Reading in our world has a sort of old, sedate, peaceful, slow image, while TV and movies are perceived as fast, exciting and youthful. Many people think that TV is shortening our attention spans! The truth is precisely the contrary: my attention span is too short to do anything but read. With 98% of movies, I get bored after about 20 minutes and start to multitask. Even with the few really good movies, I prefer to watch in 30-minute installments.
Think about it: how many words do you take in per second? Quickly testing it with a fairly easy nonfiction text, I found I read 7-10 words per second. That means that, several times per second, something is happening. In nonfiction, an argument is being presented or an example given. In fiction, even if nothing is happening in the plot, there’s a description, a philosophical aside, or a thought-provoking word choice to focus on.
(N.B.: This assumes you are reading an actually good book. If you are one of those people who read books for their plot, you might as well just switch to TV. I will not miss you.)
If I think the book is going too slowly, I can just read faster. Alternatively, I can skip forward, reading a few sentences every few pages, and see if anything more interesting promises to come.
With film, skipping forward is impossible. Watching TV or a movie in a theatre, there is no way you can figure out what’s going to happen--you have to make an absolute yes-or-no decision about whether to stay and watch. With a DVD, you can of course skip scenes; but that never gives you as much information as skimming through a book. You can skip to the beginning of the next scene, but that might not be the most interesting part. In order to see if it is, you have to watch the whole scene! It’s slavery! You can fast-forward, but all you’ll see will be vague moving shapes; you might be fast-forwarding past the best dialogue in the film, without knowing it.
Moreover, everything moves more slowly in filmed media. Things happen in the superficial sense, but anything interesting takes forever! A ton of any movie or TV show--even the good ones--will be taken up with shots intended to establish the setting or the time period--with shots showing you the characters’ clothes 0r houses or bodies or faces--with shots of their movements or observations--with fistfights and sex. Even in scenes containing dialogue, the actors speak incredibly slowly, compared to the speed at which you would read their words. If you’re familiar with the written text, it’s painful to watch the words dragging and halting by (compare reading “The Importance of Being Earnest” to watching the, nevertheless good, movie!).
I admit that there are certain respects in which the visual image can be more effective; but these are all relatively shallow areas of experience. The sex scene which might arouse male viewers--the sight of an emotional face which appeals to the sentimental--the skeleton jumping out unexpectedly which makes me jump. Anything deeper than these effects which a movie wishes to convey could probably be done as well or better in print.
The exception is comedy, which is actually easier to do in film. With a good episode of “Seinfeld”, for instance, something funny or at least attention-catching is happening every few seconds. (“Seinfeld” also illustrates the fact that in a comedy of whatever kind, all or most emotion must be leached out in order to maintain the comic mood and keep an audience’s interest.) Animated comedies are especially easy for me to appreciate, since their creators usually realize we aren’t interested in lengthy shots of clothes, faces or emotions belonging to animated figures.
I do think, however, that an authentically funny creation is a rare, virtuoso performance, which even the masters can’t keep alive for more than, say, 30 pages or twenty minutes. I honestly can’t remember any non-animated full-length film which I’ve enjoyed for the comedy!
There are other, vaguely personal reasons why I can't enjoy film--but, basically, if I refuse to watch a movie with you; it's not you, it's the entire cinematic tradition.
May 29, 2009
May 20, 2009
Blanched spinach: a miracle food
Pretty much every time I cook, about halfway through the process it suddenly occurs to me that, hey, I could blanche some spinach and throw it in here. It works for almost any dish: omelet, casserole, soup, chili, curry, pasta, or tortilla dish. Blanching is easy and spinach is one of the most nutritious foods ever. You can reduce several handfuls of spinach:
to a tiny quantity of cooked spinach:
so that you can incorporate extra nutrients into almost any meal with very little effect on its color, texture or taste.
Also, if you fail to eat spinach fast enough and it gets crushed and starts to rot, you don't have to throw it away; just blanche it and mix it in, and it retains its palatibility.
to a tiny quantity of cooked spinach:
so that you can incorporate extra nutrients into almost any meal with very little effect on its color, texture or taste.
Also, if you fail to eat spinach fast enough and it gets crushed and starts to rot, you don't have to throw it away; just blanche it and mix it in, and it retains its palatibility.
May 18, 2009
The universality of literature
This article on women's writing is surprisingly unobjectionable--until I got to this! Near the end we find a single isolated sentence: "Great Literary American Novel Syndrome is a surprisingly persistent condition, despite the increasingly obvious likelihood that no work of art can sum up a nation as heterogeneous as ours without neglecting somebody."
Note the implied idea that a great writer can never speak for someone who is different than him. What the hell. This is Chinua Achebe's obscenely obtuse critique of "Heart of Darkness" all over again. Am I only to read heterosexual female Polish/Scottish 22-year-old authors? If I can find part of myself--not my Eastern European features or my sex, but the most important part of myself reflected in, say, a middle-aged gay French man, then other people should be able to do the same. If they can't, it's their own damn fault.
For a great author--no, even a good one--doesn't just write about the superficial. His characters have hair colors and ages and nationalities, but they have other, more important, characteristics--their personalities are what we identify with--or even more deeply human characteristics.
This said, I do admit that the superficial qualities of characters and authors can make it easier or harder for us to appreciate them. It was, for instance, a strikingly bad idea to make my sophomore language class (a class of mostly female 20-year-olds) spend all year studying old men (Lear and Oedipus). Some of us may be able to reach past the different superficialites--just like some women can reach past the annoyance of an author who assumes all his readers are male. But the fact that there are women and non-white people who write makes it easier for a lot of us to find literature from which to learn.
Note the implied idea that a great writer can never speak for someone who is different than him. What the hell. This is Chinua Achebe's obscenely obtuse critique of "Heart of Darkness" all over again. Am I only to read heterosexual female Polish/Scottish 22-year-old authors? If I can find part of myself--not my Eastern European features or my sex, but the most important part of myself reflected in, say, a middle-aged gay French man, then other people should be able to do the same. If they can't, it's their own damn fault.
For a great author--no, even a good one--doesn't just write about the superficial. His characters have hair colors and ages and nationalities, but they have other, more important, characteristics--their personalities are what we identify with--or even more deeply human characteristics.
This said, I do admit that the superficial qualities of characters and authors can make it easier or harder for us to appreciate them. It was, for instance, a strikingly bad idea to make my sophomore language class (a class of mostly female 20-year-olds) spend all year studying old men (Lear and Oedipus). Some of us may be able to reach past the different superficialites--just like some women can reach past the annoyance of an author who assumes all his readers are male. But the fact that there are women and non-white people who write makes it easier for a lot of us to find literature from which to learn.
May 15, 2009
Politics in Utah
This Slate article suggests that politics in Utah are getting more moderate. As a former resident, I very much doubt it. Oh so they have bars now? Very progressive. As long as a religion has verve and vigor in it, it will be conservative; and the LDS Church, one of the fastest-growing religions in the WORLD, shows no sign of dying out.
In fact, I'm worried that people will come to think that this is a healthy and tolerant version of religion. Mormons, with their polished image, happy families and charitable ways, are more camera-friendly than the guy with the Southern accent shouting that God hates fags; but they are just as religious and, deep down, just as exclusive. In fact, Mormons, at least in Utah outside Salt Lake, get to live in their own isolated communities; where a 21-year-old single woman is considered an old maid; where a person can live his whole life without meeting anyone who believes in evolution--and for that reason, Mormonism is significantly more dangerous for the rest of us than traditional Evangelical Christianity, whose believers are less isolated and more likely to encounter people who disagree with them.
A church will tolerate dissent as much as is convenient for it; let's not think that constitutes real open-mindedness.
In fact, I'm worried that people will come to think that this is a healthy and tolerant version of religion. Mormons, with their polished image, happy families and charitable ways, are more camera-friendly than the guy with the Southern accent shouting that God hates fags; but they are just as religious and, deep down, just as exclusive. In fact, Mormons, at least in Utah outside Salt Lake, get to live in their own isolated communities; where a 21-year-old single woman is considered an old maid; where a person can live his whole life without meeting anyone who believes in evolution--and for that reason, Mormonism is significantly more dangerous for the rest of us than traditional Evangelical Christianity, whose believers are less isolated and more likely to encounter people who disagree with them.
A church will tolerate dissent as much as is convenient for it; let's not think that constitutes real open-mindedness.
Another thing to disagree with.
The book, “American Therapy”, by Jonathan Engel.
The basic intention of this book is to describe the history of psychotherapy, from its birth in Europe with Charcot, Breuer, and Freud, to whatever it currently is in America. Insofar as the author confines himself to history, the book is useful. For instance, I never knew how much influence Breuer had on Freud. (He was Anna O.’s sole physician, and came up with the basic idea that talking about memories alleviates hysterical symptoms.) But the author, while positioning himself as a social historian, refuses to confine himself to the discipline required as a historian. He ought to question the veracity and objectivity of his sources, which he hardly ever does. It is therefore a crucial mistake, in fact a mistake which invalidates the entire enterprise of the book, implicitly to assume that the findings of a modern study always invalidate past findings, and that what modern psychologists believe is always more true than what people thought in the past.
As a Freudian, I take offense to sketchy, unsupported statements like, “Studies repeatedly demonstrated that psychoanalysis did not work.” Engel makes no effort to examine how the structure of or the assumptions of these studies might have led to such a conclusion, and he brushes past the question of what it means to be ‘cured’. Orthodox psychoanalysts are described as “clinging to their dogma in a mixture of denial, professional fear, and blind belief.” The author attempts to argue against the existence of an Oedipus complex by quoting Jane Goodall’s observation of chimpanzees! In the epilogue, he justifies the unpopularity of psychoanalysis by appealing to patriotism! “Our can-do nation, often skeptical of intellectualism and scholasticism, was unlikely to embrace an ideology [!] born of fin-de-siècle European angst.”
Is he not aware we are living in another fin de siècle?
Moreover, the author has a rather happy-go-lucky attitude towards institutionally sanctioned medication. (He repeatedly quotes a pro-medication writer saying that Prozac makes people ‘better than well.) Contrast his uniformly condemnatory attitude towards people finding their own medication. His chapter on alcohol is the A.A. philosophy, chapter and verse. No opposing point of view is presented. He even quotes, with approval, some guy who published a study arguing that no one who drinks regularly is psychologically healthy--!--we’re all either alcoholics or future alcoholics, and the ‘social drinker’ doesn’t exist. His chapter on narcotics is similarly subservient to the public health official’s overcautious point of view. (On the first page, he introduces the concept of ‘psychological addiction’--but never does he bother to define this problematic idea or differentiate it from, say, a ‘choice’.)
More crucially, the author repeatedly says that we ‘now know’ that mental illness has an organic basis. What justifies this assertion? Most of the time, he doesn’t bother to tell us. When he does attempt an explanation, it’s insufficient or bafflingly irrelevant. For instance, schizophrenics and control subjects responded differently when given antipsychotic drugs. “The discrepancy in response to the drugs indicated that the brains of schizophrenics were physiologically different than those of healthy people. Schizophrenia was very much a biological condition, even if rooted partially in environmental stressors.” Now, people who have already been categorized as schizophrenics are in a much different emotional and social environment than people casually engaging in a medical study. Might that not produce different responses to any drug in the two groups?
Then, scientists find that schizophrenics’ brains are different from healthy people. Therefore their brains were different when they were born, and they subsequently became schizophrenic because their brains made them. This is the only possibility discussed. But I remember reading that the brain continues to develop long after birth--that’s why malnourished infants are often retarded. Couldn’t a person’s harmful experiences in the womb or as an infant affect the development of his brain, so that psychological traumas à la Freud might precede the organic change in a person’s brain?
Engel’s consideration of psychiatric skeptics like R.D. Laing and Thomas Szasz is confined to four pages. He starts off by calling them names-- “kooky”, “radical”, “pernicious”. “[Alcoholics who quit drinking] would take offense at the accusation of the antipsychiatrists that they had simply stopped drinking because they no longer felt like drinking. In their minds, they had conquered a dreadful disease...” So, when people find it convenient to believe they have a disease, they do? And look at this--Jesus Christ, the blindness--Engel says,
“Many mental illnesses...responded well to medications and shock, further validating an organic understanding of mental illness. Szasz’s worldview, predicated on the assumption that mental illness simply did not exist, could not stand up to clinical and laboratory inquiry.”
First off, has he read Szasz? If he has, he hasn’t read him well. Szasz doesn’t deny that what we call mental illness exists---instead, he says that metaphorically describing this phenomenon as an illness is a harmful and deceptive linguistic strategy. His example is the contrast between a person with a brain tumor and a depressive. We know how the brain is supposed to work (in general...), and we can objectively say the brain tumor gets in the brain’s way. That’s an illness. But on the other hand, we don’t really know how the mind, or the whole person, is supposed to work. Rather than calling certain people sick lunatics who have no control over their actions, it’s more scientific to describe them in neutral terms, as people who act in unusual ways, only some of whom think they ought to change. (And, if we were to go back to Freud, these people might be described as people who _think_ they are slaves to their own minds, while in fact all their actions are freely chosen by the unconscious.)
Second, let’s decode that first sentence. Many mental illnesses responded well to medications and shock. By ‘mental illnesses’ here, he means ‘people’. By ‘responded well’, he means, ‘started acting differently’. So people who acted unusually were imprisoned, drugged, and shocked, and subsequently began to act more in accordance with their keepers’ wishes. In what way does that validate “an organic understanding of mental illness”?
Then he presents, without comment, directly contradictory evidence. If mental illness is organically determined, how does he explain the finding that “spontaneous remission of psychiatric symptoms was observed consistently in a third of all patients”? Doesn’t this suggest that people have some amount of control over their actions, even if those actions are what psychologists prefer to describe as ‘symptoms’?
On the second-to-last page, the author leaves us with his most infuriating mot yet. The psychiatric skeptic Peter Breggin wrote, truthfully I might add, that “[the psychiatrist] can prescribe drugs or shock, lock you up against your will, talk behind your back with your husband, wife or parents, and make plans for your future without consulting you.” Szasz might add a criminal’s being deemed insane might make the difference between a prison sentence of a few months and being committed to an asylum for life. But to Engel, all concern with institutionalized persons’ civil rights and the distrust of institutional authority it stems from is ‘bizarre’. And on the very last page--I didn’t think he would go there, but he did...Those who argue people shouldn’t be locked up and drugged against their will are “among the Neville Chamberlains of the psychological world...willing to surrender hope, standards, and the civic enterprise for the lure of psychic autonomy.”
No one concerned with what life is really like should be a damn shill for the damn system. This book, cursory and easy to read, will be more popular than it deserves.
Well, at least I feel better now.
The basic intention of this book is to describe the history of psychotherapy, from its birth in Europe with Charcot, Breuer, and Freud, to whatever it currently is in America. Insofar as the author confines himself to history, the book is useful. For instance, I never knew how much influence Breuer had on Freud. (He was Anna O.’s sole physician, and came up with the basic idea that talking about memories alleviates hysterical symptoms.) But the author, while positioning himself as a social historian, refuses to confine himself to the discipline required as a historian. He ought to question the veracity and objectivity of his sources, which he hardly ever does. It is therefore a crucial mistake, in fact a mistake which invalidates the entire enterprise of the book, implicitly to assume that the findings of a modern study always invalidate past findings, and that what modern psychologists believe is always more true than what people thought in the past.
As a Freudian, I take offense to sketchy, unsupported statements like, “Studies repeatedly demonstrated that psychoanalysis did not work.” Engel makes no effort to examine how the structure of or the assumptions of these studies might have led to such a conclusion, and he brushes past the question of what it means to be ‘cured’. Orthodox psychoanalysts are described as “clinging to their dogma in a mixture of denial, professional fear, and blind belief.” The author attempts to argue against the existence of an Oedipus complex by quoting Jane Goodall’s observation of chimpanzees! In the epilogue, he justifies the unpopularity of psychoanalysis by appealing to patriotism! “Our can-do nation, often skeptical of intellectualism and scholasticism, was unlikely to embrace an ideology [!] born of fin-de-siècle European angst.”
Is he not aware we are living in another fin de siècle?
Moreover, the author has a rather happy-go-lucky attitude towards institutionally sanctioned medication. (He repeatedly quotes a pro-medication writer saying that Prozac makes people ‘better than well.) Contrast his uniformly condemnatory attitude towards people finding their own medication. His chapter on alcohol is the A.A. philosophy, chapter and verse. No opposing point of view is presented. He even quotes, with approval, some guy who published a study arguing that no one who drinks regularly is psychologically healthy--!--we’re all either alcoholics or future alcoholics, and the ‘social drinker’ doesn’t exist. His chapter on narcotics is similarly subservient to the public health official’s overcautious point of view. (On the first page, he introduces the concept of ‘psychological addiction’--but never does he bother to define this problematic idea or differentiate it from, say, a ‘choice’.)
More crucially, the author repeatedly says that we ‘now know’ that mental illness has an organic basis. What justifies this assertion? Most of the time, he doesn’t bother to tell us. When he does attempt an explanation, it’s insufficient or bafflingly irrelevant. For instance, schizophrenics and control subjects responded differently when given antipsychotic drugs. “The discrepancy in response to the drugs indicated that the brains of schizophrenics were physiologically different than those of healthy people. Schizophrenia was very much a biological condition, even if rooted partially in environmental stressors.” Now, people who have already been categorized as schizophrenics are in a much different emotional and social environment than people casually engaging in a medical study. Might that not produce different responses to any drug in the two groups?
Then, scientists find that schizophrenics’ brains are different from healthy people. Therefore their brains were different when they were born, and they subsequently became schizophrenic because their brains made them. This is the only possibility discussed. But I remember reading that the brain continues to develop long after birth--that’s why malnourished infants are often retarded. Couldn’t a person’s harmful experiences in the womb or as an infant affect the development of his brain, so that psychological traumas à la Freud might precede the organic change in a person’s brain?
Engel’s consideration of psychiatric skeptics like R.D. Laing and Thomas Szasz is confined to four pages. He starts off by calling them names-- “kooky”, “radical”, “pernicious”. “[Alcoholics who quit drinking] would take offense at the accusation of the antipsychiatrists that they had simply stopped drinking because they no longer felt like drinking. In their minds, they had conquered a dreadful disease...” So, when people find it convenient to believe they have a disease, they do? And look at this--Jesus Christ, the blindness--Engel says,
“Many mental illnesses...responded well to medications and shock, further validating an organic understanding of mental illness. Szasz’s worldview, predicated on the assumption that mental illness simply did not exist, could not stand up to clinical and laboratory inquiry.”
First off, has he read Szasz? If he has, he hasn’t read him well. Szasz doesn’t deny that what we call mental illness exists---instead, he says that metaphorically describing this phenomenon as an illness is a harmful and deceptive linguistic strategy. His example is the contrast between a person with a brain tumor and a depressive. We know how the brain is supposed to work (in general...), and we can objectively say the brain tumor gets in the brain’s way. That’s an illness. But on the other hand, we don’t really know how the mind, or the whole person, is supposed to work. Rather than calling certain people sick lunatics who have no control over their actions, it’s more scientific to describe them in neutral terms, as people who act in unusual ways, only some of whom think they ought to change. (And, if we were to go back to Freud, these people might be described as people who _think_ they are slaves to their own minds, while in fact all their actions are freely chosen by the unconscious.)
Second, let’s decode that first sentence. Many mental illnesses responded well to medications and shock. By ‘mental illnesses’ here, he means ‘people’. By ‘responded well’, he means, ‘started acting differently’. So people who acted unusually were imprisoned, drugged, and shocked, and subsequently began to act more in accordance with their keepers’ wishes. In what way does that validate “an organic understanding of mental illness”?
Then he presents, without comment, directly contradictory evidence. If mental illness is organically determined, how does he explain the finding that “spontaneous remission of psychiatric symptoms was observed consistently in a third of all patients”? Doesn’t this suggest that people have some amount of control over their actions, even if those actions are what psychologists prefer to describe as ‘symptoms’?
On the second-to-last page, the author leaves us with his most infuriating mot yet. The psychiatric skeptic Peter Breggin wrote, truthfully I might add, that “[the psychiatrist] can prescribe drugs or shock, lock you up against your will, talk behind your back with your husband, wife or parents, and make plans for your future without consulting you.” Szasz might add a criminal’s being deemed insane might make the difference between a prison sentence of a few months and being committed to an asylum for life. But to Engel, all concern with institutionalized persons’ civil rights and the distrust of institutional authority it stems from is ‘bizarre’. And on the very last page--I didn’t think he would go there, but he did...Those who argue people shouldn’t be locked up and drugged against their will are “among the Neville Chamberlains of the psychological world...willing to surrender hope, standards, and the civic enterprise for the lure of psychic autonomy.”
No one concerned with what life is really like should be a damn shill for the damn system. This book, cursory and easy to read, will be more popular than it deserves.
Well, at least I feel better now.
Why gay marriage is unpopular
The gay rights movement likes to frame the gay marriage question as a civil rights issue, by analogy with Loving v. Virginia . If we are to accept this, race is like sexual practice.The theory here goes, there are black people and there are white people, and the two groups are morally equal, and therefore members of those groups should be allowed to marry whomever they please. And similarly, there are straight people and there are gay people, and the two groups are morally equal, and therefore they should be allowed to marry whomever they please.
Now this argument makes sense to very many people, especially to those of us who are already sympathetic with gay rights. But it is not efficacious. It won’t convince anyone who isn’t already half convinced. In fact, I’m not sure it’s true. Race is immutable, short of plastic surgery. But the people you have sex with, or whether you have sex at all, are choices. (Being gay is generally thought to be innate; I’m not so sure; but actually fucking is a choice.) This is why opponents of gay marriage by and large reject the notion that gay people are morally equal with straights, and the notion that gay people can’t help it. So the civil rights analogy makes no sense to them. There must be another way to convince them. This is diplomacy, after all; meet the other side where they are, not where you wish they were.
It seems to me that a lot of gay rights supporters are simply willing to sit back and let time do their work for them; and time is probably on their side. But legalizing gay marriage through the courts will never create widespread tolerance of gay rights; did Roe v Wade make abortion popular? If gay marriage becomes legal against the wishes of a majority or large minority of the people, homosexuals will get symbolic recognition but not actual safety and protection from discrimination. Isolating the people who think homosexuality is wrong will just intensify them in their hatred.
What would be likely to reach them? Well, it might help, for instance, to read what people on the right actually say about gay marriage. It seems to me that gay rights advocates tend not to read these things, and to reject every argument their opponents make as motivated by unconscious hatred for gays. Or religion motivated by hatred. Is there unconscious hatred? Well, probably, sometimes. We can’t negotiate with hatred--that’s too bad-- but what we can address are the rational and plausible fears motivating most of the enemies of gay marriage. In order to do this we need to understand where the other side stands. No one ever engages in successful diplomacy without making some effort to figure out what the other guy is saying, what he’s thinking, what he wants and what he fears. We can also learn from the world of linguistics that when two people use the same word, it’s not always safe to assume they mean the same thing. Say “gay marriage” to one of its supporters, and he probably visualizes crowds of happy newlyweds. Say “gay marriage” to one of its opponents, and he thinks of much more than that. It’s not just married people to him--it’s one more step on the road towards the institutionalization of tolerance for homosexuality. If those are too many abstract nouns, it’s a step towards a world in which gays and liberals have power and people like us don’t.
Read the right wing and see what they fear. For example, Focus on the Family’s little dystopian fantasy about what they feared would happen if Obama won the election. It’s called “The World in 2016” or something like that. They imagine, for instance, that if we legalized gay marriage, public schools would start teaching children that homosexuality is okay. Christian teachers might be fired for refusing to teach this. Christian churches might be sued out of existence if they refused to marry gay people. Christian ministers or anyone else who said in public that homosexuality is a sin, or is a choice, might be sued or imprisoned.
If this seems farfetched, consider some of the anti-hate-speech laws which have been passed in the past few years in Britain and in the Netherlands. Religious people and MPs have been accused of slander and of hate speech for criticizing Islam. So it’s not so implausible to imagine that something similar might eventually happen here. For instance, the case in New Mexico in which a photographer refused to shoot a same-sex ceremony and was sued for it! Or this case in which a man who was found to have expressed 'hatred' was banned for life from expressing opinions critical of homosexuality in any medium, including private communications. How can people consider themselves liberals and yet do their best to use the legal system to batter people who disagree with them?
Gay rights advocates even strengthen this sort of fear by attributing all criticism of homosexuality to sheer hatred. In fact such criticism is usually based in religion, and calling a belief taken straight from the Bible “hate speech” is not likely to win over the Christians.
So what gay rights advocates should do is two things. First, de-emphasize the unconvincing analogy with civil rights. Instead, frame the argument as a libertarian issue. It is one, basically, and besides, many people on the right can sympathize with libertarian ideas. Second, reassure your enemies. Say for instance:
“We gay people just want to live our lives and hold our beliefs without being interfered with. In return, you can live your lives and hold your beliefs. That’s part of living in a democratic pluralistic society. We understand that you think homosexuality is a sin. --We disagree. But we are willing to preserve and to defend your Constitutional right to continue believing and saying what you do, and teaching your children whatever you think best. You leave us alone; we’ll leave you alone.”
Why can’t they say this?
I believe the gay rights movement is handicapped by its own moral fervor--the moral fervor, I suppose, of feeling like you have to defend your very essence as a gay person. Moral fervor is not conducive to a rational, effective and, above all, compassionate diplomacy. After all, very few people are capable of a compassionate understanding of their enemies when they believe those enemies are motivated by personal hatred for them as people. Maybe the straights would make better advocates.
Now this argument makes sense to very many people, especially to those of us who are already sympathetic with gay rights. But it is not efficacious. It won’t convince anyone who isn’t already half convinced. In fact, I’m not sure it’s true. Race is immutable, short of plastic surgery. But the people you have sex with, or whether you have sex at all, are choices. (Being gay is generally thought to be innate; I’m not so sure; but actually fucking is a choice.) This is why opponents of gay marriage by and large reject the notion that gay people are morally equal with straights, and the notion that gay people can’t help it. So the civil rights analogy makes no sense to them. There must be another way to convince them. This is diplomacy, after all; meet the other side where they are, not where you wish they were.
It seems to me that a lot of gay rights supporters are simply willing to sit back and let time do their work for them; and time is probably on their side. But legalizing gay marriage through the courts will never create widespread tolerance of gay rights; did Roe v Wade make abortion popular? If gay marriage becomes legal against the wishes of a majority or large minority of the people, homosexuals will get symbolic recognition but not actual safety and protection from discrimination. Isolating the people who think homosexuality is wrong will just intensify them in their hatred.
What would be likely to reach them? Well, it might help, for instance, to read what people on the right actually say about gay marriage. It seems to me that gay rights advocates tend not to read these things, and to reject every argument their opponents make as motivated by unconscious hatred for gays. Or religion motivated by hatred. Is there unconscious hatred? Well, probably, sometimes. We can’t negotiate with hatred--that’s too bad-- but what we can address are the rational and plausible fears motivating most of the enemies of gay marriage. In order to do this we need to understand where the other side stands. No one ever engages in successful diplomacy without making some effort to figure out what the other guy is saying, what he’s thinking, what he wants and what he fears. We can also learn from the world of linguistics that when two people use the same word, it’s not always safe to assume they mean the same thing. Say “gay marriage” to one of its supporters, and he probably visualizes crowds of happy newlyweds. Say “gay marriage” to one of its opponents, and he thinks of much more than that. It’s not just married people to him--it’s one more step on the road towards the institutionalization of tolerance for homosexuality. If those are too many abstract nouns, it’s a step towards a world in which gays and liberals have power and people like us don’t.
Read the right wing and see what they fear. For example, Focus on the Family’s little dystopian fantasy about what they feared would happen if Obama won the election. It’s called “The World in 2016” or something like that. They imagine, for instance, that if we legalized gay marriage, public schools would start teaching children that homosexuality is okay. Christian teachers might be fired for refusing to teach this. Christian churches might be sued out of existence if they refused to marry gay people. Christian ministers or anyone else who said in public that homosexuality is a sin, or is a choice, might be sued or imprisoned.
If this seems farfetched, consider some of the anti-hate-speech laws which have been passed in the past few years in Britain and in the Netherlands. Religious people and MPs have been accused of slander and of hate speech for criticizing Islam. So it’s not so implausible to imagine that something similar might eventually happen here. For instance, the case in New Mexico in which a photographer refused to shoot a same-sex ceremony and was sued for it! Or this case in which a man who was found to have expressed 'hatred' was banned for life from expressing opinions critical of homosexuality in any medium, including private communications. How can people consider themselves liberals and yet do their best to use the legal system to batter people who disagree with them?
Gay rights advocates even strengthen this sort of fear by attributing all criticism of homosexuality to sheer hatred. In fact such criticism is usually based in religion, and calling a belief taken straight from the Bible “hate speech” is not likely to win over the Christians.
So what gay rights advocates should do is two things. First, de-emphasize the unconvincing analogy with civil rights. Instead, frame the argument as a libertarian issue. It is one, basically, and besides, many people on the right can sympathize with libertarian ideas. Second, reassure your enemies. Say for instance:
“We gay people just want to live our lives and hold our beliefs without being interfered with. In return, you can live your lives and hold your beliefs. That’s part of living in a democratic pluralistic society. We understand that you think homosexuality is a sin. --We disagree. But we are willing to preserve and to defend your Constitutional right to continue believing and saying what you do, and teaching your children whatever you think best. You leave us alone; we’ll leave you alone.”
Why can’t they say this?
I believe the gay rights movement is handicapped by its own moral fervor--the moral fervor, I suppose, of feeling like you have to defend your very essence as a gay person. Moral fervor is not conducive to a rational, effective and, above all, compassionate diplomacy. After all, very few people are capable of a compassionate understanding of their enemies when they believe those enemies are motivated by personal hatred for them as people. Maybe the straights would make better advocates.
On Susan Sontag’s “Illness as Metaphor”
This essay is a discussion of the ways certain illnesses (tuberculosis and cancer) are and were portrayed in our culture as anything other than what they are. Metaphor is used as an attempt to understand illness:
“As TB was represented as the spiritualizing of consciousness, cancer is understood as the overwhelming or obliterating of consciousness (by a mindless It). In TB, you are eating yourself up, being refined, getting down to the core, the real you. In cancer, non-intelligent ("primitive," "embryonic," "atavistic") cells are multiplying, and you are being replaced by the non-you. Immunologists class the body's cancer cells as "nonself". “
and an attempt to use an illness as a social tool:
"The Romantics invented invalidism as a pretext for leisure, and for dismissing bourgeois obligations in order to live only for one's art. “
and an attempt to assert our will over illness (more later.)
Sontag says, with a certain lack of precision, that these metaphors distract us from the ‘reality’ of a disease. As soon as we cure cancer, and she thinks it will be soon, we’ll stop fearing it and the disease will cease being fascinating and terrifying and romantic and will become banal and unartistic. Right now, however, using disease as a metaphor is ‘not morally permissible’, or something like that.
This essay is a lovely work of social history. As soon as she introduces moral prohibitions, it gets vague and ungraspable and unconvincing. For one thing, I’ve always thought that the human process of thought is, more than anything,--insofar as I can sum it up in one word--metaphorical. How precisely are we to comprehend the ‘reality’ of a disease? I can’t imagine understanding something new except through relating it to what I already know. What Sontag is really saying is that, rather than using metaphors which empower cancer by describing it as similar to demonic possession or tuberculosis, we should be understanding it as we would a common cold or a stubbed toe.
Which would be a completely inhuman and unnatural way of looking at it. As long as we can’t cure cancer, we will fear it; as long as we fear it, our way of understanding it will be somewhat exaggerated and colorful. If we cure cancer, there will be something else for us to fear and romanticize.
Sontag’s whole book reeks of an odd sort of optimism; a refusal to acknowledge disease as the spiritual threat it is. Sometimes, in fact, she seems to be denying that the mind plays any part in disease:
“Psychological theories of illness are a powerful means of placing the blame on the ill. Patients who are instructed that they have, unwittingly, caused their disease are also being made to feel that they have deserved it…A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of "spirit" over matter.”
Sontag would prefer to affirm the primacy of matter over spirit. She herself died of leukemia, and the spiritual challenge presented by that disease is not one mere oncology can meet.
There is a middle ground between a purely scientific approach to disease and a bullshit New-Age homeopathic one. On the one hand, the mind does demonstrably affect the body, in terms of creating, changing and curing illnesses, not to mention creating the habits which lead to illnesses. And I don’t use the term ‘demonstrably’ lightly. Look, for instance, at the prevalence of modern hysterias such as chronic fatigue syndrome and Morgellon’s syndrome .
On the other hand, blaming sick people for their illnesses is an artificial way to assert our will over our bodies. If I can believe they did something wrong, then I’m safe. And not just safe, but pretty damn superior. I can’t tell you how many times I personally have seen someone coughing, or complaining about all the foods she can’t eat, and felt contemptuous. If I don’t have to have allergies, you don’t have to, so it must be your fault. Seeing a sick person gives us a nice little ego boost; we come up with some ridiculously superficial explanation (their parents were too careful with them; they must have eaten too much McDonald’s) and sidestep the reality that a simple accident of genetics or psychological trauma might easily put us in the same position.
Incidentally, Sontag throws this off:
“Twentieth-century women's fashions (with their cult of thinness) are the last stronghold of the metaphors associated with the romanticizing of TB in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.”
Partially, but not completely, true. I’ll write more on thinness (and its relation to politeness) later.
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