Ted Lasso, misappropriater of quotations
Hello, friends!
Last week I mentioned The Menu, which is a recent movie about an exclusive restaurant and its privileged guests. Of course it's more than that, but not wanting to spoil it for you, I'll just say the movie has some feelings about the relationship between art and criticism. If you watch this movie you'll see all sorts of variations on criticism: A food critic; a gatekeeping fanboy; haters; etc. You might even see yourself in one of these characters, and it might be a little...uncomfortable.
When the pandemic began, we all went hunting for content, and many of us discovered Ted Lasso. Good old Coach Lasso, with his big, friendly heart, tried to guide us all away from being Judgey McJudgersons, and he did it by quoting Walt Whitman:
You know, Rupert, guys have underestimated me my entire life. And for years I never understood why. It used to really bother me. But then one day I was driving my little boy to school and I saw this quote from Walt Whitman painted on the wall there that said, "Be curious. Not judgmental." I like that.
Be curious, not judgmental.
Walt Whitman didn't actually say that. (Snopes disproved the quote, and discovered it might actually have come from a pair of advice columnists in the '80s.)
Whether or not Whitman ever said it, or doodled it on the back of a fallen maple leaf, or even just dreamed the phrase while napping under said maple tree, doesn't particularly matter. It's a good bit of life advice, isn't it? I read it as: When something makes you twitch, don't leap to criticism; take a moment to study the thing, to understand it. Understanding usually undermines the urge to...damn. I almost had a solid alliterative sentence there. ...the urge to criticize, of course.
Danny Guo, a software engineer, wrote about this in a lovely blog post last year:
I went into my mom’s car and put the seatbelt on (probably to pretend I was flying a plane). I realized at one point that I could still lean pretty far forward. Far enough that my head could touch the dashboard. How ridiculous! What’s the point of the seatbelt if it doesn’t actually stop me from going too far? I reveled in my discovery that seatbelts were useless.
A while later, I pulled on the seatbelt quickly (a lot happens in imaginary aerial dogfights), and the seatbelt immediately stopped. An overwhelming feeling of stupidity hit me almost as fast. Nine-year-old me was not in fact smarter than Toyota engineers.
Now whenever I’m tempted to judge something as stupidly designed, I try to check myself and remember my seatbelt experience. My rule of thumb is:
My willingness to judge something should be proportional to how much I know about it.
Felicia's absolutely marvelous at this. She spends a significant amount of time with something before forming an opinion about it, and when she does decide how she feels, it's usually a very generous position. If she doesn't like something, she resists the urge to tear it down. Instead: This isn't for me. It's a healthy way to engage with art of any kind. This isn't for me, but it's probably exactly right for someone who isn't me. What's more, she always contextualizes her opinion by assessing how much she knows about the subject matter.
Watching The Menu, I sometimes felt like the movie was holding a mirror up for me to see my own distasteful reflection. I've been guilty of snap judgments, of being opinionated about things I'm interested in but have never dabbled in. The movie was a nice reminder to err on the side of humility and kindness.
A former coworker of mine, Mike Hall, keeps a terrific microblog. He recently wrote about photography and some of the troubling aspects of photography culture, and how these things prompt him to reflect on his own contribution to the scene:
The annoyance and unease dissipate a little, because I found my way to kindness and can only trust other people will, too. We need more art in the world. We need more people striving to make beautiful things, silly things, pretty things, ugly things, whatever. We need more people striving to create. So we need to be kind.
I like this. When the world responds to art with sharp, gnashing teeth, artists are maybe a little more likely to abstain from sharing, or worse, creating at all. Engaging with art with kindness and generosity isn't that hard. Everyone makes things, everyone puts a little bit of themselves into the things they make, and everyone's a little scared sometimes of putting those things into the world for a response.
Be kind, not judgmental.
Harder than it sounds, but maybe not as hard as we think?
✏️Until next time,
Jg
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