Writers and rebels, earnest young activists, starry-eyed romantics and unrequited lovers all have one thing in common: They yearn. Yearning, untempered by reason and humor, is pathological, the author of many unnecessary tragedies and many lonely, painful lives. But reason, and even humor, untempered by yearning is empty and often cruel, the stuff of a heartless and oppressive existence. Yearning is pain, but its absence is not pleasure; it’s absence is soullessness.
The early 20th century German sociologist Max Weber wrote much about the rationalization of society, its evolutionary force, its greater efficiencies, but also the trap that it sets for us. It is, Weber said, an iron cage, from which we cannot escape. Like the people caught in the cogs of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, or the savage trapped in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, or McMurphy lobotomized as he flew over Ken Kesey’s cuckoo’s nest, the machine of society eats us alive.
But these all emphasize how that oppressive force is imposed from without, at most glancingly alluding to the way in which it is accepted from within. The Frankfurt School of Sociology, synthesizing Weber, Marx and Freud, and perhaps a touch of Sartre as well, into something richer and more insightful than any of their paradigms were on their own, came closest to focusing on this dynamic, on this internalization of the seductively oppressive machine which envelopes us. But, if anything, they erred by underestimating its real benefits, and the difficulty of preserving those benefits while minimizing its spiritual costs.
The machine is neither bad nor good in and of itself. It is a robust producer of wealth, in ways that evaporate if that machine is dismantled. But without spiritual and emotional yearning to give that machine its soul, the comfort it offers is the comfort of a living death.
Long before authors and philosophers shined their light on the machine which encompasses us, they shined their light on the poetry of our existence. Humanity’s first epic stories, indeed, our first philosophies, were epic poems, with loving and angry gods favoring and disfavoring our struggling heroes, magic and monsters enchanting and challenging them, glory or horrible failure always in the balance, neither certain, either one possible.
The Hercules we’ve forgotten in our Disneyfied distillation of world folklore and mythology was a violent hot-head who murdered his entire family in a fit of divinely-imposed rage and died in horrible agony by donning a poisoned cloak. And yet he was one of the greatest heroes of Greek mythology. Heroes before the machine weren’t sanitized human beings who we loved because we wrote them without flaws, but rather were yearning human beings trapped in the passions of existence, who we loved despite their flaws.
This classical humanism, celebrating the complex beauty of human existence, was reborn in the Renaissance, after Europe’s Medieval excursion into a world imaginarily reduced to saints and sinners, nobles and peasants, chivalrous knights and infidel villains. Shakespeare knew that all the world’s a stage, and we but actors upon it. He knew that we were just spirits, and that our cloud-capped towers, gorgeous palaces, and solemn temples all appear and disappear in a dance of our creation and time’s destruction.
Of course, in every time and place there is, in reality, a bit of both forces at work, the forces of repression and the forces of liberation, the former sometimes co-opting the latter’s name (as in our own current time and place). There are always those engaged in the dance of consciousness and aspiration, and always those engaged in the implicit opposition to it. But a time and place, a culture, is defined by the balance among these two, by which is more honored and which is more reviled.
The real project of modernity, the real goal of progress, is not to honor one and revile the other, but rather to appreciate the value of each, and the best ways to articulate the two. Strange as it may sound, repression isn’t all bad and poetry isn’t all good, but, though we don’t understand that, we still manage to err on the side of too much repression and too little poetry.
I contrast “repression” with “poetry” rather than “liberty” because liberty, real liberty, is a function of a blend of repression and poetry, not the complete absence of either. I am not now using the word “liberty” in the narrow political sense born of the late 18th century Enlightenment era political revolutions, but rather in the sense of the liberation of the human spirit from the shackles that we impose on it. Ironically, that narrowly defined political “liberty” has evolved into an ideology which stands largely in opposition to that more profound spiritual liberation, a vehicle of spiritual repression rather than of spiritual liberation, negating what should and could be the ultimate goal of our existence, insisting on the contraction of human consciousness and the dominance of extreme individualism rather than the ever-increasing realization of our humanity.
But that subtler, deeper liberation of the human spirit, something accomplished not just in mutual isolation, nor just in concert, but rather a bit of both, requires both the repression of mutually imposed discipline and responsibility, and the poetry of passionate yearning and a tolerant appreciation of one another’s humanity.
Though our prevalent ideology rhetorically dismisses repression as an unmitigated evil, it actually embraces it in practice as an unmitigated good, for we live in a time and place that smirks at the poetry of life, and believes only in the machine. There are those who think they oppose the machine by opposing the government, but the two are far from synonymous, government sometimes counterbalancing other parts of the machine in ways which reduce its oppressiveness. There are those who think they oppose the machine by opposing corporate capitalism, but those two, as well, are far from synonymous, corporate capitalism being a vital part of the drama of life, and the government we invoke to oppose it really not all that poetic itself.
And there are those who think they oppose the machine by belonging to enterprises, often nonprofits, that work toward reform, but, unless their minds liberate themselves from the machine as well, unless they appreciate the value of yearning and the poetry of life, they, too, are trying to change the machine by being the machine, and the changes, though they may be beneficial, will not be revolutionary.
But to the extent that all of these sectors do comprise aspects of the machine, that does not mean that our duty is to oppose them. Our duty, rather, is to make them all more subservient to our souls, to our poetry, to our spiritual and emotional yearnings. We do not cure the machine by being the machine; we do not humanize one part merely by championing an equally dehumanized counterpart. And to do that, to champion more poetry to invigorate and humanize the machine on which we depend and which we should not strive to discard or dismantle, we need to be conscious of the ways in which our current algorithms, our current methodologies, serve efficiency at the expense of imagination, and, by doing so, actually reduce efficiency in the process.
The poetry of life isn’t just a necessary component of our humanity; it’s also a contributing factor to our efficiency and effectiveness. Weber’s iron cage of rationality presupposed that ever-increasing rationality, in the sense of an ever-more machine-like existence, is an unstoppable evolutionary force because it produces ever-increasing efficiency, but we’ve seen much evidence that there is a point of diminishing returns, a point at which more liberation of human imaginations yields more productive outcomes, and too much regimentation diminishes rather than increases the full realization of even our narrow economic potential, let alone our human potential more broadly conceived.
We waste our valuable human resources, our valuable consciousness, by assigning only those who satisfy our check lists of qualifications to the tasks to which those checklists apply, and relegating those who are less well regimented to the margins of society, where their often extraordinary potential is simply wasted, and their lives unfulfilled. Businesses and nonprofits, enterprises of all sorts, need to look beyond their checklists, need to look beyond the machine of which they are a part, and consider the less easily reducible qualities that some could bring to their endeavors. The gains in productivity and creativity would be enormous.
The poetry of life is a value too little considered, too poorly understood, too infrequently invoked and cultivated. It cannot replace the machine, for poetry does not put food on the table. But the machine cannot replace it, for mere economic production does not satisfy the yearnings of the heart and soul. Nor does economic production achieve maximum efficiency when the poetry of our lives is completely disregarded, for that poetry, that imaginative, yearning, passionate aspect of who and what we are, is a creative force, one which has practical implications and benefits when harnessed to that purpose.
We do not exist merely to exist. Our consciousness allows us to pursue purpose, and that purpose can and should be more than mere prosperity, mere political liberty, mere participation in the rationalized mechanisms of our collective existence. The growth of our consciousness, of our compassion, of our wisdom, and of our ability to take care of one another and offer one another opportunities to yearn meaningfully and functionally, to sustain ourselves both materially and emotionally, to discover the full depth and breadth of our humanity, is something truly worth living for.
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I believe in the human endeavor. I believe in our ability to become ever wiser and more compassionate as a society. I believe that the technological and social institutional innovations we’ve come to take for granted, many of which were unimaginable just a few short generations ago, are ripples on the surface of an unfathomable sea of possibilities, and that what we accomplish in generations to come, like what has come before, will appear in retrospect not just to be more of the same, but rather profoundly revolutionary and transformative, and acceleratingly so.
But there is nothing automatic about the direction this punctuated evolution takes, and no guarantee that it will be benign rather than malignant. In what ways and to what extent, in service to which emotions and inclinations always vying for dominance within and without, we free the genius of the many, this captive giant fuming within her prison of oppression and repression, of intolerance and intransigence, will determine what wonders and what horrors we unleash.
Will we find new, more sterile and yet more virulent ways to enslave minds and souls, to shackle the human spirit by overlords of fear and bigotry, using our genius against itself in acts of brilliant inhumanity? Or will we harmonize more deeply and fully, through soaring but disciplined imaginations, with the malleable but coherent dream of which we are but a part?
Our minds form an ecology of their own, with flora and fauna of our fancy reproducing, evolving, giving way to new forms. We thrive best when we harvest most of that cognitive diversity, articulating the novel into the complex, sublime whole, accommodating more, suppressing less. So it’s no surprise that a sociologist such as myself, who perceives us less as a collection of individuals and more as slightly individuated moments of a shared consciousness, would become an advocate for mental diversity and mental freedom, for that mind we share does not best thrive by imposing as much conformity as fear and convenience counsel, but rather by tolerating as much non-conformity as wisdom and compassion allow.
If this movement, and this organization, were just about helping those in mental or emotional distress to find greater harmony within and avoid the ravages of a brutally destructive psychopharmacological paradigm imposed from without, that would be more than enough to inspire me to join in the effort. But it’s also about all of us together finding a richer and subtler harmony among ourselves and beyond ourselves, about that mind we share spiralling toward enlightenment, and about the increased wealth of joy and wellness we can produce together, from which we all can draw.
It’s to that latter ideal that all of us who believe in the human endeavor ultimately aspire.
(For essays and vignettes related to this one in various ways, see, e.g., Kick-Starting A ClearMind, Symptoms v. Root Causes, An Eddy In The Stream, The Politics of Consciousness, The Fractal Geometry of Social Change, The Hollow Mountain, and A Proposal: The Politics of Reason and Goodwill.)
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Perhaps the best place to start a post titled “musings” is to muse about musing itself. Musing is something inspired by the muses, all nine of them, who were represented as a Black gospel choir in Disney’s “Hercules,” perhaps subtly referencing the “Black Athena” theory about the racial influences on ancient Greek culture. But muses are everywhere, or so it would seem, with their music whose charms soothe the savage breast, and musak whose insipidness aggravates if not riles that same breast into greater savagery; and in their houses (“museums”), where they have traditionally been more dead than alive, but always beautifully so.
Musings are underrated, and underpracticed. Less and less time is spent by more and more people staring into space and letting minds drift. Less and less time is spent by more and more people writing about doing so. More and more people consider that a coup, while I consider it a rout, a rout of the human spirit.
I spent so much of my childhood and youth inside my own head, sometimes uncomfortably, sometimes in loneliness, but always fruitfully. There is a balance to be struck, and forming healthy bonds with our fellow human beings is both precious and critical to our mental and social health, but with cell phones keeping us ever-connected to those we love and like (and work for or with or employ), and the rest of our information technologies keeping us ever connected with the echo-chambers of our preference, the balance is generally lost in favor of too much constant connection and distracting noise protecting us from the challenge posed by confronting ourselves and all that the solitude of our own minds is a portal onto.
We increasingly amuse ourselves all too literally, if we take the prefix “a-” to mean the negation of what follows. For our amusements all too often silent our inner muses more than give them voice, drown them out with the noise of mindless entertainments rather than allow them to whisper to us from the depths of our consciousness. It’s time to learn to re-muse ourselves, to pro-muse ourselves, to discover the music of shared stories and quiet contemplations.
“The Iron Cage of Rationality” that (early 20th century German Sociologist) Max Weber once talked of has become a digital cage stupification. And, just as in the original formulation, it is not that these information technologies are not a set of wonderful tools capable of contributing mightily to the liberation of the human spirit, but rather that too many of us too often fail to use them for that purpose, and instead simply surrender to their own logic as it articulates itself with our own thanatos.
My friend Doctor Mark Foster likes to talk about the history of anti-psychotic medications, how they were initially considered to be “chemical lobotomies,” less brutal and more civilized than surgical lobotomies, but for essentially the same purpose. He, too, identifies the way in which the relentless juggernauts of scientism and capitalism have been the engine for this blind tumble into reduced humanity motivated by the desire for reduced chaos. It is not that these tools can not be put to good and judicious use, but rather that that requires more consciousness, more musing, on our part. The trick is to use our tools in service to our spirit, rather than to lose our spirit in servitude to our tools.
As is often said, there is a thin line between insanity and genius, and, in the same vein, there is a thin line between mental unhealth and the creativity of our individuality. Max Weber, who I mentioned above, suffered from debilitating depression all his life, and yet produced the most wonderful works of intellectual exploration. Mozart drove himself to an early grave with his obsessive commitment to perfect what turned out to be his final composition. If we completely tame the beast of our varying degrees of insanity, chemically lobotomizing those who suffer its ravages, we also kill some part of our individual and collective genius, to our collective detriment.
Part of what drives us to tame that beast is an intolerance of individuality. Despite our ideological declarations to the contrary, Americans (ironically, particularly those who are most ideologically individualistic) have not truly mastered the art of tolerance. We continue to demand conformity, in multiple ways and in multiple venues. “Professionalism,” for instance, has come to mean not saying or doing anything that makes you appear too unique and human in ways that are not perfectly compatible with the generic image that has become the ideal of that profession. The consequence is that those who succeed most, who rise to the positions of most prominence and influence, do so more by conforming than by challenging our assumptions. And yet, it is only by challenging our assumptions that we grow wiser, both as individuals and as a society.
This is not an either/or argument: There is some need to rein in human individualism so that we each are articulating with others in an ever-evolving collective enterprise. But the creativity and robustness of that enterprise benefits from maximizing and encouraging individuality to the extent that it does not actually interfere with our ability to work together effectively. In other words, there is a balance to be struck, and there will always be debate concerning what the optimal balance is.
One of the ways to serve our continuing search for that optimal balance, of balancing the personal and socially damaging effects of what falls along some spectrum of what we identify as personality defects and social ineptitudes and mental illnesses, against their potential benefits to both society and the individual when more easily accepted and more affirmatively incorporated into the recognized range of variation of who and what we are, is to continue to muse.
So let’s put down our cell phones from time to time, and look beyond the gossip of the day, and even the urgent personal and political struggles that we find ourselves in. Let’s remember to find time to muse about this wonderful world of ours, this vibrant social reality so full of potential, this gorgeous living planet which gave it birth, allowing our minds to wander and contemplate and discover and grow. Let’s muse our way to greater wisdom, to greater tolerance, to greater compassion, to greater mental health accompanied by greater acceptance of individuality. Let us recover our primordial recognition of what a truly amusing world this is, and how much more so it can continue to become for so many more people, if we allow our minds to wonder to places they might not have been before, and then follow them there with our actions and efforts.
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(The following essay is in large part drawn from and inspired by conversations I have had recently with my friend Dr. Mark Foster on these subjects. The opinions expressed, however, are my own. You can find Mark’s blog, “Healthy Living in Colorado,” at http://markfosterdo.blogspot.com/.)
I’ve previously discussed various aspects of the creative tension between the individual and the society, how it implies a more subtle and complex conceptualization of “liberty” than is currently in vogue, and how it reaches to the heart of how we define ourselves as individuals and how we organize ourselves as societies. These essays most explicitly include Liberty & Interdependence, Liberty & Society, Rights v. Security, Freedom & Coherence, Inclusivity & Exclusivity, E Pluribus Unum, The Meaning of “Representation”, Free Will, Determinism, Quantum Mechanics, & Personal & Social Responsibility, Social Coherence and Disintegration, Collective Action (and Time Horizon) Problems, The Genius of the Many, and The Inherent Contradiction of Extreme Individualism, to name a few, but really include most of the essays on Colorado Confluence to some degree or another, because the creative tension between the individual and the society is at the heart of so many issues, on so many levels, through so many disciplines.
One aspect of this creative tension involves a set of interrelated issues on both the individual and social levels, touching upon our notions of mental illness, deviance, human variation, professionalism, and tolerance or accommodation, and how all of these things integrate into our social systemic reality.
Mental Health has traditionally been conceptualized as a duality: Those that are mentally ill, and those that are not. Some things that used to be considered mental illnesses (such as homosexuality, until 1974 according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders published by the American Psychiatric Association) no longer are, but it involved the moving of an item from one category to another, not a reconceptualization of the categories themselves. I addressed this somewhat in Sound Mind, Sound Body, Sound Society; Sound Good?
The similar duality involving deviance v. social conformity has experienced some parallel developments. It could be argued that homosexuality, removed from the rolls of mental illnesses in the 1970s, has remained until recently, in many or most minds, within the broader category of “social deviance” (and remains there in the minds of too many). At both the individual level of what we define as “mentally ill,” and at the societal level of what we define as “socially deviant,” we are addressing the issue of where we draw the line between that degree of deviation from the norm that is tolerable, and that degree which exceeds the limits of our tolerance.
To be fair, it is not a one-sided affair, merely a matter of how much diversity society will tolerate, but also a matter of how much deviation from the norm is functionally possible. A person must be able to integrate him- or herself into a society to a degree adequate to thrive within it. A person who deviates from the norm in a way which makes engaging in any productive contribution impossible, for instance, regardless of how accommodating the society strives to be (such as, for instance, by simply refusing to work under any and all conditions), will have a hard time paying the bills. (On the other hand, someone who disengages equally in terms of contribution and in terms of benefits is more easily tolerated.)
Generally, a deviation which involves drawing upon our collective production of wealth and welfare without contributing anything to it is deemed to be parasitic. It makes sense, on some level, not to tolerate such deviance, even if we might want to look beyond it and figure out what is motivating it and what might be done to address it. At that point, considering it either a mental health issue, or a character flaw, and how to encourage or facilitate a change of heart, becomes a functional necessity.
More emphatically, we clearly don’t and can’t tolerate forms of deviance that involve acts of violence or predation against others. This is an important point, because I believe that one of the reasons for relatively low tolerance of less threatening forms of deviance is that they challenge our faith that more threatening forms might not be implicated. For instance, if someone walks toward us acting in extremely odd ways, even if not in any explicit way threatening violence, most of us feel some apprehension that the norms which most of us follow, including those which protect us from one another, are not well enough in evidense to feel secure that they will be adhered to. In other words, when someone is acting oddly in a non-violent way, we generally have raised apprehension that he or she has above-average likelihood of acting oddly in a violent way as well.
But there is a dialectic between, on the one hand, how accommodating and flexible and tolerant a society is, and, on the other, how well that society incorporates and benefits from the true diversity within it. A police state is, by definition, a state in which there is an authoritarian stifling of all officially intolerated deviance, which is usually that deviance which is most threatening to those in power. But it tends to include almost all forms of ordinary minor deviance as well, since authoritarian states tend toward “overcontrol,” considering all variability generally threatening to the status quo from which they benefit.
In America today, those who are the most inclined to support more rather than less stringent enforcement and punishment of laws, and who are least tolerant of human variation (e.g., homosexuality, bilingualism, etc.) are also those who come “wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” Ironically, many who most readily invoke the word “liberty” in America are least tolerant of human variation (i.e., the liberty to deviate from social norms). “Liberty” to them means only the opposite of “collectivism,” which leads to the perverse conclusion that it is better for our social systems to be coopted by powerful individuals and groups than for the polity as a whole to exercise, through its elected agents, some public oversight in the public interest.
In other words, the modern right-wing concept of “liberty” has become co-opted by an authoritarian world view. A true commitment to liberty would involve recognizing the dialectic between the individual and the society, the legitimate demands by society for some degree of conformity or “articulation” by the individual, and the legitimate countervailing force of individuals testing and stretching those limits by deviating from the norm and advocating for a social systemic evolution which ever more organically accommodates such deviations.
There is a dynamic and creative tension between the individual and the society. The society is, and must be, coherent, able to maintain its coherence, to function with the greatest possible efficiency in producing and distributing wealth (and other forms of human welfare), and in doing so in a sustainable manner. But societies benefit from individual initiative and diversity. The division of labor is a more robust creator of wealth than all people doing identical work (e.g., farming). The markets that emerge from a substantial degree of individual liberty in finding one’s niche is more robust than a command economy. But a failure to enforce the laws within which such markets function would result in a disappearance of that robustness; in other words, some centralized conforming forces are necessary and useful. The trick is to figure out how and where to draw the line.
Though we fancy ourselves a society defined by the utmost respect for individual liberty, we may in fact be a more conformity-demanding society than most other developed nations. In any case, we are a more conformity-demanding society than is optimal. This is most apparent in our prevalent standards of “professionalism,” and the impact they have on the vibrancy of our professions.
“Professionalism” has come to mean, to too great an extent, being sufficiently bland and conformist within the professional institutional setting. A doctor who blogs about the over-prescription of drugs in the treatment of mental illnesses may lose his job as a result (as one I know did), or a particularly outstanding teacher who rocks the boat by having too much personality may be driven from the profession, as many are. We are, to some extent, prisoner’s of Max Weber’s “Iron Cage of Rationality,” sterilizing our environment and ourselves in the interests of conformity and the smooth operations that it facilitates.
This does not mean that any and all behaviors should be blithely tolerated, but rather that we need to work at loosening up our social institutional framework, making it flexible enough to accommodate more rather than less human variation, tapping into that variation as a resource whenever and however possible, and demoting it to the status of a self-imposed burden as reluctantly as possible. We have to recognize that our differences, even some of our more dramatic ones, aren’t threats to our collective welfare unless we refuse to accept them and adapt to them, that we don’t have to cure ever deviation from the norm, nor dismiss every person who isn’t enough like every other person.
Liberty requires tolerance. Prosperity requires utilizing rather than ostracizing our diverse human resources. Mental health requires accepting and accommodating our differences more and seeking to eradicate them less.
“This Week” is having a town hall this morning (I’m watching it now), addressing the question, “Should America fear Islam?” There are panelists on both sides of the question, including, on each side, people who lost loved ones on 9/11. One woman, Islamic, said, “America shouldn’t fear any religion. They should fear those who try to make them afraid.”
A woman who lost her pregnant daughter on 9/11 said that she can’t raise her remaining children to fear their neighbors, and that she lost her daughter and doesn’t want to now lose her country. The irony, of course, is that she fears losing her country to those who trade in the fear of losing our country (The same woman said, “I think we should not get into a discussion of whose religion has created more horror on Earth”).
A reverend who thinks that Christianity is the one truth agreed with a radical Muslim that Muslims who don’t practice Sharia law are not real Muslims. To the radical Muslim, that’s an indictment; to the reverend, it’s the justification of his hatred. Another commentator came on to say that the two, the radical Muslim and the radical Christian, are almost identical, flip sides of the same coin of intolerance and hatred.
The reverend had earlier said that he believed that Christianity was the one truth, and that Islam was a lie, and then went on to list the Islamic beliefs and history that he considers justification for his fear of Islam (Sharia law). But, of course, if we exposed Christianity to the same kind of critical examination, we would arrive at much the same kind of realization, that archaic religions fanatically adhered to today do not embrace the advances in our humanity that have transcended their former militancy. To use either of these religions (or any other) as a vehicle for the militancy that is historically embedded within it is the same crime against humanity dressed in different clothes; to use either of these religions (or any other) as a vehicle for compassion and goodwill, as a tolerant lens through which to focus a commitment to humanity, as a social force through which to do good in the world, is an admirable mission.
An FBI agent was brought on to discuss the legitimate terrorist threats, particularly home-grown Islamic terrorism. But he emphasized that the numbers are not dramatic, that the threat of home-grown terrorism does not rise to the level of the threat of mundane violent crime in America. He did not mention what Time Magazine did in its most recent issue (see “American Terrorists in Training”: http://coloradoconfluence.com/?p=622), the three-fold rise in a single year in the number of radical right-wing militias training to fight their own holy war here on American soil.
One right-winger on the panel said that Islamic law requires that loyal Muslims must lie to advance their religion, and that, therefore, he could not trust the moderate Islamic panelist’s assurance that she is a proud American committed to preserving and promoting a tolerant, peaceful society.
The debate went on to compare the relative levels of violence committed by radical Christianity and radical Islam, whether the building of the Islamic Center in Manhattan is insensitive. Right after Gary Bower insisted that Christians don’t commit acts of violence when they’re upset, a Muslim cleric told of his mosque in a non-controversial location in the heartland of America being destroyed by arson.
A debate broke out whether rising hate crimes against Muslims are real, or committed by Muslims themseves in order to exploit a fabricated victimhood. (Robert?) Spencer cited what a well-informed participant called debunked data (and cited the organizations that had debunked it, including the FBI).
The right-wing extremists on the panel and in the audience kept returning to exaggerated claims of a radicalization that every specifically and professionally informed person (including law enforcement officials) on the panel and in the audience completely debunked. The right-wing man who lost his son insisted that we cannot tolerate Islam in this country, because it is inherently radical and violent. The moderate woman who lost her daughter spoke with the voice of reason and tolerance.
You should link to the video or transcript, and watch or read the whole thing, for the all of it, but most of all for Daisy’s brilliant contribution. Here are two (not necessarily the best) examples: “I believe that in this nation we hold people accountable for crimes after they commit them, and not before.” “They could be sensitive and move the mosque farther away from ground zero; how far away is far enough?”
At the close of the panel discussion, the wife of the Imam behind the cultural center was asked “should you move the center?” She answered, “No. I think American values should prevail.”
So do I.
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We humans are naturally inclined to believe that things are as they appear to be. “If it walks like a duck…,” and all that. We all knew, even before we really could, that O.J. did it (unless we were among the many African Americans who alternatively knew that the system was unfailingly biased against African Americans, even very wealthy and famous ones, and that O.J. was therefore being railroaded). And lots of people similarly knew that Tim Masters did it, until some dedicated lawyers swimming upstream and for no pay proved that he didn’t, getting him released from prison after 18 years languishing there. Once we know, we filter our perceptions to reinforce our certainty. That’s the nature of prejudice, and it is far more ubiquitous, far more an inherent aspect of our lives, than most of us recognize.
In criminal matters, the first line of defense against error is the police, who, rather than being less inclined to prejudice than lay people, are more inclined. Professional experience breeds cynicism; a system which provides in some ways extravagant protections for the innocent provides too many ways out for the guilty; and the desire to compensate for that system of institutionalized doubt creates little room for doubt among those who know who committed the crime. Certainties are quickly arrived at, and evidence is sought to confirm rather than refute them. The police “put together a case” rather than test their assumptions, and a narrative is constructed that proves guilt, whether or not such guilt corresponds to reality (the fact that it usually does is not at issue, nor in opposition to this thesis, since injustices are not made more just by virtue of being in the minority).
So the police, the first line of defense, are more rather than less inclined than lay people to rely on prejudice, and to reinforce rather than question their own hasty assumptions.
Once a person is identified as guilty by the police, the presumption is really against them, though institutionally in their favor. Jurors see someone who the police arrested and who is on trial for a crime. And if that person is not terribly sympathetic, all the worse for them.
But jurors, I’m told, take their duties very seriously, and don’t convict too precipitously. And the system as a whole really does try to protect the innocent, counterbalancing some of these prejudices. Despite the many ways in which our judicial system is far less inclined to justice than we imagine, it is far more inclined to justice than almost any other sphere of our lives.
We do not enjoy the same degree of due process protections for non-judicial decisions that may dramatically affect our welfare. In many spheres, the process given involves an investigation, determination, and recommendation all done by a single office, often with a very highly pronounced predisposition of its own. If our judicial system allows more prejudice and injustice into it than we commonly imagine, then all other similar activities beyond it, that place the roles of investigation, prosecution, and judgement all in the hands of a single, predisposed agency, are doomed to be outright mockeries of justice, railroading people almost as often as they get it right.
And we enjoy no due process protections whatsoever in the court of public opinion, where the failures of other spheres become embedded in permanent reality, and a far wider universe of informal failures of its own are added to them. Some are quasi-official, such as the person who ends up on a sex offenders registry for urinating in public (something I believe that most men, at least, have done on at least one occasion, usually with as much discretion as possible). Some are simply part of our nature, such as the eccentric being ostracized.
We remain throughout our lives, to a degree we are loathe to recognize, the same essential creatures as the children we once were, mocking the little girl with the hearing aid, or the boy with a bit too much saliva production. There is a cruelty, an intolerance, that permeates what we are, in ways that we disregard or dismiss as trivial, but that have a far greater cumulative effect than we often realize.
But injustice is more deeply rooted still. We are born into different conditions in life, different opportunity structures, different lots. A person born into an abusive and neglectful family, surrounded, perhaps, by violence, poverty, drug use, and gangs that are the only source of mutual support available, does not face the same prospects as one born into an affluent and nurturing home (not to suggest that all impoverished homes are not nurturing, or that all affluent ones are).
One measure of civilization should be the degree to which we mitigate these myriad and prevalent injustices, the degree to which we level the playing field and ensure that all face equality of opportunity, and at least informal and self-imposed protection from prejudices and cruelties in all their forms. Public education is one, insufficient, vehicle for doing so. Cultivating a more widespread attitude of tolerance, mutual support, a belief that we are all members of a society, a desire to assist rather than condemn, would also go a long way to moving us further in the direction of a more just and compassionate society. Such notions have rarely been more embattled in this country, which is why they have rarely been in greater need of more voices more loudly advocating them, and more wills more diligently embracing them.
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