect to be received appropriately. People aren't trying to offend us, they just don't have a capacity to do more than take us for who we appear to be.
But I have a dear friend who shares your opinion, roughly speaking. She gets very angry when people don't remember details about her preferences -- does she like perfume? (She does not.) Does she like fudge? (No, only chocolate, but not fudge.) If someone she thinks ought to know and remember these things should forget one of these details, she receives it as a kind of personal rejection -- an attempt by them to force her to be something other than what she chooses to be.
We get along fine because I do my best to always remember these many, many details -- but I assure you I don't do that for everyone! I do it for her, because she's special to me and it's important to her. There may be ten thousand people with similar preferences that I am failing to remember every day. It's not that I don't want them to be happy, it's just that I can't possibly do it. It's a significant labor just remembering my friend's many particularities and preferences. Most of the rest of humanity will have to forgive me for not being able to know them -- or as you might say, "see them for what they are" --quite as well.
Which, in her case, I really get it. Her mother is the single worst offender, and sometimes her "forgetting" is not really caring as much as she should, but sometimes it's a psychological manipulation to try to get her daughter to live more the way her mother would prefer.
I agree with you (and her) that her mother is behaving horribly. I just don't think we can extract a general moral duty beyond the intimate sphere, because you can't have a duty to do what you have no capacity to do. We can really extend this level of knowledge only to a fairly small number of people.
There's a question about accepting people for who they've chosen to be that has to do with family members who have made very bad choices. I have a cousin I used to like when we were kids whom I haven't spoken to in decades now because he has become a drug addict. I regard this as a form of accepting him for who he has chosen to be, though, not a refusal to do so. I accept that he's chosen to become the kind of person I don't want close to me or those I care about.
Despite this long exchange, I haven't made you see the first thing about the point I'm making. I don't propose that people should devote a huge effort to picking up tiny clues about other people or remember them in the press of their other daily duties. I propose that when people see something obvious in blazing capital letters, they acknowledge it rather than obscure it with the insistent preconceived notion they had before the evidence landed on their sense like a giant elephant.
See what's there, not what we imagined. If we can do that, people won't have to shout to get our attention.
It really has practically nothing to do with extending our quiveringly sensitive antenna and trying to read the minds of our friends and intimates, or make them feel cherished, or any of that business. I'm talking about plain communication and not ignoring it because it's not what we expected or wanted to hear.
And for crying out loud, I keep saying it has absolutely nothing to do with accepting people for what they are when they've made bad choices. It's about being capable of seeing what they did, whether you accept it or not. Why is this so hard to get across? I think I'm expressing myself very plainly, but you seem to be reading into my words some insistent thought you have in your own head.
Yes, you're telling me that I'm doing just what you're complaining about people doing. But I'm not! I'm entirely agreeing with the point, at least within a sphere.
You said: But it doesn't work when you try to talk to someone on a more human level. Anyone can tell when the person he's supposedly talking to is really talking to himself, which is what insistent, inaccurate, uncorrectable projections amount to. Why stick around?
I think that's all quite right. I'm just saying that we can use this tendency to get what we want in a market interaction, and move on to dealing with the people who do care about us. "Why stick around?" as you say.
You said you agreed with that: "We don't disagree that dealing with strangers on the basis of uninformed preconceptions is often a reasonable shortcut." So we agree there.
You went on to say, "But that doesn't mean it's a good idea to impose an ill-fitting role on an unwilling person. It's not our place. And that's what it means to project a mask onto someone, then ignore his real face even if he tries to show it."
And I agree with this too. My example of my friend's mother is a good example of someone doing this: refusing her daughter's very plain and repeated statements that she doesn't want to wear perfume or makeup, and continuing to present them as gifts 'because I knew you'd like them.' That's a refusal of the kind you seem to be talking about.
As far as I can tell, we don't disagree about any of that. What we disagree about is something much more fundamental, so much so that it is difficult for you even to see how much I do agree with you. Disposing of how we got to our conclusions, in terms of practical results we're quite close.
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