There's much that is salutary about Freddie DeBoer's recent post on the "self-care industry." The post's main contribution is to remind us about the way in which self-care philosophies (for lack of a better word) assume away the fact that we have conflicting desires even as they encourage us to prioritize our own desires over those of others.
DeBoer identifies a real problem. We should remember, though, that not all "self-care industry" products commit those same error.
Freddie DeBoer criticizes what he calls the "Covid realist":
For the Covid realist, no amount of pessimism about the virus is deep enough. No amount of adherence to the rules is strict enough. No surrender to the inevitability of more and more restrictions is complete enough. With the Covid realist you learn quickly that the only correct response is to nod along more deeply with every new, more pessimistic thing they say. Every utterance becomes a referendum not only on your apprehension of where we stand relative to the virus but on whether you are willing to accept the harsh, brutal truths of the Covid realist.
Covid realism is a way
to make yourself into a cruel person, cruel and self-satisfied and righteous. It is a way to trade on other people’s misery to attain some sort of momentary social standing in an exchange which should never have been a contest in the first place.
DeBoer continues:
Be pessimistic in your assessments when you feel it’s appropriate. But let people feel things. Including optimism. Including investing great hopes in the vaccine. Including planning ahead for better futures....I get what he's saying. I even agree. Pessimists shouldn't rain on people's parade. And pessimism brings with it the temptation to put on airs and look down at others--to make others feel bad for hoping. That, in turn, erodes hope. And hope is a good thing, not to be easily eroded.
And yet, pessimism is how some people cope with the bad. Not wanting to get one's hopes up--choosing not to hope--is how some of us try to navigate through uncertain times. Pessimism may be the wrong choice, but it is a legitimate one. In some ways, it might not even be a choice.
Don't shame people for being pessimists. DeBoer isn't exactly doing that. He's simply outlining some of the drawbacks of pessimism or the extremes to which pessimism can take us. Pessimists would do well to heed his warning. But it's possible to go too far into the criticisms against pessimism, and I write this blog post as a corrective to the tendency to go too far.
One definition C. S. Lewis has offered for the idea of "faith" is "the art of holding onto things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods."[1] The idea, as I understand it, is that reason leads us to a conclusion. As long as reason continues to lead us to that conclusion, we ought to continue to endorse it. And yet our moods--by which I think he means our emotions, but perhaps also something like "how things look in the short term on an impressionistic level"--get in the way. They tempt us to adopt beliefs that reason has shown to be wrong or to disbelieve things that reason has shown to be right.
Yes, Lewis was writing about religious faith, particularly Christianity. But I don't bring his statement up now to write about religion. I'm writing instead about the temptation I face to support Donald Trump.
I've been working my way through Ibram X. Kendi's How to be Antiracist. I'm about one third of a the way through. It's not a hard or difficult work, not bound up in abstruse theory. Its writing is easy enough for me to understand. But it's hard to finish.
The reason for the difficulty is only partially "because it challenges my white privilege." I'm sure that's part of it. I do believe I have privilege as a white person that non-white persons don't have.
But "the challenge to my white privilege" is not the whole thing, or the main thing. Rather, it's a combination of other things, too.
One is that it's a book that "I'm supposed to read." No, no one is forcing me to read it. But it's one of those books the title of which is in the air and is being "debated." That is, if you can call what's being said a "debate." Outside of the podcasts I've been listening to with Glenn Loury, John McWhorter, and Coleman Hughes, I've seen very little engagement with Kendi's book that goes beyond, "it's something all white people ought to read."
Another reason is that what I've read so far appears to be way too reductionist to be serious, to be worthy of the accolades I've heard so many send the book's way. It seems Kendi argues that racism is the only thing to combat and that one can easily discern the antiracist choice. A racist policy is one that advantages one race over another, he says. Fair enough. But what about the argument that racism is so pervasive that any policy, even a putative antiracist one, can in some ways advantage one racial group over another. And no, I'm not talking about "reverse discrimination." I'm talking about how a program like race-based affirmative action can actually both benefit some persons of color and harm them at the same time, both those who benefit and those who can't attain the benefit.
Oddly, the book (or the first third of it that I've read) seems to acknowledge little in the way of group incentives or institutions that encourage people to make certain choices. It would seem that someone who sees racism as a cornerstone of American society would acknowledge that racist structures influence choices and that those choices may be something to criticize.
I don't deny that racism exists. I don't even deny that it's impossible to take a "neutral" stance toward racism. I don't deny that "antiracist" is different from "non-racist" or that I in some sense help sustain racism by choosing not to be antiracist. (I also, for what it's worth, count myself as a cautious supporter of race-based affirmative action.)
What I'm arguing against, is a certain simplistic notion that there is only right and wrong and nothing in between--and that right and wrong is easy to discern.
Kendi's approach, at its worse, seems to function mostly as a way to teach us (by "us," I probably mean "white people," but I'm not certain) certain scripts, certain things to say, or profess in order to demonstrate that we understand our original sin and orient ourselves to addressing the right.
To be clear, Kendi's work (again, the one-third I've read of it) is not wholly to be criticized. Kendi focuses on actions and not on essences. He's not one of the antiracist "racial realists" that it's easy to accuses activists of being.
I have a new post at Ordinary Times on Re-reading (and not reading) James Joyce.
I have a new post at Ordinary Times. Georgia, everybody loves you now.
I have a new post at Ordinary Times: My Reflections on Biden's Apparent Victory.
I have a new post at Ordinary Times: White Fragility's Might-Makes-Right Reductio
Robert Gressis at the Electric Agora discusses in The New Abnormal his decision to "withdraw" from some political discussion. After analyzing why someone might support Mr. Trump enthusiastically and after explaining why he disagrees with them, he says,
I have withdrawn. I’m trying to keep myself as ignorant of politics as possible, partly for my mental health. Hearing about our current political scene is deeply disturbing. It reminds me people are not handling each other well, which scares me; “when is someone coming for me?” is a question that abides after spelunking into the caverns of politics.
But I’m also doing it for my moral health: a lot of times, learning about people’s reactions to politics makes it almost impossible for me to see them in the same way. I lose respect for them. I fall into the fundamental attribution error: I judge them as evil, demented, or dangerous because of the things they say in the one sphere of our lives where we can feel like we’re part of a conquering horde, where we can crush our enemies, see them driven before us, and hear the lamentations of their women.
My withdrawal, then, comes from my own personal failings. It’s too hard for me to be a mensch to you when I see you being so unmenschlich. If I were a better person, I’d talk more about politics. But I avoid it when I can, because I don’t want to be a worse person.
I am more and more adopting Gressis's approach. I've found that I do better when I abstain, at least partially, from politics. By saying I "do better" I mean the choices I make when I abstain are more morally justifiable than the choices I make when I don't. Or more accurately, the choices are less morally unjustifiable.
For example, when I engage, I find that I choose to criticize "anti-anti-Trumpism" much, much more than I criticize the more morally compromised Trumpism itself. I choose to indulge whataboutism. I get snippy. I sometimes do the discourtesy of offering to clear the speck from others' eyes.
For further example: Dr. X, who I link to on my blogroll, posts repeatedly on Trump's outrage of the day--sometimes the outrage of the hour--and my reaction is not to acknowledge that what he says is true or to thank him for doing the otherwise mostly thankless and needful work of chronicling such things. Instead, I choose the path of anger and feeling defensive. And while I believe I'm civil enough and sometimes express agreement--and while I have a lot of respect for him, from what little one can know of anyone "virtually"--I choose more frequently than not to raise counterpoints to what he says. And no matter how needful or accurate I believe the counterpoints to be, I cannot deny I offer them more from an impulse of defensiveness and hyper-criticism.
Worse still is the way I choose to treat those persons (at Ordinary Times) who I dislike personally, if "personally" can be used in reference to people I've never actually met in person. I find I get angry just to read a comment from them, even if it's on a subject as innocuous as what they plan to do this weekend. While I can't blame that wholly on my engagement with politics, politics and political discussion are quite fruitful avenues for choosing enmity over friendship.
Sometimes deciding NOT to read what others write makes me feel better, or prevents me from feeling bad and, worse, from choosing to do bad. I find that I feel better when I don't comment. I rarely regret not saying something. I more often regret saying something. Or to put it slightly differently, the sins I regret more are sins of commission than sins of omission.
Sins of omission are real, though. That's how I interpret Gressis's penultimate sentence above. If I were a better person, I would both engage politics more fully AND make choices that really, truly serve to advance what is right. But I sense my own moral weakness. I despair of being up to the task. I'm at a point where I find it morally more "healthful" to be less bad than to be more good.
No, I'm not withdrawing completely. I don't keep up with the news as much as I used to, but I still keep up. I've curtailed some of my commenting activity on other blogs and at Ordinary Times, but I still choose to comment, and sometimes in exactly the way that makes me a "worse" instead of "less worse." I may continue to blog about the issues of the day, either here or at Ordinary Times. In fact, I have a post pending at Ordinary Times that, if approved, engages politics. (I'll let you know when/if it's available.) And of course, I plan to vote this November (for Mr. Biden).
