hi friends! I'm excited to hear what you think about this one.

love,
Graham

LAST ISSUE: YOUR THOUGHTS

Claire G., paraphrasing Brene Brown, shared the beautiful idea that “shame thrives in secrecy.” She added:

I've also been thinking quite a bit about the patriarchy, and how painful it is for everyone, including men. I've been thinking about all the times I've acted as a "good woman" and in doing so betrayed myself, perpetuated the patriarchy, and ironically acted in disservice to those I love. I suppose it takes two to tango.

And:

The iterative mindset reminded me a lot of lessons I've learned from designing thinking, in particular from this book "designing your life." The book offers a structured way to think creatively and test limiting beliefs through iteration and help of a "life design team" (aka coaches). I'm thinking one could use the same design thinking principles (empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test) to design a personal belief system for what it means to be a "good (wo)man."

Steph C. recommends Peggy Orenstein’s thinking on gender and sex (like this Ted Talk). She also reflected: “On the other side of the coin, I've started to narrow my focus to certain principles by which I want to choose to live by -- which in some ways feels like moving more towards a fixed mindset”

Sean F. suggested another way to look at Fixed vs Growth: “What is today's viable growth action, may be tomorrow's fixed course.” And he adds that the limiting factor may be less our mindset itself, than our judgments about our mindset:

Sometimes I work out, sometimes I don't. Nothing about the workout changes. What changes is my relationship to how I perceive working out. And sometimes it sucks and I don't do it. And other times it sucks and I do it anyways. Sometimes I am looking forward to it! 

He also rightly pointed out that there aren’t many venues to talk about this stuff. If you would like to talk with other men about what it means to be a good/better man, then let me know. We’ll set up a video call.

THIS ISSUE: IN DEFENSE OF OTHERING

I believe that Othering is bad. To Other is to treat some human beings as if they were not human beings. This is at the root of the worst evils: war and racism, injustice and violence of all sorts.

Yet I often Other. I act as if my comfort is far more important than some people’s lives. How can I justify this fancy bike while people are starving to death? How can I just walk past suffering in the street? Of course, I find excuses to withhold aid: it would just be a drop in the bucket, or it would be misused, or it would make things worse. Apparently, I am miserly. But moreso, I am overwhelmed.

To end Othering would be to erase all boundaries between myself and others. I’d have to give away everything; nay, I’d have to become a corporate lawyer so I could maximize how much I give away.

Instead, I turn inward or act sporadically. I call a car to help one guy, but I hope the next man will just leave me alone. I try to be inclusive, but my community ends up being people like me. Oddly, I find that being against Othering doesn’t expand the range of my moral concern, it contracts it.

Most of us agree that Othering is wrong. Yet it persists. Why? Is it because Othering is inevitable, simply part of human nature? Or maybe it seems inevitable because we’ve diagnosed the wrong problem. Maybe the way we think about Othering actually makes the problem worse.

Consider a prominent opponent of Othering: Jesus H. Christ. Jesus’ second most important rule of all time is: “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” But what kind of love is possible at this global scale?

Love is sacrifice and vulnerability. Love demands reciprocity. Unrequited love is sad (at best). Love is false if we do not support the people we love and if we cannot ask to be supported. Whatever they need--empathy, time, money--we must give to those we love. Love demands care. Love is mutual and material.

Therefore, true love is limited. To be unlimited in scope, love must be limited in degree. So when we try to love the whole world, we degrade love. Often, we reduce love’s standard of caretaking to the standard of liberalism: the most love we can manage for everyone is to leave them alone. Or we reduce love to pure intention: thoughts and prayers. Or we reduce love to Charity, or, even, to selfishness.

The Christian concept of Charity comes from the greek agape. Dr. M.L.K. Jr. defines agape as spontaneous and unselfish love (as distinct from eros aka romantic love, and philia aka brotherly love). Agape is best cultivated by trying to love your enemy (from whom you can expect nothing in return). In this sense, it’s a one-sided love. And Charity is a one-sided affair, too. It need flow only one way--from the chosen to the needy. Consider: they are called the objects of our charity. Charity is defined by the good intentions of the giver, not the desires of the recipient. So perversely, Charity becomes another way of drawing the line between Us and Them.

But this is far from the most degraded form of love. The most perverse legacy of Jesus’ teaching is our worship of selfishness. Adam Smith stole his “Invisible Hand” idea from some Calvinists he was hanging out with in Paris. They (Smith and the Calvinists) imagined that markets were created by God to transmute our self-interest into the public-interest. In this view, selfishness by the rich is actually the best way to help the poor. This effectively re-translated Jesus as: “Thou shalt love others by loving thyself.”

Is it unfair to blame Jesus for these self-serving interpretations? Perhaps, but our responses strike me as predictable consequences of his rule. Our inevitable failure to meet Jesus’ standard makes our selfishness seem immutable. But our failure isn’t permanent because we are flawed or sinful, rather because the rule was impossible to follow. 

Jesus’ injunction to love everyone was an attempt to make us cosmopolitans--citizens of the cosmos. Citizenship, he rightly recognized, requires love. To join together in a political community is to agree to love each other--to be mutually bound and to care for each other. But just as globalization hollows out love, so does it hollow out citizenship.

When we try to be citizens of the world, we degrade citizenship. Without a boundary, caretaking is replaced by tolerance, action by intention, politics by consumerism, and the collective by the individual. Absent love, Democracy becomes unwieldy and untenable. Our only options seem to be Monarchy--a singular God-King to love/hate us, or Aristocracy--Ivy League bankers and lawyers to think for us.

Is this inevitable? I hope not. Maybe if we freed ourselves from the obligation to love everyone, we might allow ourselves to love more people more deeply. We might create the kind of loving community necessary to sustain meaningful Democracy. But this will require drawing intentional boundaries, which is scary for at least two reasons.

The first worry is that Us vs Them tends to divide Human from Not. This is unacceptable, so we must draw the line on different grounds. Perhaps Us vs Them could distinguish a Duty to Care from a Duty to Respect.

Othering, in this sense, doesn’t end our obligations, it just limits them. This resembles how we act now, but by being clear about it we might actually raise the standard. We would need to allow Other people to pursue their own projects. Aid wouldn’t be required, but it might be justified on other grounds, and it would need to be designed to respect other people’s wishes, rather than impose what we think they need.

As a bonus, because it’s clearly limited, our duty to the Other could be expanded beyond humans. Loving the planet sounds hippie-dippie and unactionable, but respecting the planet sounds downright practical.

The second worry is how the line between Us and Them will be drawn. This is less scary when we aren’t treating people outside the line as if they were subhuman, but it’s still worrisome. We’d need to come up with some rules about what lines are OK and what lines are bad.

Here’s some very preliminary principles for line-drawing:

1. Reciprocity - If you depend on someone’s care, they must be able to depend on your care.
2. Locality - Love your literal neighbor.
3. Freedom - You can opt-out whenever you want.
4. Consistency - If you would exclude someone based on a rule, and that rule would have excluded current members, then you must either exclude the current members or eliminate the rule.

What do you think?

RECOMMENDATIONS

Easy Pesto

1. Chop up at least 2-3 handfuls of fresh green leaves. Basil, obviously, but parsley, cilantro, kale, etc… all work.
2. Blend/food-process 1-2 handfuls of seeds/nuts with enough nice olive oil to lubricate. Cheap-o sunflower seeds work just as well as expensive-ass pine nuts. Some people love walnuts. You can also chop these. You could also food process the greenery.
3. Shred a normal block-triangle of Parmesan. Or any hard cheese, probably.
4. Mix everything in a bowl. Add salt and more of that nice olive oil until it tastes good.

Late Night Tales by Badbadnotgood

Late Night Tales asks musicians to make playlists well suited for studying or goofing in the wee hours. Badbadnotgood made a particularly groovy one. The others are available in this Spotify playlist.

LINKS, &c…

• Some anthropologists have tried to estimate the maximum number of friendships we can sustain. The Dunbar’s number is around 150.
• Astra Taylor’s documentary What is Democracy is very artful and thoughtful and free on Kanopy if you have a public library card (for DC at least). In it, Wendy Brown notes that “We the People” requires a clearly identified “We.”
• David Graeber died earlier this month. It’s a terrible loss. Here’s a bit from a piece he wrote about fun: “Why do animals play? Well, why shouldn’t they? The real question is: Why does the existence of action carried out for the sheer pleasure of acting, the exertion of powers for the sheer pleasure of exerting them, strike us as mysterious? What does it tell us about ourselves that we instinctively assume that it is?”
• Some of this issue’s philosophical ideas came from Lewis Hyde’s The Gift and Michael Walzer’s Spheres of Justice.
• Some of this issue’s political ideas came from Theda Skocpol’s Diminished Democracy, Robert Putnam’s How Democracy Works, and Doug Rae’s City.