Cultivation and the small life

 When I was a teenager, my mom sang in our parish choir. One night each week they practiced. I think I remember that it was Wednesday after the evening mass. I would go to mass and then stay in church reading or doing homework during their practice—sometimes, I would take a long walk around town. As much as I sing, I have never been much good, so there was little temptation for me to join in.

When practice was over, a small group of choir members, mostly somewhere in age between my parents and grandparents, would go to the local Dairy Queen for burgers or ice cream and an hour or two of gossip. I usually went along. I was a strange child and adolescent.

The Dairy Queen was usually pretty busy on those nights, mostly with people who had been at other weeknight meetings at other churches around my small hometown. 

There was one couple I remember almost always being there when we’d arrive. They were almost always there when we left, too. They were an older married couple, in their fifties or sixties. That is, they seemed older to me then. I really can’t remember whether they were formally married, but they had been together for decades, so it was as good as if they were. He was part of the custodial staff at the junior high I’d attended. I don’t know whether she worked or not. They were both a little “slow”, as people said at the time. They were probably a little poorer than we were: being an assistant janitor for decades didn’t pay all that well. Like my grandmother’s family, they were Appalachian. 

They would sit in a booth across from each other, each with a cup of coffee. It seems to me that they rarely had much else (but memories fade and reformulate over more than three decades). They were always dressed up, though not well. He would always wear a tie and often a jacket. She would be in a long skirt or a dress, her hair in two braids on the side. Their clothes were old and worn, but they clearly made an effort on their appearance. They’d almost certainly come from some church or other. 

Between them, they would have a stack of several piano exercise books. They weren’t particularly advanced books, certainly nothing beyond what I had gotten to in the years I had taken lessons. One of the books would be open and they would be studying it intently. They would pore over the pieces and talk to one another about the tune and notes and how to play it. They rarely, if ever, spoke to anyone else beyond exchanging greetings. They were engrossed in the sheets in front of them.

I don’t know what made me think of them this week. Maybe it was because I was talking about the meaning of life in one of my classes. Whatever the reason, there’s something instructive in that little bit of their lives that I know about and that I’ve recounted here. 

They were, by every normal worldly measure, people who did not matter very much. In most ways they were on the edge of society even in a place as out of the way and insignificant as my hometown. They were dedicating their evenings to something that neither one of them was ever going to become very good at. I don’t even know that they had a piano at home to play, and they weren’t looking at difficult pieces. That activity, as little as it mattered to anyone else, mattered to them. They had a real artistic interest and they showed a real dedication to it and to getting better at it, to understanding the playing of music. 

They were cultivating themselves. That cultivation seems to have created a beauty and sweetness in their lives, even if no one else could share in it or benefit from it. From the outside, it certainly seemed that they were leading small lives, but small lives can be flourishing ones as much as great lives can be. Sometimes, it may just be enough to tend one’s one garden and tend it well. 

The justification of the state

 The state is a form of organized violence or the threat of such violence. This is among its essential and defining features. I can imagine a community or a society that didn’t have the power to punish or to fight against enemies—there are pacifist communities, after all—but I can’t imagine such a state. I don’t think that’s just a failure of imagination on my part. At least in one long political tradition, police and defensive powers are definitive of the state; I’m thinking of Plato’s auxiliaries, the power to punish in Aquinas, the role of the Sovereign in Hobbes, the magistrate and the powers
he’s been given in Locke, …. What is law without the power of compulsion? 

Other than those pacifists, most people hold that, at least in some cases, violence can be justified. There aren’t many people who would deny the right to violence in self-defense. I hold the view that self-defense isn’t sufficient to justify taking a life. From conversations with students and my husband, I know that this is not a very common view—it might even seem outlandish—but even I think mere self-defense justifies some lesser forms of violence. (For what it’s worth, I think other-defense alone can justify taking a life.)

So, if violence can, in some cases, be justified, the most important question about the state in general or any particular state or particular state action—in ethics and politics, it is really the particular and concrete rather than the general and abstract that matters—is whether it is justified in this case, here and now. That is the most important question, the question of moral status. Whether it’s justified or not is not, of course, the only question: it is often prudentially advisable to comply when threatened with violence, even if that violence isn’t justified, maybe especially then.

Which came first: the me or the we?

Crises bring into relief tensions easy to ignore in more normal times. Any thoughtful person recognizes that the individualism that is not just taken as a given but celebrated and even raised to a virtue in contemporary liberal capitalistic societies lives in an unstable relation with the idea that we have positive moral obligations to others. In normal circumstances, however, when we aren’t asked to do too much for one another, when the pursuit of our individual interests has no negative effect on others, and when Mandeville’s praise of private vice as contributing to public good seems just about right, the relation is more or less peaceful and of only theoretical interest. These are not normal circumstances.

So, I am asked to stay home in order that the curve of the pandemic might be flattened. Businesses and parks are closed. Churches don’t meet. We’re dissuaded even from being outside much, unless it is in our own yards. Those of us who have no yards are to stay indoors as much as possible. 

Already in week four (where I am) people are starting to bristle at the not-very-stringent conditions under which we are living. Some of this is a desire to see people again and to return to routine. I feel the same things. I want to joke around at the gym, I want to go out dancing, and I even want to go to a bar. One of those I would normally do daily, one only once or twice a year now, and the last almost never since I stopped tending bar myself.

Some of it, too, comes from a different place. People are saying that they’re willing to risk it, so why shouldn’t they be allowed to gather or party or open their businesses or patronize those of others? Those who are most at risk can opt to stay at home. Beyond the assumption that we can know who is most likely to become infected or whom is most likely to be seriously affected, this is the voice of the individual. We can, it says, each look out for ourselves and, really, that is the only responsibility we have. I’m not saying I’m immune to this voice, either.

The response to this individualism is to talk of our obligations to the community, but such talk is dissonant to our ears. I think this is so because of the way we have resolved the tension between the individual and community through a peculiar metaphysics of community.

At least since Locke in the English-speaking world—maybe it’s Hobbes in his state of nature—we’ve taken society or the community to be metaphysically and conceptually posterior to the individual. Individuals exist first and then they come together voluntarily to make up societies and communities and states. Those groupings have whatever value they do only because of the service they are able to offer the individuals who make them up. So, the metaphysical priority leads to an ethical one. Even Locke’s account of the rights of parents and obligations of children makes it appear that the family exists for the production of more individuals.

That the causal and historical direction goes from community to individual is obvious. There was a different we before there could be an I. We’re born into and raised by communities. They form us, for better or worse. They sustain us. Whatever some survivalists and perpetual adolescents may think, we are not the kinds of beings that can survive without communities. Of course, we leave some kinds of communities behind us, too. Our actions profoundly affect what those communities are like, so that we are  at least causally responsible for them.

Those facts lead some to reverse the metaphysical, conceptual, and ethical priorities. There can be no individuals without communities in which they come to be, they say,. Individuals inherit all the good that exists within their communities and leave traces in the communities they inhabit. It is the community that is most important; it is the community that transcends. So, communities have rights to which individual rights are subsidiary.

That latter approach is so foreign to our way of thinking to appear self-evidently wrong. I don’t put much weight on what is self-evident, but I do think the solution lies somewhere else.

The individualistic observation that communities are made up of individuals and must be evaluated in terms of the good they do to individuals is correct. This is why we can talk of bad and good societies, of nourishing and toxic communities and groups. The communitarian insight that there are no individuals without communities and that individuals benefit from them and owe something for that benefit and to the community that will succeed them is as correct. This is why we can see people as ungrateful and why we excoriate the anti-social.

There is no priority, but only mutuality. The individual and the community are together in their birth, the individual is an individual only within a community and the community exists only because of the individuals who make it up. The community owed nourishment and nurturing and support to the individual and the individual owes concern and respect and effort and even resources to the community, both conceived as a collection of individuals and something that transcends those particular individuals. A community is something for which it makes sense to sacrifice, but only if that communities feeds and makes possible the flourishing of the individual. 

It’s this lack of metaphysical, conceptual, and ethical priority that makes so difficult questions about what I owe to my community in times of crisis and what is owed to me. As this crisis deepens, those questions are only going to become more difficult, but recognizing the tension as necessary—unable to be definitively resolved in either direction—is essential to arriving at the right answers and right balance. 

The Rottweiler woman

There's a woman in my neighborhood I call "the Rottweiler woman." She lives near me, but she doesn't have a home. She lives on the street, napping during the day in a parking lot near a pharmacy and grocery store and storage facility, and sleeping in entryways of banks or the patio of a coffee shop. She has a unit in the storage facility, so she's able to change clothes and keep some goods. She must get some sort of disability or social security or other form of income. She's able to keep body and soul together. She neither begs nor scavenges. At least, I've never seen her doing either.

I call her "the Rottweiler woman," because she has the sweetest—he's also a bit scary if you don't know them—middle-aged Rottweiler. She also has a beautiful parrot who lives in his cage on her cart. She loves them and feeds them and grooms them. The Rottweiler sleeps beside her on the ground when she's napping or bedded down for the night. He watches over her and protects her, as any dog would do.

The Rottweiler woman isn't visibly more ill than most of the people I see every day, though I don't know all her problems or history. She reminds me of people I knew and worked with in the year between university and grad school, when I volunteered at a clinic for the homeless and a soup kitchen. So many of those people were just on the edge of keeping their lives together. They could make it if they got the right sort of support, but if too many demands were put on them, things would fall apart.

I don't know if that's her situation or not. I talk to her regularly. We talk about our dogs and she lets me see glimpses of her past, but it's not my place to pry. I hope I do get to know more about her, maybe even her name.

Yesterday, I stopped to talk to her as she was eating her lunch and I was on my way to mine. We chatted for a few minutes about her dog and the younger of mine and injuries they've suffered. She talked to me of the efficacy of her prayers in the past. And, she apologized for taking up my time, as if my time were more valuable than hers or she wasn't worth human interaction. (It's perhaps worth noting that she doesn't seem to have a network of other homeless people as many on the streets do.) As I left my lunch, she was still on the patio and I chatted a little more. Her dog came to smell my pants, picking up the scent of my dogs. She apologized again. As I was leaving, she chided the dog softly for not letting her talk to people.

I don't have some overarching point in this story, except to remind myself and whoever might read this of two things: a society in which people live on the streets is objectively a bad society (this is something Plato recognized in the Republic) and those people who live on the streets are people.

There is a tradition in at least some forms of Buddhism to see the Buddha-nature in everyone you meet. There is a tradition in at least some forms of Christianity to see Christ in everyone you meet. There are, I take it, similar tropes in other religions and traditions. I think they get something both very right and a little bit wrong. What they get right is to see the inherent value in every human being—that kernel of Kantian dignity that Schopenhauer couldn't find—and I think it is all too easy to look past certain people—the homeless, the suffering, the elderly, the disabled, the unloved, the discriminated against, the stranger, the poor, the prisoner—and by averting our eyes deny them their dignity and their place in community with us. I'm not sure the right way to do this is by seeing Christ or Buddha in them, though. That's too abstract, too mystical. We need to see the them in them, the particularity, but also the value in that particularity.

I think a lot about loneliness. I think it's perhaps the defining characteristic of human life. Maybe it's not the only one. Maybe it's only a characteristic of a certain kind of modern, deracinated life. But, we are the kinds of beings who need connection and, I think, we're the kinds of beings who realize that we are individuals. That is, we are self-conscious in a way other animals don't seem to be.

I'm lonely and I'm surrounded with people much of the time. These are people who are required to pay me respect and attention. I go home to a comfortable home—I live in comfort while others live on the streets—and I have a husband who loves me. And, there are the two dogs.

We have a duty not only to see the dignity in others, but to bridge our divides and help the lonely to be less lonely. To help all of us be, at the least, alone together. Or, as EM Forster had it, to "Only Connect."

mother!, connection, and a few other things

I left Darren Aronofsy’s new film mother! with a lot to think about. Don’t worry, this isn't going to be a movie review; I have neither the interest nor the chops needed to provide one of those.

A lot of people I know and respect hated the movie and I understand why one would have that response. Among its failings has to be counted a marketing campaign that positioned it as a horror film. While horrifying, that isn’t what it is. I liked it—I might want to say I loved it, but, as with really difficult theater, I’m not sure that’s quite an emotion one can sustain toward this piece. I suspect it’s a movie that, in spite of its high-powered cast might have been better placed in arthouse cinemas than the AMC cineplex I saw it in. It has more in common with a move like Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In than than IT. When we were walking back to the car, Fernando noted the way it felt like a story by Cortázar. That, too, seems right.

The movie’s best (or maybe, most easily) seen as an allegory. As with the best allegories, it operates at different levels. At the most obvious level, we have a stark and unsympathetic retelling of Christian salvation history with its Garden of Eden, Fall, the murder of Abel by Cain, Incarnation and Redemption, and even Apocalypse. A student told me that he thought the movie “tried too hard,” and maybe the allegory is a little on the nose at this level. I don’t think so, but opinions may vary.

At another level, though, Bardem is not God—nor even the lesser creative mind he might represent at yet another level of allegory—but instead might represent any one of us. He stands for a perennial facet of the human condition that finds more expression in our world of immediate and total connection.

Bardem’s Him has someone in Lawrence’s mother! who loves him completely. She lives for Him, has created a world for Him, serves Him, and, as we see, is willing to die for Him and give Him her love as her ultimate gift. Only her child is able to compete with Him for her devotion.

Alas, it is not enough. As Bardem’s character says, “It is never enough.” That’s not a situation peculiar to a God who creates a world in order to be loved and who wants even the worst of His creatures to love him. It’s a situation many, if not all, of us find ourselves, one that’s exacerbated by the connectedness of our world.

As much as Him, I find myself searching for the approbation of people I barely know or who merely barely know people I barely know. Too often, I do that at the cost of appreciating and returning the real love and affection of those few who are closest to me, those few who invest their energies and lives in me.

That’s not new. As long as there have been crowds, we’ve looked for the superficial and fickle love of the crowds over the deeper, more constant, and therefore more real love of our true intimates. No matter the axiom, the birds in the bush are more attractive than the one in hand because they are yet to be captured.

For the first time in human history, however, most of us in the technologically advanced world have the real ability to chase a crowd. An insignificant fellow like myself could never have gathered more than a handful of people around himself before the last decade or so. Now, I can reach out to scores or hundreds of “followers” or “friends” on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or Snapchat or whatever will come in their wake. Because their approval, their likes, their retweets, their shares are outside my control, it can be tempting to work harder for them than I ought. It can be just as tempting to overvalue them, to be too buoyed when I get them and too hard hit when I don’t. The energy, whether positive or negative, that’s expended and created in this chase can only come at the cost of other social interactions. Whatever else might be said about me—about us—our emotional capacities are limited. To paraphrase one of Nietzsche’s criticisms of Christianity for another purpose—I think I’m getting this right—he who loves everyone, loves no one. Or, as Aristotle had it, one cannot have more than a few friends and expect them actually to be friends. In chasing a million interactions as though they were the most important, I run the risk of losing the ones that are most important. In making sure than I’m not alone, I might just end up that way.

That might just be me, but I think it might also be a more general truth. 

One quick thought about atomistic moral minimalism

Americans at least tend to elide the distinction between the law and ethics. Students, I find, often have a hard time maintaining the distinction and, when questioned about the morality of some action or practice, will respond by asking what the law says about it. Of course, there are important connections between the law and morality. Murder and theft and battery are all illegal and they are immoral.

But, this elision leads to a common problem in our moral thinking. Quite rightly, our laws are premised on negative rights. That is, I have a (legal) right to life and this means that ceteris paribus you may not kill me. I have a legal right to property and this means that ceteris paribus you may not take my property away from me. These rights give me no legal claim for your assistance in my living nor in the acquisition or maintenance of my property. I have relatively few positive (legal) rights.

If you take that as the basis of your moral thinking—if you can't distinguish between legal and moral thinking—you end up with an extremely atomistic account of morality. You end up with a moral minimalism that is indistinguishable from ethical egoism. You end up thinking that my only obligation to another person is to keep out of their way and that there is no deeper connection between us except that requirement.

I fear that's where we've gotten as a society. I think this prevents any real kind of human flourishing. I think it vastly underestimates our intrinsic sociality and the obligations we have to the society through which we have come to be. To put it in the word of a now-prominent figure, I think it is: "Sad!"

Washing our hands in the abortion debate

It’s one of those periods when lots of people are talking about abortion in the United States. With one political convention over and the other just beginning, pundits and even some real people are thinking about the positions of the two major parties—one absolutely abolitionist, the other nigh on celebratory—and the four candidates. All of this had me thinking a little bit in the gym about not abortion, but the two main positions: Pro-life/anti-abortion and pro-choice/pro-abortion, to give them both their preferred and disdained names.

I don’t want to argue about the ethics of abortion here. I’ve done that before and probably will do so again. I don't want to argue about whether men should have opinions on abortion. I don’t even want to argue about the politics of abortion or what the law should be. My views on all of those questions would be upsetting to almost anyone.

What I want to point out is something I have noticed about many of the most ardent proponents of both views. Now, of course, this doesn’t apply to you necessarily, so you don’t need to explain to me why I am wrong about some or even most of the people who hold whatever view you have. What I have noticed is that there is often a kind of washing-of-the-hands that goes along with both positions.

There are, of course, many people who are opposed to abortion and who work either to decrease the number of unwanted pregnancies or to share and alleviate the burden that comes with bearing and raising those children. Whatever your view on abortion, these people show a commitment to their beliefs. 

There is another—I fear, more common—opponent of abortion. There are many exemplars of this sort in the political class. This opponent is adamantly opposed to abortion, but isn’t invested in changing social structures either to lower the number of unwanted pregnancies or do anything for those women who would have to bear the costs of bearing and raising children. They won’t support the kinds of safety nets, whether governmental or private, that would make having children part of a flourishing life. In a real way, they wash their hands of these women who are not their concern. Their opposition to abortion is easy and morally lazy, because it makes no actual demands on them. For them, the right-to-life is merely a negative right that places no positive moral responsibility on the rest of us. 

I think this moral laziness occurs on the other side, too. Of course, people who are in favor of abortion access tend to vote for progressive policies, so they will at least tend to support a social safety net at the governmental level and such things as wider access to childcare. Many of these people also work to help those women who decide to keep their children to thrive. Whatever your opinion on abortion, you should praise such efforts. 

I say that such people will tend to support such policies, but there are also many libertarians who support access to abortion without supporting any of the policies that make it easier for women to keep and maintain their children. There are also supporters of abortion access who are quite happy to see the social safety net shrink; the age of welfare reform in the nineties was also one of demonization of single mothers by conservatives and liberals. That kind of demonization is related to my point. Support for abortion rights can easily bleed into an attitude, if not a belief, that the woman who chooses to keep a baby—even or especially when that decision will impact her life negatively or she can’t quite afford to raise it as well as she or we would like or that child is going to require extra help—should be fully responsible for the consequences of that decision. After all, if she couldn’t raise the child, she shouldn’t have had it. This is an attitude that also washes its hands of these women and their children. (And, it’s an attitude I’ve heard expressed sneeringly by good liberals.) For those in this camp, the right-to-choose is a fully individual right with material support only for one possible choice. It is in this camp, too, that you find the slightest unease with abortion equated with misogyny.

This tendency to let people fend for themselves may be the true American character of individualism: no one's decisions make any personal demands on us. 

Against the revolution

In theory and practice, I believe we should emphasize and privilege the particular over the general, the concrete over the abstract. We must often speak in general or abstract terms, but in doing so we should take our speech to be an approximation or simplification of a much too complex account of all the individuals we are talking about. What I mean is that when we talk about humanity, for instance, we are using a handy way to talk about billions of individuals and not talking about some thing over and above those individuals.Since we can’t make a statement about all the individuals, we abstract away from the particular. In so doing, we lose not only particularity, but a good deal of accuracy. It’s easy to forget this, but it’s important not to lose the individuals for the crowd. (I know that sometimes it is the crowd and its effects on the individuals that matters, too.)

In matters of ethics and politics—for those who wrongly assume that there are two spheres of concern here—an emphasis on the particular means an emphasis on humans. You might think that it’s obvious that humans matter ethically and politically, but many people place their emphasis on humanity. And, “humanity” and “humans” often don't mean the same thing. Consider the way that millions of humans were sacrificed in order to bring about homo sovieticus or his Maoist counterpart or consider the way that fascists are willing to sacrifice millions to bring about their utopia. Yes, the sacrificers here were wrong about what would be good for humanity. Of that there should be no doubt, but they are exemplars of a way of thinking. This way of thinking privileges humanity over humans, and it is a way of thinking that is present in almost all revolutionary thinking.

The revolutionary—here my thought is inspired by Camus in The Rebel—has an idea of an ideal utopian future. This utopia might be a religious paradise, a republic of reason of the sort imagined by the Jacobins, a workers’ paradise, or some other version. The belief is that the utopia is the right, the best, the only correct environment for humanity. Because of the great value of this ideal, sacrifices must be made. I don’t doubt that sometimes lives must be lost in the pursuit of justice, but the brilliance of a utopia means that almost any sacrifice can be justified for this great boon to humanity. In other words, innumerable humans will have to die so that humanity will be better off.The world will burn but how much better things will be after the purifying fire!

The revolutionary is an anti-human humanitarian. If that seems paradoxical, you should think more about it. It is very, very easy to love humanity. The difficult thing is to love one’s neighbors. It’s easy to think that we ought to do something about the suffering of the homeless or the refugee or the victim of racial or sexual or … discrimination or violence; it is hard to treat the homeless woman sleeping in a doorway as deserving of my hospitality, to welcome the refugee into my home, to comfort the victims of discrimination or violence or give up some of my privilege that they may live better.

Talk of revolution is talk of universal morality or a political ideal, whatever the cost. That cost is always borne by real, living, breathing humans. I prefer the humans. That’s why talk of revolution is always terrifying to me; that’s why I think it is always, at best, irresponsible. It’s also why I am a kind of conservative. I believe that human beings are the most valuable—not the only valuable, but the most valuable—beings in my world. Thus, we must do what we can to preserve and conserve them and their lives. That demands justice and it demands change and progress, but not a justice and change and progress that can say, “Let’s tear the world down and start again.”

On thinking about natural law in the shower

I first learned to think and do philosophy as part of a tradition, a fairly conservative Catholic tradition that took both Aristotle and Aquinas seriously. My graduate training was very different, but the effects of that initial training are still in me. I might be a very bad and marginal member of that tradition, but I am still in it in some ways. One way that I remain is in a general respect for virtue theory and—oddly enough for an avowed homosexual—natural law approaches to ethics. I still take Aristotle and Aquinas seriously and I think their approaches to the good life, to flourishing, to what is good for us still speak to us.

If there is something odd about this it is because natural law moralists, in particular, have been at the forefront of objections to the decriminalization of homosexuality and to recognition of same-sex marriages. I'm not interested in debating whether modern advocates of natural law are in the right here. But I do want to note one important thing. Both virtue theory and natural law theory are meant to be empirically grounded theories. They make pronouncements about what is good for beings like us and what would amount to a good life for beings like us based on facts about our biology and psychology.

It is a basic assumption of both sorts of accounts that humans have some immutable nature. I think this is probably right, at least in the medium term; what might happen to that nature over evolutionary time is a different issue. But, many modern proponents of each of these theories seem to assume that our knowledge of this nature is also immutable. What I mean is this: Contemporary natural law theorists operate under the assumption that Aristotle and Aquinas had a complete and completely correct account of human nature, in its biological and psychological aspects. Thus, they believe not only that human nature is immutable, but that we have known all there is to know about it for at least almost a millennium. 

What we have learned about human biology and human psychology and the nature of human interactions since the middle ages is or seems to be of almost no interest to many practitioners of both virtue theory and natural law ethics. You see them quoting Aquinas as authoritative on all such matters.

Now, I think that Aquinas understood quite a bit about human psychology, but I don't think he got it all. And, his biology was pretty bad. Similarly, I think Aristotle understood human motivation and psychological development and society pretty well, but he was missing out on some pretty important pieces, pieces which have partially been supplied by further exploration in the ensuing years. 

Mostly, I think that Aquinas and Aristotle and others in this tradition were right to base an ethic on what we are like and what will lead to happy and fulfilling and flourishing lives for creatures like us. They were also right to think that is largely an empirical question. But this empirical question is an empirical one, not an a priori one or one that was settled in the high middle ages. If we discover new things about ourselves—say about sexuality or human interaction or the family—then our theory has to respond to that.

If virtue theory or natural law is just a constant rehashing of what people thought 900 or 2300 years ago, it isn't philosophy, it isn't even virtue theory or natural law, it's just a dead orthodoxy. And, that's exactly how it should be treated: as dead and irrelevant. 

(I should mention one exception to the immutability of the theory here: Almost all such theorists have discovered that lending at interest is morally acceptable; that we learned something about economics that Aquinas wouldn't have known, since he roundly condemned this practice as usury and a violation of the natural law. This exception may be self-serving or might be a realization that the theory needs to evolve.)

Aut ridenda omnia aut flenda sunt: some thoughts on anger

We live in an age that at least appears to be bathed in outrage. Maybe we are angrier than we used to be. Maybe we are made angrier by the way social media allows us the intimacy of knowing the thoughts of our non-intimates while accelerating the formation of virtual though effective mobs. Maybe nothing has changed but the way we think about these things.

It's not just that we appear to be angrier. To some degree we are expected to be angry. If you enter a discussion about abortion or racism or campus sexual harassment or ISIS or Trump's latest tirade or whatever the issue of the moment is, it isn't sufficient to have the correct opinion. Of course, it won't be accepted if you have a different opinion even if you can mount a reasonable defense of your heresy. But, even when you are on the right side, you have to be sufficiently passionate about it. If you aren't outraged and ready to march, it's suspicious that you even care. 

But this may just give anger too much credit. This week, I've been reviewing Seneca's De Ira. Among the demonstrations of his erudition and theoretical virtue, he speaks to the way we live now. Particularly striking is his questioning of the effectiveness of anger. I think it's common now to think that anger helps to motivate action. Seneca denies this more than he should; in his Stoicism, he believes we should motivated and act wholly on reason. I'm suspicious of this for both Aristotelian and Humean reasons—reason alone will always leave us cold—but I think he's right in the way that anger can at least tend to motivate us in the wrong ways. 

Anger is, after all, an emotion, or a passion in his taxonomy. When we are passionate, we don't think clearly and we act in ways that are not means to the ends we desire. Anger, in particular, takes over. We strike out at people who aren't to blame for the injustices we are angry about; we don't dig deeper into what we are angry about, failing in some cases to see that there was nothing to be angry about in the first place; we harm ourselves and those we care about, metaphorically (and sometimes literally) punching walls and destroying those places and relationships in which we live. We commit injustices small and large to vent our rage. None of this gets us to our goals, at least not in the most direct way. If the machine is unjust, maybe raging against it isn't the best plan. Maybe planning, rationally and coolly, would be more effective.

More importantly, it is easy to lose the humanity of our opponents in our rage. Anger turns our opponents into demons. Demons don't have any goodness left in them, demons don't have reasons, and demons don't deserve our respect. And, if they are demons, we are angels or saints at the worst. Angels are fully good, they have all reason on their side, and deserve full respect. Angels aren't humans; even saints aren't like any humans we know. In anger, we lose the humanity of others and we lose our own. We can no longer see their goodness nor our own failings. And, every disagreement can become an existential fight between Good and Evil. In such fights, no compromise is possible. There is no cooperating with evil. Thus, injustice is likely never to be ameliorated if it can't be erased altogether.

Finally, as Seneca also notes, anger is hard to maintain. You can coldly hate someone for decades, even generations. But, it's hard to maintain the froth of anger for long, at least about the same thing. Online an outrage lasts for no more than a day or two and then another gains our attention. The mob swarms from one to the next. But when we move onto to the next outrage, what happens to the one we've left behind? It's left behind. And, the thing about real problems, real injustices, is that they take time and commitment and anger just won't keep us at that. It takes something else, maybe a passion after all, but not that one. 

Why shouldn't you sit in my front yard to eat your lunch?

In the middle of the summer a contractor for the city began replacing the sewer lines in our neighborhood. Having finished that, the same contractor is now digging up the streets they have just sort-of repaired to replace the water lines. This has meant a summer with the constant sound of heavy machinery and multiple backhoes and bulldozers racing through the street at breakneck pace and parked throughout the neighborhood overnight, through weekends, and during holidays. The work is scheduled to be completed by March 2017; so much for private contractors being more efficient than public workers. 

These are the sorts of first-world problems that people like me like to complain about. Living in San Diego, they combine with the third-world streets—only slightly better than those around my husband's family home in La Matanza in Argentina—to give us some small thing to temper the weather and sun and ocean and mountains and everything. But I'm not going to complain about that now. Instead, I'm going to complain about myself.

Since this is the last week before the academic year picks back up, I am still at home with the dog and my one remaining monarch caterpillar. I spend the day reading and avoiding work and dreading/longing for the beginning of classes. As I ate a piece of leftover pizza today, I noticed that one of the workers had walked from the work-zone, which surrounds us, but isn't within a block of our house in either direction, to sit on our retaining wall to eat his lunch. This irked me, but I figured that he was only sitting on the wall and, after all, he needs somewhere to eat his lunch. After a second piece of pizza, I looked out again and he had been joined by another worker. His companion wasn't sitting on the wall but lying on the stones on our front yard, between two plants. From being irked, I became angry.

When I walked the dog I noticed that they had their coolers and a radio and a whole spread in front of the house. As Mateo and I walked around the block, I thought about what I should do. Should I confront the workers and ask them not to lie on our yard? Should I call the company and complain about their behavior? Should I wait for Fernando to deal with it?

When we got back to the house, I said hello to them and went inside. By this time I had begun to ask myself a different question: What the hell is wrong with me? Here were two people eating their lunch in the middle of a hot day doing relatively unpleasant work. And, I was upset because they were sitting on a wall and lying on some rocks. Of course, that wall and those rocks are mine. But, they were doing no harm and getting a little bit of rest.

The answer to what is wrong with me (in this context) is a fully American, fully Lockean, common, and inhumane conception of property. The harm they were doing was a very minimal trespass, one that did no damage either to the property or its owners. The wall and yard are in the same shape as they were before their lunch. I wasn't going to be using it for something else during that time. But, as my reactions and actions show, I have deeply imbued the notion that property is sacrosanct, that is exists as a right and value in and of itself and before all others.

But that's not what property is like. Property, as Aquinas taught, exists for the good of the community. A right to property exists to help us avoid tragedies of the commons, because people take better care of what is theirs than what is all of ours, because collective farming and cooperatives and group work in classes tends not to be as productive. But property is not some primary value; it can be justified only insofar as it contributes to the commonweal. In a certain, very real way, each of us holds it in trust for the community. And, when the good of the community is threatened by property claims those claims must be reexamined. Sometimes the community will win and sometimes property will. But when it's between two men sitting down for fifteen minutes and my claims on the wall, it's probably the community that wins. 

Truth against truth

A few semesters ago, I had a truly brilliant student. He wasn't one of our majors—not that that matters—but he was the kind of student who has a genuine and deep interest in ideas: exploring them, understanding their motivations and justifications, teasing out their implications.

At one point we were discussing the Republic and Plato's blueprint for the education of the Guardians, including his canons of censorship and the Noble Lie. We began talking about whether it was ever acceptable to lie to children (Santa Claus, family myths, etc.) or whether it was necessary always to tell them the unvarnished, if not complete, truth.

Our conversation continued after class and after several more meetings. As it continued, it expanded into related questions.  In the course of thinking through these questions, we got to fiction. He told me that he never chose to read any fiction, because he just couldn't see the point of reading things that aren't true.

In his case, this preference seemed to come from a a certain type of ethical seriousness, one I can admire even if I find it mistaken in its application.

But, in effect, he shared a preference with many in contemporary society. Consider how A Million Little Pieces was first rejected by publishers when submitted as a piece of fiction, but won acclaim and bestseller status when it was published and marketed as a memoir. (And, how it came to be seen as not just a fraud, but worthless, when it was again seen to be a fiction.) This must mean our standards for nonfiction are vastly lower.

"Well," the prospective reader says to herself, "I wouldn't read that, but since you tell me it is a true story, well, now I'm interested."

Or, consider the plethora of memoirs now published, often by people in their 20s and 30s. There was a time when memoirs were written mostly by people of note at the end of illustrious—interesting—lives. Now, people write them when they are still in college. Of course, this reflects the narcissism of our selfie-culture, but they also sell. Apparently, the reading public wants to read these things.

Not only do we want to read them, but sometimes we want to see them made into movies. For one egregious example, consider Julie & Julia. The part of the movie about Julia Childs is watchable. It has Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci and it's about an interesting person with an interesting life. But what of the other part? And, yet, because it was true-life, it sold as a book and movie. I mean, it actually happened!

Or, consider how a book or television series can add to its appeal by claiming to be "based on a true story" or having tired police procedural plot-lines that are, nevertheless, "ripped from the headlines."

We want truth, even if it's dreck.

This reflects a loss of something of value in our society, one we can regain by thinking about a simple distinction between truth (as positivistic factuality or representation of a state of affairs that obtains in the world) and truth or truths (as something transcendent, both above and below the facts of the matter). Good art often shows us the latter without expressing the former.

Consider Oedipus or The Magic Mountain or Emma or True Stories or the myths of most cultures or so many more. Each of these presents truths about humans, about our lives, our natures, our interactions, our psyches, our ethics. But they do this while being manifestly false. In some cases, they aren't even plausible or life-like.

This is part of the point of Aristotle's suggestion that ethics be learnt from fables or that drama can lead to catharsis, it is what Alasdair MacIntyre was getting at when he said to his students that we should read Austen if we wanted to know how to be, it is how Wittgenstein could deny that there were any ethical propositions even while claiming that Westerns had a moral function.

Of course, there can be art that expresses both types of truth, but it will always be rarer than that type that tells us true stories that tell us nothing about ourselves. If we are honest, most nonfiction is banal, empty, little more than an entertainment masquerading as something profound—and not that good artistically. (And, I am not defending that art that attempts to provide truths while claiming, falsely, to be true.)

What I am declaring is that I am a partisan of fiction and the imaginary and the fantastic. Only in these can we see important truths about ourselves. Without them, we are impoverished, left with only the real. 

Just a minute, I'm checking my phone

We went to one of our semi-regular places this morning for our semi-regular practice of a weekend breakfast out. While I waited for my fully-regular order, I noticed the booth across the aisle. A mother sat there with her two young boys. 

One of the boys was probably around four or five and had brought a toy car to the diner with him. The other boy was young enough to be in a highchair (and the cutest onesie I’ve seen in a long time). Both boys were well-behaved, but the older one went from booth to booth looking for people to talk to and other children to play with, while his younger brother looked around for someone to make eye-contact with. 

While she waited for her food, their mother was fully engrossed with her phone, texting, reading emails, checking various social media platforms, looking at pictures. A few times the older boy called out unsuccessfully for her to notice something. She couldn't be pulled away from the phone.

When the food came, the phone went to a position by her plate, so she could keep looking at it while they ate their food. The phone remained at the center of attention, the very focal point of her time in the diner.

I’m in no position to judge her. I have no reason to believe she is a bad parent or a bad person. And, except when I babysat decades ago, I have never had to sit through a meal shared only with children. I have no kids and the world of the future is probably better off for that. 

I am also no better than she; it is a difficult thing for me to go through a meal without checking my phone. I can’t walk the dog in the morning without it. I check it immediately before sleeping and immediately before rising. I have it with me when I watch a show or a movie in the evening.

Watching her instead called to mind something I have thought about, if not personally addressed, many times before. We live in a time when the virtual too often trumps the real. We’d rather text with someone far away than talk to the person in front of us. We’d rather read about someone else’s life on Facebook than live our own. We would rather edit our experiences for Instagram than fully live them. Hell, much of the time we’d rather sext or use a hookup app than actually have  real, human-contact-involving sex.

Maybe part of the reason some among us dream of achieving immortality through uploading themselves into computers—and are satisfied that this would be a good existence—is that many of us already cannot imagine a life lived any way other than virtually. 

Works before faith: against orthodoxies

We seem to care much more about what people believe than what they do. Or, rather, we care more about what they affirm than what they do and what their actions show to be their real commitments.

Maybe this is the result of the Reformation with its talk of the Inner and Outer Man and salvation by Faith but not Works. Maybe it is an expression of the older mind/body dualism that those Reformers inherited from Augustine. Maybe it's just the result of reading a lot of Plato; here I jest. Most likely, it is at least partially a result of the fantasy that there is a real—more authentic, more virtuous, and fully private—me independent of my actions, a true and hidden character; the fantasy that let's people say things like, "I wasn't myself yesterday," and, "I'm sorry for what I said, that wasn't me." And, then we can be told, contrary to all behavioral evidence, what a person really believes or what her character really is.

Whatever the cause or causes, this emphasis on belief (as affirmed) over action feeds into real strife. At least in the United States, we prize orthodoxy. We judge one another based on our political and religious ideologies. And, we use these ideologies as epithets. Someone is just a stupid liberal or a heartless conservative, a godless atheist or a deluded believer. And, too often, when someone is on the other side of such a divide, we immediately dismiss them. Of course, this damages discourse, because we disengage, but it damages other kinds of human interaction even more deeply.
When someone disagrees with us we are quick, I think, to dismiss them as a cooperator. Because one of us is a liberal and the other a conservative, we are unwilling to work together, even when what we want is the same thing. Lots of people on the left and lots of people on parts of the right are very concerned about poverty and, believe it or not, mothers and children. Working together, though, is too often forestalled by ideological difference: I can't work with those socialists; I won't work with fascists.
I remember several years ago Hillary Clinton—I'm not generally a fan—calling for cooperation between the left and the right on abortion. Since she thought both sides had an interest in reducing the number of abortions, they should come together to discuss those things that they could both get behind to achieve a reduction. But orthodoxies and principle continue to keep anything like that from happening. As always, the perfect is made the enemy of the good.
One more personal reminiscence: The year between university and graduate school, I worked at a  Church-sponsored meal program and clinic for the homeless and near-homeless. As you might expect, most of the people involved were unreformed 60's-style liberals, with a fair smattering of Catholic Workers. But, there were also deeply conservative volunteers, including a far-right Republican police detective who washed dishes at the meal several days a week. Rather than seeing an ideological divide, he and the other volunteers worked together for something they both valued. The fact that they disagreed about sociopolitical causes and solutions to homelessness and poverty didn't matter at that moment. What mattered was the work. (And, the work they were doing probably said a lot more about what their real beliefs were than their stated ones.)
Now, I don't want to claim that beliefs as affirmed don't matter. Of course, the causes of poverty matter, but so does feeding the poor. And, as a philosopher, I care deeply about beliefs. But, in interpersonal relations, I care more about actions and the real beliefs they express.
It's all good to deride deluded Christians, but if they are fighting oppression and you are doing nothing, what does the right belief matter? It's wonderful to scream about godless atheists, but if they are fighting human rights abuses while you are reading a devotional, who cares? It's fun to talk about heartless conservatives, but if with their heartless beliefs they are also helping refugees, what is more important?
Only last week, I was told that I lacked principle—utterly true, if for different reasons—because I teach at a Catholic university, and no gay atheist should do that. Leaving aside the mischaracterization of my beliefs, I can only mourn a viewpoint that says I should have nothing to do with those whose orthodoxy or ideological purity is suspect, or that I cannot cooperate with them in a project that we both find worthwhile, e.g., education.
I have colleagues and students and friends who I think are utterly deluded about all sorts of things and I have pretty serious philosophical and political differences with my partner of 18 years, but at the end of the day, it is by their works that I judge them. As it should be.

Is it right to do what you have a right to do?

A common argument form, at least in the American context, goes like this:

1. I have a right to x.
2. It is right to exercise one's rights.
3. Thus, it is right to x.
4. A right that is not exercised may disappear.
5. Thus, I should x, on pain of losing the right.

For sake of illustration, substitute the following for x: "carry a firearm into Chipotle," "use a racial/sexual/national epithet," "express the opinion I have formed without any evidence or reflection," "ridicule people with beliefs I take to be irrational," etc. It's left as an exercise for the reader to find other substitution instances. 

We have all heard arguments of exactly this form when someone obnoxiously and pointlessly does something he may very well technically or legally have a right to do. "But, I have a right to!"

I don't think we are the only ones who argue this way, or at least implicitly accept this argument form. In fact, I think it occurs in any culture that has taken rights to be the central category around which morality revolves and upon which society rests. That may mean that all of us who live in a post-Enlightenment world will tend to find this sort of argument sympathetic. 

Insofar as we make this type of argument or find it compelling, we are dooming ourselves to a non-civil society. And, maybe we are providing a reductio of the (centrality or primacy of a) notion of rights.

A few thoughts about ownership and self-ownership

In the normal sense of "own," if own something I am able to sell it and once I sell it I no longer have any claim over it or how it can be used. Having sold it, I have no interest in it, since I sell my interest in it when I sell it.

There are strange sorts of cases where a piece of property cannot be sold, where it is limited by an entailment, and where the master or mistress of the property can only benefit from its production during his or her lifetime. Think of Pride and Prejudice or Downton Abbey. I think our intuitions about these kinds of cases are to say that no individual owns the property, but that it is owned by a family, held in trust by an individual. If I am wrong about what our intuitions are in these sorts of cases, I don't think I am wrong to say that they are not normal, standard cases of ownership.

Also, in the normal sense of "own," a person is one of the things—or the only one?—that I cannot be said to own. Of course, it took humans a long time to discover this, but that doesn't make it any less true.

Now, there is a special kind of ownership going back to at least John Locke in the Second Treatise and adopted by liberals and libertarians since, a notion of self-ownership. It is this idea that because I own myself and my labor, that I can come to own property. Self-ownership is supposed to be the foundation for all other sorts of ownership.

The problem I see is that self-ownership just isn't ownership. Or, at least, it doesn't share the essential characteristics of ownership. And, since it is not the same as the normal notion of ownership, it cannot serve as a basis for it.

Namely, I cannot sell myself. I can sell my labor. I can enter into contracts. But I cannot sell myself in such a way that I become wholly the property of another human being and cease to have any interest in myself. I cannot alienate myself in the same way that I can alienate any piece of genuine property. Having sold my labor or my time, I always and everywhere maintain rights over myself. If I own myself—or if I have a property in myself—it is not the normal sort of ownership or property.

And, if it is a general truth that a person cannot be owned, then a person cannot be owned, even by himself.

In other words, whatever we mean when we say that we own ourselves it is not what we mean when we say that we own a house—it might be close to what we mean when that house is an entailed property, all of whose benefits we enjoy, but which we cannot alienate and hold in trust. And, since the two notions of property ownership differ in their essentials, they cannot serve as grounds one for the other.

The narcissism of self-forgiveness

Students, friends, columns and essays I read talk about the need for people to forgive themselves. Sometimes this comes from a spiritual—though not religious—place. Sometimes it is parroting something heard in therapy or counseling. Sometimes it is repeating something remembered from a self-help book or an episode of Oprah or Dr Phil.

Wherever it comes from, it looks like it rests on an error, and a pernicious one. I will readily agree that people sometimes need to overcome their guilt. But, if it's true that you shouldn't feel guilty, then there is nothing to forgive. You don't need to be forgiven, you need to adjust your views. Similarly, people often need to learn not to feel shame about certain things. But, shame isn't overcome by forgiveness. It's overcome by changing what one thinks is worthy of shame. (And, there are things worthy of shame, just not a lot of the ones we grow up believing to be shameful.)

Forgiveness is something that can only be given by the person whom we have offended. And, it must be asked—begged—of them. 

There is something strange about saying that I have offended myself. How would I give offense to myself? There are times when I may have hurt myself, but even there the notion of self-forgiveness is mistaken. Or so it seems to me.

Forgiveness is a two-person relation and necessarily non-reflexive. It is also a relation tied to other relations I cannot bear to myself. If I've harmed myself, I need to resolve not to do it again, but I can't forgive myself just as I cannot carry out any kind of reparation to myself, simply because I am one person and not two. How would I beg forgiveness of myself? How would I apologize? How would I make it up to myself? What reparation to myself would I propose? 

Even so, I'm not so worried about people concerned about forgiving themselves when they have harmed themselves. This is because what people often mean in forgiving themselves is forgiving themselves for the offense they have given to others. As long as I can forgive myself, they think, it doesn't matter that I don't make it up to those I have offended. It doesn't matter that I don't apologize, that I don't have their forgiveness. All that really matters is that I have forgiven myself. 

I am able, they say, to absolve myself of all my faults. And, thus do even justified guilt and shame disappear. Because, at the end of the day, all that matters is that I can live with myself. 

There's as much narcissism here as in attempting to be one's own (best) friend. 

Am Anfang

Another school year begins. As I start another ethics class, I've been thinking about the strange—and off-putting—way that so much ethics is taught in colleges and universities. 

Courses too often have three components: 1) An episodic and ungrounded trip through the history of theoretical ethics; 2) A series of outlandish ethical dilemmas, ostensibly to evaluate and criticize intuitions and the positions of those ethical theories; and, 3) A short series of practical applications to issues like abortion and torture.

Most textbooks and readers follow something like this plan, as do most introductory courses. It seems to me—even when I am doing the same damned thing—that this misses on almost all cylinders.

It's very important not to lead students into the genealogical fallacy, but teaching Aristotle without talking about what sort of society 4th-century BC Athens was leaves the students utterly flustered. From there, of course, you have to talk about the way a virtue ethics might be divorced from its context, or better yet married to a new one, but you can't treat theories as ex nihilo. Too often, though, we do. When students can't see what made the categorical imperative live for Kant, there is little hope they can see what might make it live for them.

Then, we ask them questions about fat men trapped in caves, or runaway trolleys, or—Heavens forfend!—unconscious violinists and people seeds. We ask them what their intuitions are in such cases, ignoring the fact that no one has untutored intuitions in these cases. We treat intuitions as if they were themselves ex nihilo, while we really know that we gain them in experience. And, I have just had no experience with people seeds, so whatever my intuitions are they are intuitions about people or seeds.  We act as if there were deep underlying principles for each of a person's moral judgments, when we also think that what we are trying to do is provide such principles. When we do this, we ask them to think that ethics and philosophy is pure and utter bullshit. Then we are surprised when they think it is.

Finally, we try to ground this whole project in talking about controversial issues. But, we talk about the same ones all the time. Who really wants to talk more about abortion in a classroom? How many more times can we rehash the same substandard articles on same sex marriage? Or, animal rights? And, we act as if the issues that we are talking about the most central ones in a human life. But, I am not getting abortions most of the time. That is not where my attitude to human life is made most clear. So, we teach them that ethics, if it can be made about anything, only applies at the edges of life, not in their everyday lived lives.

I don't always think that the teaching of philosophy should try to be useful. Mostly, I think it shouldn't. But ethics is one place where it must be about the real world and the common life. And, I think we fail at that. Or, at least I do most of the time.

The Father of Lies: Evil, the Devil, and Us

There’s a line you hear from traditional Christians quite often. They will tell you the Devil is real. And, that when you say he isn’t that’s exactly what he wants, because he wants you not to fear him, not to be on guard against the lion that walks about waiting to devour the believer. And, when you aren’t on guard, that is when evil can triumph.

To deny the real existence of the Devil as a being is still a heresy for most Christians. His existence is affirmed in the catechisms of the Catholic and many other Churches.

There’s something a little brilliant about the notion of the Devil. To see a being like the Devil is to affirm that there is real evil in the world. This is not something that every tradition has seen. Many religions have some shady gods or demigods or spirits—Loki or Hades or Coyote or the Tempter or Opposer (haShatan) or many others—but they aren’t purely evil. And, often they exist in worlds where there’s not much notion of evil.

It can be hard to see from our point of view, but the notion of evil has not been and isn’t universal. When you read Homer, you see enemies, but they are no more evil than the gods are good. Hector is Achilles’ enemy, and he hates him for killing Patroclus, but he isn’t evil. There is no moral judgment of the sort that could make that distinction. Even when we come to a figure like Socrates, he cannot conceive that someone could see something as bad and yet choose it.

The discovery of real evil is an advance in thinking about humanity. Whatever Nietzsche may say about how we should feel about birds of prey, it is good to recognize we live in a world—yes, of mostly grays—but in which the full negation of good has a place. In this sense, then, the Devil is an advance in understanding the world.

But that advance comes at a cost in terms of our own self-understanding. The Devil is both a recognition that there is evil and a placing of that evil outside ourselves. It isn’t humans that are evil; they are led astray, tempted, suggested to, by an outside evil force. 

There is a danger in giving up the Devil—maybe a greater danger than that of giving up God. The danger is that we lose sight of evil. And, this happens in some of the more shallow presentations and lazy acceptances of relativism. 

“What they do over there, or what we used to do here or [less often] what we currently do isn’t evil,” we are tempted to say. “It’s just the way we do things.”

That is a mistake.

But, there’s an equal danger in hypostasizing or reifying that evil into an external being, a Devil. If we are seriously self-reflective and, sometimes I am too seriously self-reflective, we all recognize that there are dark places in us, spots of evil. Some of us have more and some of us have less; some of us can control them better, some of us worse; some of us barely see them, some of us are aware of them all of the time. But, they are there. Inside us. 

Denying the wisdom the idea of the Devil represents may well lead us to forget the real evil that is around us, but believing in the Devil is as likely to make us oblivious to the evil within.

The world would be easier if there were no evil, and life would be easier if the source of evil were outside us. But neither the world nor life are easy.

Risky behavior, victims, dirty boys, and the way we talk about HIV

At least a few times a year, I get to have the seroconversion conversation with a friend. There's nothing novel or unique about that. It's common enough for gay men my age and it has been since I came out. I'm right in that age group so that when I came out, HIV and AIDS were already major and established parts of the community. They were facts of life and of death.

When I opened a gay magazine—they were still relevant then—almost all the ads were for viatical settlement companies. They hadn't yet been taken over by pharmaceutical ads. The older guys who took me out to bars and showed me the ropes were few and far between, since so many of them had died, and they both taught me to assume anyone I would have sex with was positive and to expect that there was a good chance that I would be someday.

We've come a long, long way since then. For many people, a diagnosis is more like a diagnosis of diabetes than the death sentence it once was; yes, you will have to take medication for the rest of your life, but it won't be the thing that kills you and your life expectancy most likely won't be affected.

But, some of the same attitudes hang around, attitudes that are damaging to all of us.

All too often, when someone tells me that he has found out that he is positive, he will tell a story—it might be one that he believes, it might even be true—about the very unlikely way in which he got it. This will usually involve some practice for which there is a theoretical risk but no—or almost no—actual documented cases of infection. It will be a story about a tiny scratch in the mouth, chapped skin, or something else. Why do people do this?

We tell these stories and convince ourselves of their truth because we hold onto a dichotomy of those who are victims of the disease, those who got it accidentally or through extreme circumstances and thus are innocent; and, those who deserve it, whose own decisions and actions are the reason they became infected. Yes, there are people who had no causal role in their infection and there are those who have challenged fate (not that this means they deserve anything), but this dichotomy misses the great reality in the middle. 

Whether positive or negative, anyone who has been sexually active has done something risky at some point. I'm old enough to remember when a huge effort was made to eroticize safer sex, an effort that was doomed to failure, because even the most anonymous, meaningless sexual encounter is a moment of intimacy. Sex is often about pleasure, but that doesn't mean that even hedonistic sexual acts are not about a connection with another person. The introduction of a condom or any other barrier necessarily limits that intimacy. And, almost everyone has chosen pleasure—because we also have to face that unsafe sexual practices feel better—and intimacy and risk over safer but less intimate and less pleasurable practices.

We all do this or have done this sometime; Apollo has a hard time winning when Dionysius is offering us so much more. And, some of us have been lucky and some of us have been unlucky. 

To admit this is to admit that we've been stupid and if we've gotten something because of that our decisions had a role there. We aren't victims; we were involved. 

But, it also involves admitting that if we haven't gotten something, luck had a lot to do with that. No one deserves their bad luck. So, no one deserves to be infected or sick.

In other words, to admit this means to admit that the world is much more complex than we like to tell ourselves.

All of this also means that we have to overcome another really horrible dichotomy: clean and dirty. You aren't virtuous or perfect or clean because you have avoided some infection. If you are sexually active, the odds are that you are lucky or you might be the one person who is perfectly responsible in every situation (and who has never been lied to by a partner or friend). And, you aren't vicious or a slut or dirty because you became infected. You may have made bad choices or one bad choice—or you may not have, maybe you just trusted someone you shouldn't have—and you weren't so lucky.

To see these attitudes hanging around after all these years is more than disheartening; overcoming them is necessary for loving ourselves and loving one another.