Category: JustThinkin

Coin of the Realm

Cruel.com linked to this post in Halley’s Comment. It’s kind of funny in a cruel, sad way. The author, Halley Suitt, doesn’t feel like she fits in with the upscale suburban moms in her upscale suburban suburb.

She feels excluded by them, they make catty remarks about her and are generally nasty — unlike the unconditional positive regard and deep respect she has for them:

There’s something tame and well-fed and well-cared for about most of the other mothers I see when I walk through my kid’s school. They look obedient and mediocre to me.

They are like well-groomed pets. They are very pretty mothers. I’m sexier and edgier. It seems like there’s something forbidden about mixing mothering and sexiness for a lot of suburban mothers. Better to sit around and wear pastel pants suits and get fat. Ugh. I think it’s a shame. I don’t want to look like “a happily married wife and mother” — I never was one and I’ve given up pretending to look like one, if I ever did look like one[…]

These housewives seem to love their boring, mediocre lives. They can be nasty and vicious to outsiders, that’s the coin of their realm.

Funny, that may be the coin of the other suburban moms’s realm but Halley seems to be jingling a fair amount of pocket change herself.

The whole thing is interesting to me as a case study in “violent communication,” the way people can naturally come to confirm each other’s worst fears about each other. Perhaps also because a good friend of mine is in a not entirely dissimilar position with regards to her neighbors, though most of the details are different.

I’m sure that with many mutatis mutandis I’ve been in parallel situations myself with regards to people or groups of people with whom I’ve been at odds for one reason or another. This is a situation alien enough from my own experience (despite having kids about that age) that I can view it with some detachment and see the self-perpetuating tragedy of it. I’m sure many times I have not been able to have that kind of detachment. So this is an interesting little story to read with a kind of “can’t look away from the auto accident” attitude, but it’s also interesting because everybody’s lived that story in one way or another.

BTW, Halley wrote a series of articles on being an “alpha male” that I assumed would make me hate her but when I randomly picked one to read I found it was touching and made me like her. So there you go. Whether you hate or admire somebody is probably going to depend a lot more on how you get acquainted with them, in what context, what part of their complex selfhood you happen to latch onto and use as a stereotype to define them.

All that from a link on cruel.com. Huh.

Violence

I’m interested right now in Marshall Rosenberg’s work on “Non-Violent Communication” or NVC. It has roots in Rogerian psychotherapy and Gandhi’s nonviolent work. Rosenberg spends most of his time teaching this stuff worldwide in conflict spots to try and bring people together, working with Hutus and Tutsis, Palestinians and Israelis, Serbs and Bosnians, Irish Catholics and Protestants, gangs and policemen, and so on. He’s got a lot of experience talking peace with people who have literally killed each other’s relatives and countrymen, so it’s not airy theory.

Anyway, he shares Gandhi’s idea that physical violence is only a logical end product, symptom, or reaction to violent communication: interaction between people which manipulates, judges, dominates, belittles, stereotypes, coerces, all that sort of thing. If you can get people relating to each other in a nonviolent manner in their communication, then ending physical violence will be easy; if you can’t, it will be impossible.

I’ve been participating (sometimes in ways I like, sometimes in ways I’m not thrilled with) in some ongoing discussions in various gaming-related blogs about violence. A lot of it was off in realms of hypothesis that precluded much useful from being said, but there were some important things said by people that I might have on the surface been in disagreement with, that I want to acknowledge the truth of.

In the comments here the massively important point was made that violence comes from inside people, and that violence against self and violence against other have the same roots. I have become convinced lately that you can’t judge yourself harshly without judging others harshly, and vice versa. “Judge not, that ye be not judged” is not just a statement about theology, it’s a statement about psychology.

In the same set of comments I said:

That whole “self-hate ==> violence” thing is totally what it is all about. Physical violence is just the symptom or end product of violence between human souls by many other means – injustice, blame, labelling, belittling, all that kind of thing. You can’t stop the one while ignoring the other. The physical violence is often the least damaging kind of violence going on, and compared to some of the emotional violence going on the physical act of violence may in compaision be honest, freeing, and purifying, because it’s at least *explicit*. That doesn’t make it a thing to be desired. But looking just at the physical stuff and not where it comes from is not helpful, I don’t think.

And also looking just at the physical and not the places where it comes from makes things just a little too easy for people like me who are lucky enough to have avoided giving or receiving much physical violence in our lives, not necessarily through any virtue of our own – but who have as much to learn as anyone about the emotional, interpersonal kind.

That’s really important to me. One of the things about the NVC thing is that it challenges me where I’m at. I’m lucky enough not to be in a situation where I’m threatened with, or feel the need to use, physical violence, at all. That would make it really easy for me to advocate “non-violence” in the same way that it is easy for a eunuch to preach chastity. I can see the resentment that someone who by choice or by chance is in a position where physical violence is a part of their lives would have for someone like me who dares to judge them for it from a position of suburban safety. (N.B.: I don’t want to judge people, including people who use violence.)

I’ve engaged in a lot of communicative violence in my life, including in this blog (including a lot of posts that aren’t here anymore because at one point I was so discouraged about where the blog was going that I trashed it). I still do — look at this post from yesterday. Despite my disclaimers about it just being a look inside my head, arguably it belittles people I was disagreeing with. That ain’t nonviolent. It’s part of the problem.

I think a lot of the reaction against people who object to violence tends to come from a dislike for that kind of hypocrisy, and a perception that physical violence is not different on a deep level from many kinds of interaction that few think to condemn.

It’s certainly true that the reason that more privileged folk can avoid being personally involved in physical violence is that other people are doing it for them. I don’t think that means it has to or should be that way, but it’s sure true that “that way” is deeply embedded in the fabric of society, and denying it doesn’t help.

OK, that’s all that’s running through my head for now. Gonna publish and come back to this if I think of more to say later.

Ungrateful Wretch!

“Look, kid, you can prattle on with your silly idealistic notions about a world without human sacrifice, but the only reason you haven’t been smited by angry, bloodthirsty gods is the proud men and women who go up on the pyramids and rip the still beating hearts out of helpless victims and offer them up in supplication. And I hope you aren’t cornered by an angry god some day without a human-sacrificing priest to protect you, because all your no-ripped-out-and-bleeding-heart liberal ideals aren’t going to stop that angry god from cursing you with boils and carbuncles, blighting your crops, slaying your children, and making your wife barren.

“So talk all you want, but the only reason you can even say those disrespectful, foolish things, is the hard work of our proud sacrificial priesthood, who have convinced the gods not to make your tongue cleave to the roof of your mouth.”

That’s what you hear (mutatis mutandis) if you question the necessity of war and violence on the Internet.

UPDATE/CLARIFICATION: Clearly this isn’t an argument or anything like that. There are some holes in the analogy, as with any analogy. It’s just meant as a kind of look inside my head, at how it sounds to me when people say certain things. I’ve been in some discussions about violence on various blogs lately and more than once I’ve gotten this kind of talk back at me. The metaphor to human sacrifice hit me this morning so I thought I’d write it up.

So it’s not meant as an argument to show people why they ought to think like me, far from it, it’s meant more as picture to show people how someone could think this way, and how certain kinds of arguments against it (“you’re insulting the very soldiers who fight for your freedom to say these things!”) come across.

M Scott Peck

Fascinating article about M.Scott Peck via MetaFilter.

This was interesting to me because I read Peck when I was a teenager and found him very interesting and convincing… And because I haven’t thought about him for a long time and I’ve come to conclusions about life that are almost entirely at odds with what I found then, and believed, in Peck.

Peck’s work suggests that, not to put too fine a point on it, psychopathology is sin. Specifically, cowardice and laziness. Not being willing to face up to the reality of one’s problems and deal with the emotional pain involved. It’s kind of a “come on, be a man, life hurts, stop whining and suck it up!” kind of philosophy. You’re sick? Well, you’re lazy. Get off your ass and be healthy.

Looking at Peck from where I’m at now, he just seems to exemplify the type of supercilious cruelty which is characteristic of conservatives. (Nota bene: I don’t mean by saying that to imply that conservatives are crueler than anyone else, just to identify a type of cruelty which is associated with conservatism.)

The article also suggests that Peck fulfils in spades the stereotype of a moralizing conservative hypocrite. His writings idolize self-discipline and integrity at the cost of any personal pain, but by his own admission Peck has virtually never denied himself any pleasure of the flesh, licit or illicit, except where age and illness prevented him. As for his vision of himself, well —

Peck regards himself as a “stage-four evolved person”, the highest spiritual stage a mortal can attain (in his arcane model, an atheist such as myself ranks above an orthodox believer: I come in at a stage three). His identification with other prophets is marked. In the past he has said that when in doubt he asks himself what Jesus would do. Today he confines his comparisons to Daniel, another “bright Jewish boy” who interpreted dreams: “Ultimately he begins reading words written on walls and he was a prophet, which, of course, people have accused me of . . .

I wish I’d known more about Peck back in the days when I was reading his guilt-inducing crap and accepting his hypocritical judgments against ordinary humans.

I might have laughed it off, as it deserved, and found wisdom elsewhere.