Try your patience? Don’t mind if I do. You must try mine sometime.

Posted on 11 May 2012 by Saul

[This began as an intended post to the "Religious Tolerance" Facebook group and ran long.]

I’ve been thinking some about this, somewhat due to any of the times that someone tries to claim that limited tolerance isn’t tolerant at all. If the ideal being pursued is a sufficient tolerance, that’s something which we not only expect from others but require ourselves to extend to them. And I say that not because I imagine anyone here doesn’t understand that, but because it’s something that can easily be lost to sight if one has or acquires a relatively high level of comfort with — even preference for — diversity. That comfort or preference can itself become an inflexibility, an intolerance that provides an excuse for friction where it’s not necessary.

I don’t know why (other than it’s concrete and universal) but my mind always runs to food analogies when it comes to this. But, imagine a group of people gathered for a potluck. It’s been advertised that everyone is welcome, you don’t even need to bring a dish — or eat anything, for that matter — but bring whatever, eat whatever, as long as you don’t start any food fights.

So, imagine your diet is somehow limited. It doesn’t matter how or why, there are foods and preparations and combinations that you’re comfortable eating and enjoy, and others that you aren’t and don’t. You decide for whatever reason to give the potluck a try, and you make up a batch of some favorite dish. You know you’ll have that at least to eat, but you make enough to share with everyone else.

Now… if you showed up at the potluck and advocated that all the other food be thrown out in favor of yours; or if you spent the dinner asserting that all the other food was terrible because it wasn’t just like yours; or if you only let people sample your dish on an otherwise empty plate and then called them ungrateful barbarians if they ate anything else after yours… I think we might mostly agree these are intolerant behaviors. These are the kind that it seems to me those of us most comfortable with an ideal of tolerance find obvious.

But imagine instead that when you arrive, after initial warm welcome, you discover that everything everyone else has brought to eat has been dumped into a giant bowl and stirred together. And when you try to offer people an unmixed portion of what you brought, others of the people there demand that you mix it with the big bowl first, and try to take your dish away from you before you can even serve yourself an unmixed portion.

Imagine, further, that when you offer around some of what you brought, you’re the one being told it must be thrown out.

This is the kind of intolerance that it seems to me those of us most comfortable with an ideal of tolerance may find easiest to miss — at those very times when we’re guilty of it. We stand up for an existing package of things that we’re already comfortable sampling, even mixing, because we’re attached to an ideal of sampling and mixing — and in some cases we’ve screened the existing package because of that similarity. (I’m cool with X-ive Y-ism because I’m an X-ive Z-ist, and X-ives are tolerant regardless of their ism. But don’t get me started about those W-ists. Oh, there are X-ive W-ists? I guess they’re ok then — but why don’t they speak up? And I’ve read their book, there’s no way they can be X-ive.) But only being tolerant of those who are similarly tolerant is another kind of the same failure against which we advocate tolerance.

As I alluded at the start, I don’t advocate an ideal of unlimited or perfect tolerance. (I don’t know that anyone does.) I advocate sufficient tolerance. Sufficient for what? For peace, for cooperation, for the minimization of harm. But those of us who hold such an ideal, and who are either predisposed to or practiced at handling the diversity aspect of it, can’t be complacent and neglect the distinctiveness aspect. Our challenge is to tolerate with as much grace those attached to only doing things certain ways, as we hope they will tolerate others doing things every which way.

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Afterglow

Posted on 5 July 2011 by Saul

For all the glory of the thunderous blooms,
I love the lingering glitter of the leaves
on half-lit weeping willows of smoke.

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Aduersus Apologias

Posted on 3 July 2011 by Saul

Courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/wheelo28/3432257340/in/photostream/, without endorsement

I should write a whole post just analyzing the recent short diatribe of Todd Akin, US representative for Missouri’s 2nd District, and that diatribe’s fallout. But there’s an aspect of it which is independent from specifically what he said, who objected, and why that I want to call attention to: the public apology ritual.

These things come up with bothersome regularity (two more near me in recent months, but in Kansas) so let this serve as anchor for a series. The public apology ritual goes like this. A person is observed doing something some others find objectionable. The act is recorded or described. The recording or description is published. The ritual then consists of the following.

  1. Optionally, the person is asked for an apology, either by some number of those objecting or by some number of interviewers covering the objections.
  2. The person may or may not apologize, but if apologizing nearly always does so in terms of regret for having offended.

I want this ritual stopped.

Let me say that the expression and acceptance of sincere apologies are as essential to healthy relationships and open societies as are objectionable acts. People will bother and hurt each other without intent or awareness, and recovering from that depends on objection and apology. People will bother and hurt each other with intent and at some point develop regret for the hurt itself, and recovering from that depends on apology too.

Preserving the effectiveness of apology (and objection for that matter) is in fact one of the two reasons I want this ritual stopped. An effective objection doesn’t include a request for an apology. It states an objection. Requesting an apology robs the one requested of full room in which to make the decision to apologize, thus cramping the range of sincerity any subsequent apology is capable of expressing — no matter how sincerely regretful the one making the apology may be.

(One might raise the question here regarding the instructive behavior of adults toward children, when one of the former directs one of the latter to apologize. I’m not at all suggesting that should stop, but pointing to it serves to highlight the effectiveness problem of the public apology ritual. An adult may well request that a child apologize to someone as a way of teaching the child cultural expectations and how to meet them. But that’s not generally appropriate behavior between adults.)

The second reason I want the ritual stopped is that in the vast majority of cases, it’s entered into as a result of objectionable speech: sometimes the expression of personal opinion, whether posed as fact or not, and sometimes terms of expression themselves. And while the objections and requests for apology may aim at the holding of such opinion or at the sanction of such terms, the practical effect is to request apology for the expression — and many of the apologies follow suit, not expressing regret for holding a given opinion or for being in the habit of thinking in such terms, but for having expressed them under such circumstance that they became public.

This does two things, both of which I consider negative. It tends to encourage politeness-from-fear over politeness-from-respect — also the counter-reaction of being rude to prove one’s courage. But equally bad, it gives public figures further encouragement to hide their thoughts, making it that much more difficult for people to judge a public figure’s intentions. This is of critical importance with regard to those in positions of power. If you’re in the habit of thinking of certain groups using slurs or stereotypes, I’d much rather know that — particularly if the slurs extend to dehumanization. If you think victims are to blame for their suffering, I’d much rather know that — particularly if you think the occasion of an outbreak of suffering is a good time to assess that blame. If you can’t see the difference between disagreeing with your conclusion and disagreeing with your premise, I’d much rather know that.

Unless your intention is to do me harm, it’s to both our benefits that I have as much information as possible with which to judge how much power to trust you with, and how much information you may need from me to use that power wisely. Of course, if your intention is to do me harm, I’d much rather know that, too.

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Innocents Abroad

Posted on 5 July 2007 by Saul

In the summer of 1990 my parents took my brothers and me on our last grand family vacation, and made it the grandest of all. We went by airplane — which was still, believe it or not, a big deal for us in itself — to London, England, and spent some two weeks “overseas,” first in Wales and then in Europe, where we took a wandering tour almost entirely by train through Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy and France.

Traveling always offers the opportunity for chaos and mayhem, and my family is especially inclined in that direction. Fortunately we share enough of a laid-back good-nature that we can stumble through such things without getting or going too mad. But I remember clearly coming to the dining room of the bed-and-breakfast where my brothers and I spent our first night, having left London almost immediately, headed for Wales.

(“Where did your parents spend the night?” the attentive reader asks. At another bed-and-breakfast down the road. The landlady at the first one had unintentionally double-booked my parents’ room to guests who had arrived before us. I was still outside in the rented car when this was discovered, so I missed this part. But my parents still tell the story. “Picture us: we’ve just managed to make two long flights in a row, arrived in a foreign country, and immediately embarked on a drive through the gantlet of a major city, an unfamiliar road system, in a rented car, in a country where all the traffic rules relating to left and right are backwards to what we’re used to. We make it to our first overnight stop without injury, without having lost anything or anyone, triumphant but haggard. And we go in to check in, and when we announce ourselves this poor woman, the landlady, went down on her knees and begged our forgiveness for having given our room to someone else!” A very surreal scene, and just the last one of the day demonstrating that, despite ostensibly speaking the same language natively, we were in a very different place.)

I was still getting used to the continuous, mild shock of the ways in which the area we were visiting was like and unlike what I was familiar with in the United States. Most of them were subtle, but even the subtle ones accumulated to great effect. The exit signs at Heathrow read “Way Out” and the yield signs on the roads read “Give Way.” I placed an order at an open air fish-and-chips shop and was asked — at great speed — “sit in down o taken away?” instead of the more familiar (and less cumbersome) “fur hearer to go?”

The breakfast that first morning continued the theme. Scrambled eggs and sausages were nothing out of our ordinary, though they were (of course) much better eggs and sausages than are typical in the US. (We’ve all heard that story, I won’t belabor it.) But on the plate with them were baked beans and a half-tomato, grilled.

If it had just been the tomato, I probably wouldn’t have given the menu any thought. But baked beans! For breakfast! I don’t mean to make myself sound parochial, or to suggest that I’ve become very much wiser or knowledgeable in the time since. I have habits and biases and preferences and expectations just like anyone else. But well before I experienced a little first-hand, I knew that habits and customs vary over the face of the earth in ways that can be merely surprising to a displaced observer, or delightful, or frightening, or abhorrent. And I knew that I might encounter some of that by going to Europe, though I knew any of it would likely be mild compared to experiences I might have in other parts of the world, just because of the historical relatedness and ongoing communication between my native culture and those of Europe.

No, it was the juxtaposition of the familiar with… the familiar. I recognized everything on the plate, but one of them was quite clearly “doin its own thing,” as the saying is on Sesame Street — at least by by my standards. I had yet to encounter mashed peas, or the jarring uses the British sometimes have for maize-corn.

Anyway, there were other people staying at the bed-and-breakfast, obviously, but they were all more or less locals compared to us. They all said good morning as we walked in, some of them having to twist around awkwardly in their seats to face us, and one of them either asked us where we were from or whether we were Americans.

Upon learning that we were, in unison they wished us a happy Independence Day. In the wild confusion of our journey, and absent all the usual cues, I had completely forgotten. But it was the Fourth of July.

We thanked them and sat down to breakfast. I ate in startled bemusement and considered the various causes. There were the baked beans, of course. And there were the other guests, unconsciously reinforcing the stereotyped politeness sometimes associated with the British. There was the surprise of being reminded by foreigners that it was my holiday that day — in many ways the American holiday. And there was the further irony that they were the very foreigners on the other side of the day’s celebration.

The rebellion of the American colonies, their establishment as a separate nation and the period following, are exactly the sort of conflict which can begin bloody and horrific feuds that last as long as anyone identifies with one of the parties and thinks she can identify surviving members of the other. But there I sat at breakfast with my brothers, a mere 214 years later, surrounded by English, congratulating us on our independence.

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I’ve Got the Will to Drive Myself Sleepless

Posted on 4 July 2007 by Saul

One thing I should clear up first: I am not J. Alfred Prufrock, nor do I wish to seem to be. I didn’t discover T.S. Eliot in a high-school English class, and I don’t view that one poem as some kind of modern scripture, to be iconized or somehow lived by or even just to wear as some kind of badge.

But given that blogs are generally communicated by means of patterns on a screen, referring to mine as a magic lantern seemed irresistible.

I actually listened to a recording of Eliot reciting “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” — and “The Waste Land,” and “Ash Wednesday,” and others — many, many times before I ever read them. My mother copied a library’s vinyl record to cassette tape and would play it in her car stereo, along with tapes of other poets, and show tunes, and English folk songs, some classical pieces — and the Beatles.

I was too young and insufficiently well-versed to pick up on a great deal that Eliot had in mind when he wrote, and his delivery tended to blur all the poems on the recording into one endless meditation. What I did take in were the more fundamental aspects of poetry: the sound itself; the choice of words and word order both for their ranges of meaning and to serve the sound; the deliberate construction of images which defy the ordinary senses of words but which succeed, often with great precision, through the ambiguity of natural language.

“Prufrock” tended to stand out from the rest, primarily because in the recording Eliot delivered it with more humor — certainly more than I think most people read it with. There is much discussion among critics of how many speakers there are in the poem, and who might be talking to whom at different points. As a child it always seemed that there was basically one speaker, but that he (or she) at different points relayed comments from other people, with nothing to identify or distinguish them except the things being said and the way Eliot said them. And it seemed fairly clear that the central figure, whether it was he (or she) speaking or being spoken about, was unhappy and had some problem with no solution. It was something deeply serious, large, and complicated.

At the same time someone, whether the central figure in self-awareness, or the poet as a co-speaker, regarded the central figure with great amusement, in a mixture of fondness and contempt. So that part of the very difficulty of whatever great problem it might have been was the trouble it had in being taken, or taking itself, seriously.

I did read the poem in more than one English class, and discovered that other people have tried to take it very seriously. And I have read it now as an adult, who has known the arms already, and as a more widely-educated reader, who catches the prophet references, and so on. I have given the poem careful and careless examination as a child and as a teenager and as an adult, as one mired in my own quandaries of existence and purpose and alienation, and as one singing with mermaids.

I’ve only become more attached to my early conclusion that it’s a beautiful and delightful piece of work. But I don’t wave it around as a banner, as if it managed to say all the things I’ve thought or felt but haven’t been able to put into words myself, or as if it were the Ultimate Truth in Code.

And I know Eliot was a flawed human being. Some of his genius lies in the degree to which his poetry cannot be inescapably bound to his personal weaknesses and mistakes.

Anyway… that’s not what this post was going to be about.

Today is the celebrated anniversary of the Declaration of Independence by the United States of America, theretofore colonies of the British Empire. This post is also not about that, even thematically or metaphorically. It just seems an auspicious occasion to begin a blog.

This post is essentially about itself, about my being up at 4:30 in the morning by local time, not having slept yet since yesterday. This is, by the standards of my whole life up till the last few months, completely uncharacteristic and seemingly impossible. But here I am.

I don’t know what it is exactly. I don’t get sleepy at the proper time, it’s true, or I don’t notice it. Then as more time goes by I do get sleepy. But… for some reason I start fighting it. Even though I may have nothing that needs to be done now, that can’t wait till tomorrow. In fact most of the things I need to do would benefit from waiting for the next day, when the rest of local society is open for business and I’m more fully awake.

That must be part of it: this is time I feel like I can control, and also which I can’t use for some tasks. So I don’t have to get sucked into the black hole of priorities and justifications. I need sleep, though. I like sleep. But lately I seem to have the will to drive myself sleepless.

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