Tuesday, December 29, 2020

Babies and bathwater: the self-help and self-care industry

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.

Monday, December 28, 2020

Pessimism is a legitimate form of coping

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.

Thursday, December 24, 2020

Lost faith in right and wrong

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.

Wednesday, December 23, 2020

Reluctant to engage Ibram X. Kendi

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.