Note: This blog was announced as a place to comment both about politics, society and the economic system, and about the themes of my book Demystifying Demons: Rethinking Who and What We Are. The following essay is the first post that relates to the book.
On Condemnation
On Condemnation
In my book Demystifying
Demons: Rethinking Who and What We Are, I argue that our thoughts,
feelings, motives, and actions flow from a complex of external and internal
factors that we do not really understand and cannot control. We were, each of
us, shaped in infancy by the dynamics of the situation into which we were born,
a situation that includes not only the immediate lives of our families, but the
larger social order in which our families operate. We are all deeply affected by
economic and political conditions and the ways they influence how people treat
each other. What appear to us to be, and are assessed by others as, conscious,
deliberate choices, are the products of forces in us and around us of which we
are largely unconscious or that we misinterpret. The stories we tell to
“explain” why we acted as we did are mostly rationalizations aimed at
satisfying or placating others whose judgment matters to us.
Quoting (slightly altered) from the book:
This view of ourselves should lead
us away from the habit of condemning people for things they do, and towards
being merciful towards ourselves and each other. The more we live with this
picture of all human beings as damaged survivors of the traumas of childhood,
the more we are able to override the scorn and contempt we so often direct at
people (including ourselves) who do stupid or terrible things. This is not to
say that judging what people do as evil or criminal is never justified, and that
every crime must simply be forgiven and forgotten. But it is to say that
vindictive punishment or moral condemnation aimed at individuals fails to
understand that people who damage us are themselves part of the collateral
damage that comes with human life, especially in the world as it is now.
Vengeance against those who have harmed us does none of us any good; it only
fuels the careening juggernaut of human catastrophe that is our history. We
should now be able to recognize that the drive for vengeance is born of our own
desire for an acceptable target of the cruelty we have accumulated in our own
souls.[1]
The philosopher Spinoza said, “I have labored carefully not to mock human actions, nor to lament nor to
curse them, but to try to understand them.” When we mock, lament, or
curse someone, we cannot understand him or her.
We have reduced the complex person, who is embedded in a many-sided
social situation, to a demonic and isolated caricature, someone who is either a
moron or is evil for no other reason than the perverse desire to do evil.
Now it is one thing to understand this argument for mercy
and quite another to apply it in daily life. And it’s easier to apply it to the
motes in the eyes of others than to the planks in our own. I can find myself
angrily or contemptuously calling someone stupid or an idiot – or worse. I
usually follow this by trying to think through some of the factors in the lives
of those others that lead them to act, feel, and think as they do. But a
problem arises when I respond to others in conversation when they condemn
others as stupid or corrupt or insensitive. My intervention can strike them as
condemnatory, as if I were calling my friends stupid for calling others stupid.
A first step in thinking about this problem is to clarify
what I mean by condemn in the sense that
I think we should avoid condemning others. Spinoza’s words (as translated from
the Latin) are “mock”, “lament”, and “curse”. Mocking and cursing are ways of
setting others apart from ourselves, refusing to take them seriously. You do
not mock or curse someone as a way of opening a productive conversation with
them,[2]
and indeed, we typically mock and curse people behind their backs, in
conversation with people we do (at least for the moment) take seriously. The
clearest cases of condemnation are those in which the people being condemned
are being set up for real exclusion: immigrants, homeless people, black people,
old people, people called “criminals,” and so on and on. Immigrants do not
belong here. Homeless people should just get out of site if they can’t get a
job and clean up their act. Blacks should stay out of our
neighborhoods. There are institutions for sequestering the infirm elderly
(and the mentally disturbed and disturbing). We have prisons for criminals. Or,
if we’re liberals, then Trump voters… well, they should just crawl back under
their rocks. We condemn people we want nothing to do with and we condemn them to people like ourselves, people with
whom we claim to share a community. Indeed, a way we often build our sense of
solidarity with our community is precisely by condemning others to remain
outside it.
By contrast, when I suggest to a friend in conversation that
she (or he) try to go beyond her first angry response to some behavior she
finds disturbing and consider how much we are all creatures of the moment and
of the many factors, past and present, operating in us and on us, factors over
which we have no control and did not choose, I am engaging with her as a member
of our community and inviting her to consider a larger picture. But she may
hear my intervention as a refusal understand how she feels; it may seem that I
am unwilling to take in the hurt and anger she is experiencing about how the
behavior she is complaining about affects her life.
My friend’s response to my attempt to move her from anger to
mercy should cause me to reflect on my own motives. Perhaps I do brush aside her
feelings of fear or outrage too quickly. It may well be that my insistence that
no one be condemned and excluded
comes from my own fear of being
condemned and rejected, a fear I acknowledge having. A deep motive for writing Demystifying Demons, in fact, was my
wish to establish a persuasive case for understanding and treating people as I wish to be treated, and to demonstrate
what is terribly wrong with the way (I felt) I was treated as a child, the way
I learned to treat myself. Thus, when I hear someone else condemning others,
separating them from us, I fear that she may be open to condemning me as well.
So I am anxious to protect myself from that possibility by trying to make the
general case for mercy, compassion, and generosity.
Admitting this does not mean that my position is nothing
more than a balm for my particular personal problem, for it seems to me that
many, and probably most, people suffer from some degree of guilt,
self-loathing, free-floating anxiety, insecurity about one’s own existence, and
anger, the inner demons I attempt to exorcise, or at least expose, in the book.
But I do need to be more aware of another point I make there: that what matters
most in our closest relationships – what we need most from others – is the
sense that the other is trying hard to hear and understand us.[3] By
moving too quickly to correct, however gently, the way another person thinks,
before acknowledging the emotional weight of those thoughts, I may well give her
the sense that I am more interested in promoting my own superior view of the
world than in hearing and taking in what she thinks and feels. No doubt it is a
skill, probably cultivated by good therapists, to know how to move from
sympathetic understanding of someone’s excessive anger to offering a
reinterpretation of a situation about which they are angry. It’s one we would
all do well to cultivate.
[2] It is sometimes possible
that a conversation that begins with mocking and/or cursing can develop into an
open dialogue and reach some kind of mutual understanding.
[3] See Demystifying Demons, p. 68.
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